With the release of XP, Microsoft started that delightful policy of dissuading manufacturers from including stand-alone install media with new computers (of the kind that frequently ends up on eBay). If you want to reinstall Windows, you have to use the system restore disks to reinstall everything, OEM crap and all, and we all know the only realistic way to get rid of all of it is to format your hard drive and reinstall the OS alone. I'm still toying with finding a warez copy of Home OEM and trying the product key on my old laptop's XP sticker and seeing if I can get that to work.
Vista, supposedly, has the same problem, but that little "Windows Anytime Upgrade" disk that comes with your new computer, conveniently (and undocumentedly, of course) works as install media. When I use it to reinstall Vista and use the product key on my new laptop, I always end up having to call Bangalore to finish activation, but it's still more than what I can accomplish with an OEM XP install.
With that said, I'd still throw on one of my retail XP licenses instead if I could find drivers for everything.
You're confusing XP with 2000. Most posts around here at the time complained about the apparent downgrade from moving from 2000 to XP (all the bloat slowed computers down), the interface appeared markedly different from what everybody got accustomed to with 95/98/Me/NT4, and businesses and "power users" in general were sluggish to move to XP because of it. It wasn't exactly uncommon for people here to say "Why upgrade? 2000 plays all my games, faster, without this DRM 'activation' nonsense! And what's with this silly home/pro split?"
Granted, the disgust Slashdot had for XP isn't anywhere near as caustic as it is for Vista, but you need to remember that those here that migrated to XP were generally already using 2000, not still on 98 or Me.
"You'll get much higher resolution and texture resolution."
What the game may gain in the three-dimensional graphics it loses on the two-dimensional overlay, for some reason, with poor contrast, lousy transparencies and the like. Same problem on the Xbox 360, but I've gotten used to it. I suppose these things happen when you're dealing with a port instead of the original.
"That will open up macro possibilities and add-ons also."
Possibilities to get me banned.
"If you care about FFXI don't waste time playing it on PS2 (or even 360)."
If I care about FFXI, I'll continue to play it in my living room, in my lounge chair, on my 30" television. A relatively minor change in the graphics may justify staying hunched over your desk to play it for you, but not for me.
"There's a difference between all retailers individually making the decision not to carry a product, and all retailers working together to decide to not carry a product."
Pure coincidence? Going back to the example of Leisure Suit Larry, what do you think would happen if only particular retailers carried the game? Those retailers could advertise "You can only get it here!" and the retailers that refused to carry the game would lose business.
A retailer's decision to not carry something that would otherwise be in demand must necessarily depend on what his competitors are doing. If nobody else is carrying Game X, it makes it far more comfortable for the retailer to decline to carry it personally (as there's no risk of a competitor luring sales away). And, of course, once you reach a "critical mass" of sorts, the behavior also makes it that much more uncomfortable for a retailer to break ranks and offer Game X in spite of industry norms.
"Wait, you spent upwards of $500 to.. play games you could play on consoles you already own? WTF? Why?"
Because there will eventually be a game for the console that I want to play (Final Fantasy), but if I wait until then, well... they've already stopped manufacturing PS3s with hardware emulation.
"I've never really understood backwards compatability that much anyway.. it's not that much hassle to keep around multiple consoles and have some kind of automatic video out switching device."
I have a Wii, a GameCube, an N64, an SNES, a Genesis, a TurboDuo and an NES. That's two component, two S-video and three composite inputs to juggle. Granted, most of those consoles are in storage as I don't play games for all systems all the time, but a combination of the Wii's backwards compatibility and Virtual Console reduces the hassle even more.
(Now if only they'd add Rumble Pak support for N64 games...)
"No amount of cosmetics will make someone ugly beautiful."
The number of people born truly ugly is similar to the number of people born truly beautiful: fleetingly small. The overwhelming majority of the human population are average. The only difference for 99% of us comes from diet, exercise, grooming and cosmetics.
"And all those things you see in the isle are hoaxes, pipe dreams that people buying them don't need."
The "beautiful" people know they don't work alone and that they don't work without the proper knowledge of their use.
"If they're lucky enough to be able to aford it"
Debt: it's the American Way(TM)
"and they don't do a Michael Jackson on their face"
Like cosmetics, it won't help without knowledge of proper application. Michael Jackson insisted his face look like that, no doubt against the recommendations of others.
I was an early adopter of the PS3 solely because of Sony's track record of backwards compatibility consistently getting worse as new versions of a particular console come out; I wanted to be sure to get the PS3 model that would play most (if not all) of my PS2 and PS1 library, and I have yet to actually play (let alone spend money on) a PS3 game. And the list of games here isn't going to change that for me as far as I can tell: I'm not going to speak for others, but there's nothing interesting for me in that list.
I'm looking forward to the new rumble controller for backwards compatibility, nothing else. I suppose, in that way, rumble really is a "last-gen" feature, as least on Sony platforms.
Now if only some new update will fix the sound flubs in Final Fantasy XI (or if S-E would release a PS3 client of the game).
"If there were a guarantee that some girl were not going to flirt and even blow somebody to get ahead, then they would face much less discrimination."
Is it that they would blow somebody to get ahead, or that they would be given opportunities to get ahead through a little fellatio? Often geeks aren't attractive even to each other, so there's little temptation to solicit sexual favors, and it seems to me that what you're proposing is akin to punishing a prostitute for the behavior of johns; you're punishing her for your coworkers thinking with the wrong head.
Your attitude is only a heartbeat away from favoring media censorship.
"Funny how the article leaves that FACT out entirely"
"Fact?" Got a link? Or at least anecdotal evidence not of the "Bitch wouldn't go out with me" variety?
"Exactly. If you don't have the right look, you fail. Our society needs improvement."
A particular collection of industries != society.
As for when you cut and paste this line a second time, you were answering a sentence in which I stated that engineering was an industry that necessarily needed to depend on skills more than looks, and that bothering to pay attention to looks (be they below or above average) in an industry where only hard-and-fast numbers matter in the end is detrimental to a business' ability to compete. I find myself wondering if you properly read that which you cut and paste from my original post.
"Nope. You evidently need the right look in both. "
Again: where did I say that? The best I can figure, you're conflating "worrying about a person's looks" with "worrying whether a person looks attractive." Since we're talking about the possibility of people being discriminated against because they were too attractive rather than not enough, I thought I was clear enough, but apparently not: concern about a person's outward appearance in the engineering industry, in any way whatsoever, is detrimental to your ability to compete in the market.
The "opposites" I was talking about were "appearance" versus "substance," not "pretty" versus "ugly."
"But then again, with hosting a restaurant, you need good interpersonal skills in addition to the right look."
You assume that efforts to improve one's physical appearance are divorced from efforts to improve one's interpersonal skills. But pursuit of physical attractiveness requires a degree of empathy, since you are attempting to make yourself attractive to other people, catering to their tastes rather than strictly your own.
This applies even to basic grooming, such as daily bathing: someone will look filthy and unkempt or give off noticeable odors to other people long before the individual in question decides they feel dirty/gritty/oily, or that they notice their own stench, and it is for the former that the average person will attempt to bathe daily rather than the latter, at least if they intend to leave their homes and interact with other people that day.
"The pretty women do NOT have it bad. They get most of the perks in life.
That is like saying, Oh, the poor white man, "
Specious analogy. Despite what mass media would have you to believe, no woman is born beautiful, at least not in the mass-market sense. As feminists have been saying for decades, we're being sold only one particular body image for women that we define as beautiful, and the overwhelming majority of women that apparently meet that image did so only after a good deal of hard work, with the emotional (and, with the advent of plastic surgery, physical) scars to prove it.
If they do get "most of the perks," it is not by accident of birth but by hard work. You may personally disagree with that which they dedicate their work towards (i. e. their looks rather than their mathematical skills), but it is work nonetheless.
"Pretty women have the UNFAIR ADVANTAGE in most of the general envirionment"
It's only unfair if most people are wholly incapable of taking advantage of it. You yourself would have access to similar perks if you, for example, looked like an underwear model. But you don't try to look like one. Heck, too many male geeks seem to have trouble trying to simply bathe regularly. But simply because you choose to focus on other aspects of your life more than your physical appearance doesn't mean that everybody is making the same value judgment as you; pretty girls don't "just happen" to be skinnier than you, rather they focus on dieting where you would focus on coding, to the same (if not greater) degree.
Have you even so much as glanced at the beauty aid aisles in your local drug store and marveled at the bewildering array of options that a person seriously concerned with their physical appearance has to be knowledgeable about and sort through? Show me someone that has better-than-average looks and I'll show you someone with a veritable chemical weapons laboratory in their home.
I've heard this complaint a lot. Now, with a flat screen, you don't have the advantage of stereoscopic vision and you have to instead rely (mostly) on relative motion of objects on the screen. This naturally means that level design is important to implementing a successful first-person jumping experience: the jumps need a lead-up to gauge parallax, rather than requiring jumps in close quarters.
But beyond that... do you need to look down at your feet when you walk in real life?
"How often do you see a pasty geek hosting a restaurant? Anchoring a news team? Modeling swimwear?"
Because those jobs actually depend on looks. They are all about presentation, and if you don't worry about what it is you're presenting, you fail.
Engineering, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about the math, the product. If you care more about how someone looks than about the quality of the math they churn out, you fail.
You're talking about two completely different industries with opposite requirements for profitability.
"Private business should be and are allowed to make their own rules."
Individually, yes, but what happens when they collude? There's a difference between individual retailers refusing to carry a product and all retailers refusing to carry a product.
The example used is Leisure Suit Larry. It made Sierra money, therefore there was quite the market for it. But in today's market, despite potential customer demand for such a game, the retailers as a whole would refuse to sell it, denying Sierra access to customers and vice versa.
"Censorship" likely isn't the right word, but it's certainly "anti-competitive practices."
"That's like saying you stop by a gas station convenience store, and get pissed off because they don't have (say) bread."
No, it's like every gas station refusing to sell a particular brand of bed. Because they all got together and decided they didn't like the bread you were selling and that it was best for "the children" that you not be able to sell it.
... is what I like to call the "Can Not Call List," where you simply cancel your landline service. If the phone companies are going to insist on favoring corporate call floors over residential customers with the products they sell, allowing the former to harass the latter with little or no recourse, then they don't want your money.
"But, where do schools and publishers think students are getting all this money from?"
Credit cards. College students are inundated with offers, mostly because they have a reputation for not knowing better. Most college bookstores I've seen will include an offer for a credit card right in the bag.
The energy to dissociate a molecule must come from somewhere, in this case from interactions with other molecules. Parent post seemed to insist that this was both wholly spontaneous and inherently unpredictable.
"Mr. McGuire: Plastics."
First off, the adoption of the platinum-iridium as the mass standard predates the mass-production of plastics.
Secondly, something need not be solid to be dissolved in water. Heating a sample of tap water will liberate dissolved air, for example. Opening and depressurizing a bottle of carbonated water will liberate dissolved carbon dioxide, which brings me to my next point...
"This is a fundamental property of water - it is INCOMPRESSIBLE."
Simply because something is assumed to be incompressible for particular engineering purposes doesn't make it actually incompressible. Unless you'd like to try to explain how an incompressible medium can conduct sound.
"Last, but not least: sealed container."
Since your favorite word seems to be "equilibrium," you of all people should understand that such a sealed container will eventually contain some mixture of liquid water and water vapor.
"Solutes dissolve MORE in superheated water."
I said "steam." In the neighborhood of 1000 kelivn. Of the kind that went through turbines to power the computer you're reading this on, all with less than 30 parts per billion of solid contaminants in it.
"The current US government certainly didn't learn anything from Vietnam;"
Conscription makes the war much more personal to the middle class majority, rather than the already-marginalized poorer families that produce the bulk of military volunteers. Make up any shortfalls with mercenaries instead; they can't be prosecuted for atrocities.
Don't ignore the press: they're liable to go out and find things you'd rather they not find. Keep them occupied and content with canned reports of good news to send back home. Especially useful are the "But they're worse!" reports of the enemy's atrocities (in this case, such videos are often volunteered by the enemy themselves).
Anti-war protests are best dealt with by diversions rather than head-on confrontation. "Free speech zones" help to marginalize both the protesters and their message; lazy journalists are given a non-story about a non-event.
Keep the stated goals personal. Conflate Iraqi insurgents with Al Qaeda, a group that attacked the United States directly. Nobody ever believed Ho Chi Minh was going to attack targets in the US.
I could probably think up a few more if I were awake.
Yeah, the DMCA is teh Bad and all, but I'm having a hard time caring about one bunch of crazy Christian evangelicals using it to attack a bunch of crazy atheist evangelicals. This just isn't the poster child case that will sway public opinion against the law.
"On a molecular scale, molecules of water most certainly do break up."
Not without interacting with something else (e. g. other water molecules).
"It takes a certain amount of energy, of course, but that energy is freely provided by stray molecules that have much more free energy than the average."
And those "stray" molecules lose energy in the process, maintaining a constant net energy in the system. As I pointed out in the next paragraph, with no change in energy in the system, the number of whole water molecules in your sample must necessarily be constant; they may not always be the same molecules, but the number is the same, maintaining a constant volume (absent all other factors).
"Don't apply macro thermodynamic laws to individual molecules. They only apply to systems."
Don't pretend that energy isn't conserved when dealing with individual molecules. The First Law still applies even at quantum scales.
"And as long as you're going to be wrong, you could at least be polite about it."
The specific charge I was answering was that water was an improper mass standard due to dissociation, suggesting that the volume of a water sample at a constant temperature not only fluctuates because of it (it doesn't, as the dissociation constant is just that), but fluctuates beyond acceptable tolerances, implying it was of a similar to or greater than the scale of the change in density caused by solution. Four moderators thought this was correct (and none so far have found it incorrect), giving the parent a wider audience to spread this misinformation to. Being polite, respectful, civil, etc. does not get the attention required to correct such mistakes in the minds of others.
Now, my being "impolite" can introduce other problems that hinder understanding (your visceral reaction to one paragraph apparently prevented you from reading others), but I'm not going to apologize for my tone if it gets people going in the right direction towards a better understanding.
"(while other molecules lose energy, keeping the average intact)"
Exactly. If the amount of energy in a water sample is fixed, if the temperature is constant, then so is the number of dissociated water molecules within the water sample at any given time.
"For example if the beam is 1 meter long, the gravity may change by 0.00000001% or so on the ends (rough calculation using the change from pole to the equator) or greater if there is some anomaly. That may be not good enough."
Then orient it so that it's east-to-west rather than north-to-south. Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
With the release of XP, Microsoft started that delightful policy of dissuading manufacturers from including stand-alone install media with new computers (of the kind that frequently ends up on eBay). If you want to reinstall Windows, you have to use the system restore disks to reinstall everything, OEM crap and all, and we all know the only realistic way to get rid of all of it is to format your hard drive and reinstall the OS alone. I'm still toying with finding a warez copy of Home OEM and trying the product key on my old laptop's XP sticker and seeing if I can get that to work.
Vista, supposedly, has the same problem, but that little "Windows Anytime Upgrade" disk that comes with your new computer, conveniently (and undocumentedly, of course) works as install media. When I use it to reinstall Vista and use the product key on my new laptop, I always end up having to call Bangalore to finish activation, but it's still more than what I can accomplish with an OEM XP install.
With that said, I'd still throw on one of my retail XP licenses instead if I could find drivers for everything.
You're confusing XP with 2000. Most posts around here at the time complained about the apparent downgrade from moving from 2000 to XP (all the bloat slowed computers down), the interface appeared markedly different from what everybody got accustomed to with 95/98/Me/NT4, and businesses and "power users" in general were sluggish to move to XP because of it. It wasn't exactly uncommon for people here to say "Why upgrade? 2000 plays all my games, faster, without this DRM 'activation' nonsense! And what's with this silly home/pro split?"
Granted, the disgust Slashdot had for XP isn't anywhere near as caustic as it is for Vista, but you need to remember that those here that migrated to XP were generally already using 2000, not still on 98 or Me.
"Unisys denies it all."
They Have the Way Out!(TM)
"I bought a sweet 47" 1080p LCD TV about a month ago."
And that's the problem with this new advertising gimmick:
"PlayStation 3: for people who have cash to blow on 47" 1080p LCD HDTVs."
Heck, they might get more sales if their slogan was "It still works on SDTVs too!"
"You'll get much higher resolution and texture resolution."
What the game may gain in the three-dimensional graphics it loses on the two-dimensional overlay, for some reason, with poor contrast, lousy transparencies and the like. Same problem on the Xbox 360, but I've gotten used to it. I suppose these things happen when you're dealing with a port instead of the original.
"That will open up macro possibilities and add-ons also."
Possibilities to get me banned.
"If you care about FFXI don't waste time playing it on PS2 (or even 360)."
If I care about FFXI, I'll continue to play it in my living room, in my lounge chair, on my 30" television. A relatively minor change in the graphics may justify staying hunched over your desk to play it for you, but not for me.
"There's a difference between all retailers individually making the decision not to carry a product, and all retailers working together to decide to not carry a product."
Pure coincidence? Going back to the example of Leisure Suit Larry, what do you think would happen if only particular retailers carried the game? Those retailers could advertise "You can only get it here!" and the retailers that refused to carry the game would lose business.
A retailer's decision to not carry something that would otherwise be in demand must necessarily depend on what his competitors are doing. If nobody else is carrying Game X, it makes it far more comfortable for the retailer to decline to carry it personally (as there's no risk of a competitor luring sales away). And, of course, once you reach a "critical mass" of sorts, the behavior also makes it that much more uncomfortable for a retailer to break ranks and offer Game X in spite of industry norms.
"Wait, you spent upwards of $500 to.. play games you could play on consoles you already own? WTF? Why?"
Because there will eventually be a game for the console that I want to play (Final Fantasy), but if I wait until then, well... they've already stopped manufacturing PS3s with hardware emulation.
"I've never really understood backwards compatability that much anyway.. it's not that much hassle to keep around multiple consoles and have some kind of automatic video out switching device."
I have a Wii, a GameCube, an N64, an SNES, a Genesis, a TurboDuo and an NES. That's two component, two S-video and three composite inputs to juggle. Granted, most of those consoles are in storage as I don't play games for all systems all the time, but a combination of the Wii's backwards compatibility and Virtual Console reduces the hassle even more.
(Now if only they'd add Rumble Pak support for N64 games...)
"No amount of cosmetics will make someone ugly beautiful."
The number of people born truly ugly is similar to the number of people born truly beautiful: fleetingly small. The overwhelming majority of the human population are average. The only difference for 99% of us comes from diet, exercise, grooming and cosmetics.
"And all those things you see in the isle are hoaxes, pipe dreams that people buying them don't need."
The "beautiful" people know they don't work alone and that they don't work without the proper knowledge of their use.
"If they're lucky enough to be able to aford it"
Debt: it's the American Way(TM)
"and they don't do a Michael Jackson on their face"
Like cosmetics, it won't help without knowledge of proper application. Michael Jackson insisted his face look like that, no doubt against the recommendations of others.
I was an early adopter of the PS3 solely because of Sony's track record of backwards compatibility consistently getting worse as new versions of a particular console come out; I wanted to be sure to get the PS3 model that would play most (if not all) of my PS2 and PS1 library, and I have yet to actually play (let alone spend money on) a PS3 game. And the list of games here isn't going to change that for me as far as I can tell: I'm not going to speak for others, but there's nothing interesting for me in that list.
I'm looking forward to the new rumble controller for backwards compatibility, nothing else. I suppose, in that way, rumble really is a "last-gen" feature, as least on Sony platforms.
Now if only some new update will fix the sound flubs in Final Fantasy XI (or if S-E would release a PS3 client of the game).
"If there were a guarantee that some girl were not going to flirt and even blow somebody to get ahead, then they would face much less discrimination."
Is it that they would blow somebody to get ahead, or that they would be given opportunities to get ahead through a little fellatio? Often geeks aren't attractive even to each other, so there's little temptation to solicit sexual favors, and it seems to me that what you're proposing is akin to punishing a prostitute for the behavior of johns; you're punishing her for your coworkers thinking with the wrong head.
Your attitude is only a heartbeat away from favoring media censorship.
"Funny how the article leaves that FACT out entirely"
"Fact?" Got a link? Or at least anecdotal evidence not of the "Bitch wouldn't go out with me" variety?
"Exactly. If you don't have the right look, you fail. Our society needs improvement."
A particular collection of industries != society.
As for when you cut and paste this line a second time, you were answering a sentence in which I stated that engineering was an industry that necessarily needed to depend on skills more than looks, and that bothering to pay attention to looks (be they below or above average) in an industry where only hard-and-fast numbers matter in the end is detrimental to a business' ability to compete. I find myself wondering if you properly read that which you cut and paste from my original post.
"Nope. You evidently need the right look in both. "
Again: where did I say that? The best I can figure, you're conflating "worrying about a person's looks" with "worrying whether a person looks attractive." Since we're talking about the possibility of people being discriminated against because they were too attractive rather than not enough, I thought I was clear enough, but apparently not: concern about a person's outward appearance in the engineering industry, in any way whatsoever, is detrimental to your ability to compete in the market.
The "opposites" I was talking about were "appearance" versus "substance," not "pretty" versus "ugly."
"But then again, with hosting a restaurant, you need good interpersonal skills in addition to the right look."
You assume that efforts to improve one's physical appearance are divorced from efforts to improve one's interpersonal skills. But pursuit of physical attractiveness requires a degree of empathy, since you are attempting to make yourself attractive to other people, catering to their tastes rather than strictly your own.
This applies even to basic grooming, such as daily bathing: someone will look filthy and unkempt or give off noticeable odors to other people long before the individual in question decides they feel dirty/gritty/oily, or that they notice their own stench, and it is for the former that the average person will attempt to bathe daily rather than the latter, at least if they intend to leave their homes and interact with other people that day.
"The pretty women do NOT have it bad. They get most of the perks in life.
That is like saying, Oh, the poor white man, "
Specious analogy. Despite what mass media would have you to believe, no woman is born beautiful, at least not in the mass-market sense. As feminists have been saying for decades, we're being sold only one particular body image for women that we define as beautiful, and the overwhelming majority of women that apparently meet that image did so only after a good deal of hard work, with the emotional (and, with the advent of plastic surgery, physical) scars to prove it.
If they do get "most of the perks," it is not by accident of birth but by hard work. You may personally disagree with that which they dedicate their work towards (i. e. their looks rather than their mathematical skills), but it is work nonetheless.
"Pretty women have the UNFAIR ADVANTAGE in most of the general envirionment"
It's only unfair if most people are wholly incapable of taking advantage of it. You yourself would have access to similar perks if you, for example, looked like an underwear model. But you don't try to look like one. Heck, too many male geeks seem to have trouble trying to simply bathe regularly. But simply because you choose to focus on other aspects of your life more than your physical appearance doesn't mean that everybody is making the same value judgment as you; pretty girls don't "just happen" to be skinnier than you, rather they focus on dieting where you would focus on coding, to the same (if not greater) degree.
Have you even so much as glanced at the beauty aid aisles in your local drug store and marveled at the bewildering array of options that a person seriously concerned with their physical appearance has to be knowledgeable about and sort through? Show me someone that has better-than-average looks and I'll show you someone with a veritable chemical weapons laboratory in their home.
I've heard this complaint a lot. Now, with a flat screen, you don't have the advantage of stereoscopic vision and you have to instead rely (mostly) on relative motion of objects on the screen. This naturally means that level design is important to implementing a successful first-person jumping experience: the jumps need a lead-up to gauge parallax, rather than requiring jumps in close quarters.
But beyond that... do you need to look down at your feet when you walk in real life?
"Males are more likely to take risks and indulge in competition (testosterone does that). It's just a fact of life."
Really? Never heard the adjective "catty" before and wonder where it came from?
The difference between men and women isn't the desire to compete but in the nature of the competition.
"How often do you see a pasty geek hosting a restaurant? Anchoring a news team? Modeling swimwear?"
Because those jobs actually depend on looks. They are all about presentation, and if you don't worry about what it is you're presenting, you fail.
Engineering, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about the math, the product. If you care more about how someone looks than about the quality of the math they churn out, you fail.
You're talking about two completely different industries with opposite requirements for profitability.
"Private business should be and are allowed to make their own rules."
Individually, yes, but what happens when they collude? There's a difference between individual retailers refusing to carry a product and all retailers refusing to carry a product.
The example used is Leisure Suit Larry. It made Sierra money, therefore there was quite the market for it. But in today's market, despite potential customer demand for such a game, the retailers as a whole would refuse to sell it, denying Sierra access to customers and vice versa.
"Censorship" likely isn't the right word, but it's certainly "anti-competitive practices."
"That's like saying you stop by a gas station convenience store, and get pissed off because they don't have (say) bread."
No, it's like every gas station refusing to sell a particular brand of bed. Because they all got together and decided they didn't like the bread you were selling and that it was best for "the children" that you not be able to sell it.
... is what I like to call the "Can Not Call List," where you simply cancel your landline service. If the phone companies are going to insist on favoring corporate call floors over residential customers with the products they sell, allowing the former to harass the latter with little or no recourse, then they don't want your money.
Be sure to get an Arabic translation of it while you're at it.
"But, where do schools and publishers think students are getting all this money from?"
Credit cards. College students are inundated with offers, mostly because they have a reputation for not knowing better. Most college bookstores I've seen will include an offer for a credit card right in the bag.
"Yes, they do, and it's called equilibrium."
The energy to dissociate a molecule must come from somewhere, in this case from interactions with other molecules. Parent post seemed to insist that this was both wholly spontaneous and inherently unpredictable.
"Mr. McGuire: Plastics."
First off, the adoption of the platinum-iridium as the mass standard predates the mass-production of plastics.
Secondly, something need not be solid to be dissolved in water. Heating a sample of tap water will liberate dissolved air, for example. Opening and depressurizing a bottle of carbonated water will liberate dissolved carbon dioxide, which brings me to my next point...
"This is a fundamental property of water - it is INCOMPRESSIBLE."
Simply because something is assumed to be incompressible for particular engineering purposes doesn't make it actually incompressible. Unless you'd like to try to explain how an incompressible medium can conduct sound.
"Last, but not least: sealed container."
Since your favorite word seems to be "equilibrium," you of all people should understand that such a sealed container will eventually contain some mixture of liquid water and water vapor.
"Solutes dissolve MORE in superheated water."
I said "steam." In the neighborhood of 1000 kelivn. Of the kind that went through turbines to power the computer you're reading this on, all with less than 30 parts per billion of solid contaminants in it.
- Conscription makes the war much more personal to the middle class majority, rather than the already-marginalized poorer families that produce the bulk of military volunteers. Make up any shortfalls with mercenaries instead; they can't be prosecuted for atrocities.
- Don't ignore the press: they're liable to go out and find things you'd rather they not find. Keep them occupied and content with canned reports of good news to send back home. Especially useful are the "But they're worse!" reports of the enemy's atrocities (in this case, such videos are often volunteered by the enemy themselves).
- Anti-war protests are best dealt with by diversions rather than head-on confrontation. "Free speech zones" help to marginalize both the protesters and their message; lazy journalists are given a non-story about a non-event.
- Keep the stated goals personal. Conflate Iraqi insurgents with Al Qaeda, a group that attacked the United States directly. Nobody ever believed Ho Chi Minh was going to attack targets in the US.
I could probably think up a few more if I were awake.Yeah, the DMCA is teh Bad and all, but I'm having a hard time caring about one bunch of crazy Christian evangelicals using it to attack a bunch of crazy atheist evangelicals. This just isn't the poster child case that will sway public opinion against the law.
"On a molecular scale, molecules of water most certainly do break up."
Not without interacting with something else (e. g. other water molecules).
"It takes a certain amount of energy, of course, but that energy is freely provided by stray molecules that have much more free energy than the average."
And those "stray" molecules lose energy in the process, maintaining a constant net energy in the system. As I pointed out in the next paragraph, with no change in energy in the system, the number of whole water molecules in your sample must necessarily be constant; they may not always be the same molecules, but the number is the same, maintaining a constant volume (absent all other factors).
"Don't apply macro thermodynamic laws to individual molecules. They only apply to systems."
Don't pretend that energy isn't conserved when dealing with individual molecules. The First Law still applies even at quantum scales.
"And as long as you're going to be wrong, you could at least be polite about it."
The specific charge I was answering was that water was an improper mass standard due to dissociation, suggesting that the volume of a water sample at a constant temperature not only fluctuates because of it (it doesn't, as the dissociation constant is just that), but fluctuates beyond acceptable tolerances, implying it was of a similar to or greater than the scale of the change in density caused by solution. Four moderators thought this was correct (and none so far have found it incorrect), giving the parent a wider audience to spread this misinformation to. Being polite, respectful, civil, etc. does not get the attention required to correct such mistakes in the minds of others.
Now, my being "impolite" can introduce other problems that hinder understanding (your visceral reaction to one paragraph apparently prevented you from reading others), but I'm not going to apologize for my tone if it gets people going in the right direction towards a better understanding.
"(while other molecules lose energy, keeping the average intact)"
Exactly. If the amount of energy in a water sample is fixed, if the temperature is constant, then so is the number of dissociated water molecules within the water sample at any given time.
"For example if the beam is 1 meter long, the gravity may change by 0.00000001% or so on the ends (rough calculation using the change from pole to the equator) or greater if there is some anomaly. That may be not good enough."
Then orient it so that it's east-to-west rather than north-to-south. Problem solved.