What does vacuum instability mean? It means that vacuum might have a half-life, after which it decays into energy. This is a cool concept until you realize that the Universe is mostly made of vacuum. If the Universe were to spontaneously disintegrate, that would be Bad.
Maybe it's a dead man switch in case God dies before his experiment is finished.
Sure you can. You can prove that a number is not even. "You can't prove a negative" is an oversimplification of the axiom that "absence of evidence" != "evidence of absence". But even that is not saying that there's no such thing as "evidence of absence." A properly designed experiment *can* provide evidence of absence just as reliably as a properly designed experiment can provide evidence of existence. What it cannot do is speak to conditions outside the scope of the experiment, but neither can any experiment. There is always a non-zero probability that any inference is wrong, which is why scientists speak in terms of confidence levels instead of absolutes. And even then, it's easy to make the mistake that a high degree of confidence is the same as an absolute truth, when it could be that an experiment was biased in a way that no one had noticed.
Well obviously it depends on the road surface, but then, German cars are likely engineered for German roads. I agree that if you're only driving on streets in an urban environment, replete with potholes, manholes, constantly grooved pavement and the like, then the only thing you'll get out of a stiff suspension is a harsh ride.
Nonetheless, for other conditions -- "normal" roads -- if your springs are too soft, your car *will* lean (AKA roll), which shifts more of the weight to the outer wheels, and also sets up an inverted pendulum-type scenario when you turn the other way. One possibility to cope with that is to use really stiff anti-sway bars, but you necessarily sacrifice independence when you do that, which causes its own set of problems.
The Hydractive suspension is just an implementation of a nonlinear spring, which allows a degree of softness before the spring rate increases. It gives you most of the ride benefits of softer springs with most of the handling benefits of stiffer springs. It's a compromise, but it's one that makes sense, and would probably be ideal for the vast majority of drivers. Unfortunately, the auto industry seems to like to keep those technologies in the upper echelon of their offerings, or in commercial vehicles where they have to compete more on actual substance and less on BS.
I agree with the discomfort of the seats, but a stiff suspension is a prerequisite for good handling. You can either have good handling, or a soft ride, but not both, at least not at the same time. Some vehicles have dynamic suspensions to switch between the two, with varying results. And for some people, good ride quality is a vehicle that doesn't feel like it's floating over the pavement or lean at a 30 degree angle when taking a curve.
Of course if we made decent roads and kept them maintained, stiff suspensions would provide just as smooth of a ride.
I'm agnostic, since I believe taking a position on something non-disprovable is pointless at best. I do, however, think that people shouldn't be worried about how other people celebrate. We happen to live in a country where the majority of people are Christian, and so that culture should be accepted. (The fact that Christmas was co-opted from winter solstice festivals to begin with is sort of irrelevant at this point in time.) Complaining about Christmas dominating the figurative landscape of holidays in the US is like going to Japan and complaining about Buddhist parks dominating the physical landscape. It's just part of the culture. Live and let live.
In a capitalist system, that's not theft. If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair.
Agreeing to a price based on incomplete knowledge may be legal, but it's not what I'd call fair. And most people make purchasing decisions with little or no knowledge other than what someone else is asking for a similar or the same item. Indeed, that's often the only information that's available.
With many items/services the buyer doesn't have to worry too much about it, because other providers will step in if there's a chance to sell at a lower cost, which drives prices downward. The problem is, the consumer begins to expect this market efficiency, but when the barrier to entry is too high for competition (whether that barrier is startup cost, availability of infrastructure, or just patent protections) then prices and profits are allowed to grow nearly unchecked. "What the market will bear" trends toward a function of available funds for the average buyer -- the way corporations like it -- rather than a function of the efficiency of the corporation -- the way consumers like it. (I think government-granted monopolies should come with a stipulation that their implementation be limited to something like a 20% profit margin, though that would be nearly impossible to enforce, and I digress.)
The thing is, corporations benefit more from efficiency than from maximizing profits, because taking all of the consumer's available funds (and more) leads to economic stagnation. It's killing the golden goose. It might not seem to matter if corporate exec Alice already has all the money she could ever use, but that's the problem, isn't it? The people who have to suffer for extremely successful short-term strategies are not the same people who execute those strategies. Alice's personal long-term success is guaranteed even if her short-term strategy proves ruinous to the company. This is a fairly serious failing of the market, and we're seeing the results manifest in income disparity of third-world proportions, which is exactly where we could be headed if we don't create a disincentive for irresponsible profiteering.
What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
First of all, ad views don't make money; clickthroughs make money. And I may be in a minority (though probably not), but I'm usually not interested in any of the products or services advertised and don't trust the sales pitch of an online ad regardless.
Second, if advertisers create more intrusive ads (which didn't work so well when they did), that's just too bad. I will either avoid the ad, or else avoid the site promoting the ad. The only thing that forcing an ad on my display would accomplish is to make me not want to look at your site, and therefore be extremely unlikely to recommend your site to someone else who might actually click on an ad. If I want to learn about a product or service, I'll do the research on my own, and ads will never be a factor. I am not an early adopter, I do not make impulse purchases, and I am not your target demographic.
People who either don't know how or choose not to block ads will have to decide for themselves whether they want to patronize a site that tolerates or facilitates intrusive advertisements.
I know I'd be ticked if a $600 per hour patent lawyer was billing me for the time he spends calling his Swiss banker, why should I be any less ticked by a customer support person at $20 per hour is doing the same thing? (It may cost me less, but I'm still paying for work I'm not getting).
Uh, yes, because it costs you less. Or do you get just as upset when you lose a pencil as when you lose your phone?
And please show a correlation between productivity and/or quality of work and time spent (pretending to) work, especially where that time spent being under a microscope leads to unhappy workers.
People aren't robots. They're doing the task you paid them to do, and they get it done in a reasonable amount of time, or they don't. If they're not meeting your productivity expectations, you should probably discuss it with them or find a replacement, though if your expectations are unreasonable, chances are you won't have much luck.
First of all, if you're in an accident where you're incapacitated, it's probably not the sort where you're going to park your car in the garage afterwards. But putting that aside...
First responders aren't going to help much if there's a fire in the situation I described (not uncommon) when it takes >0 minutes to get there... usually >10. It's much easier to manage an even *before* it occurs rather than while it's occurring. As I said in another post, now that everyone's aware of the risk, we won't park our punctured battery EVs in the garage, the same way we don't idle our ICE vehicles in the garage with the door closed. FFS, I can't believe people are actually arguing over this.
Yes, but now that we're all aware that there's a delayed risk of fire, that risk can be managed appropriately. I have no doubt there will be cases where a battery puncture goes unnoticed and leads to fire that kills someone later. There are also cases where fuel hoses fail, generally without prior warning, and spray gasoline all over a hot engine block. Both events are theoretically preventable, and can be managed with proper inspections, but we all know mistakes happen.
Having personally been in an accident which ruptured my fuel tank and left me unconscious until the paramedics arrived and woke me up with smelling salts, and having seen more than one accident with passengers literally pinned inside, I'd much rather take my chances with an event I can mitigate -- a future fire -- than one I can't.
to me it isn't so much as because it's "new" but rather because it is delayed.. in a normal car wreck if you have a fire it happens then.. not 3 weeks after the car was repaired.
Right, I'd much rather have the fire break out while I'm trapped unconscious and injured in my vehicle immediately following an accident.
It will force the US to rejig the comms to their drones, and promote one hell of a fuss in the US command chain as arses are covered and blame transferred to the least well protected elements.
Only if their version of events is true. For all we know the operator performed an emergency landing because we thought we could get to it before the Iranians did. Or maybe it landed itself for some reason. Who knows? But even if they're correct, and even if comms have to be re-tooled, that's not exactly a huge undertaking. It's not like they have to redesign the bird from the ground up.
The point is, it's a relatively embarrassing story at worst, but not quite as embarrassing as making a childish parody of the US flag with skulls on it and then lending further legitimacy by airing it on national TV with the president standing in front of it. And they wonder why nobody trusts them with nukes.
GMO is simply a product produced by an *engineering technique*. It's perfectly reasonable to point out specific products, such as your fish tomato which was never marketed and probably wouldn't contain seafood allergens anyway, but saying that all GMO is bad because a poor product was produced is like saying mechanical engineering is bad because, hey, guns. And just like guns have also been used for good, your argument also ignores the fact a frost-resistant tomato would *definitely* lower the cost of producing food, which would be a much greater social good than the (speculated) consequence that people with severe food allergies would have to *continue* to be careful of what they eat and carry epinephrine with them at all times.
Incidentally, while you couldn't naturally cross-breed a fish and a tomato, it's not only possible for plants and animals to share some common DNA; they already do. And there's absolutely no reason you couldn't select successive generations of mutations until you had a gene that also happened to be found in a fish. It would probably take a long time -- a very long time -- but if you were determined enough, you could probably do it. Like I said, GM is simply a more efficient technique than relying on chance.
It's reasonable to subject GMO foods to testing for known hazards -- we expect this of all of our food, GMO or not -- and it's even reasonable to subject GMO foods to testing for otherwise unexpected allergens and toxins before they're marketed. But it's not reasonable to say that GMO is inherently more dangerous or unhealthy just because the genes were modified by a different method.
Finally, you're creating a strawman with regards to Monsanto: Just because they're a producer of GMO doesn't mean I'm defending their business practices. I'm not. I'm saying that making blanket statements about products based solely on the fact that they're genetically altered is reactionary, alarmist, and unproductive.
Which is, frankly, stupid. ALL living things are Genetically Modified Organisms, it's just that the mechanism of modification is usually either more random (natural evolution), or takes longer (breeding and hybridization, AKA ranching and farming). Manipulating genes directly is both more efficient and more effective. If it wasn't, farmers wouldn't buy the seed.
Now it's true that we don't really know the extent of the role that the genetics of our food supply plays in our health, but that's just as true for non-GMO/organic foodstuff as it is for GMO. It's not like we have much in the way of conclusive evidence or scientific consensus that any particular food is healthy or unhealthy, with the obvious exception of substances that are acutely toxic. It's natural to be wary of things that are new and unknown, but the reality is that the existing things (foods) are unknown in this case, except for the fact that we don't generally keel over dead from eating them. And on top of that, you never know when you might be getting something new anyway thanks to spontaneous genetic mutations.
I'm not saying that food and nutrition shouldn't continue to be studied, certainly they should, but dismissing a food source out of hand because it's "GMO" is simply alarmist.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, perfect *anything* is impossible, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be the goal.
Or biological. Women may actually enjoy the fields they gravitate toward.
What does vacuum instability mean? It means that vacuum might have a half-life, after which it decays into energy. This is a cool concept until you realize that the Universe is mostly made of vacuum. If the Universe were to spontaneously disintegrate, that would be Bad.
Maybe it's a dead man switch in case God dies before his experiment is finished.
You can't prove a negative.
Sure you can. You can prove that a number is not even. "You can't prove a negative" is an oversimplification of the axiom that "absence of evidence" != "evidence of absence". But even that is not saying that there's no such thing as "evidence of absence." A properly designed experiment *can* provide evidence of absence just as reliably as a properly designed experiment can provide evidence of existence. What it cannot do is speak to conditions outside the scope of the experiment, but neither can any experiment. There is always a non-zero probability that any inference is wrong, which is why scientists speak in terms of confidence levels instead of absolutes. And even then, it's easy to make the mistake that a high degree of confidence is the same as an absolute truth, when it could be that an experiment was biased in a way that no one had noticed.
Well obviously it depends on the road surface, but then, German cars are likely engineered for German roads. I agree that if you're only driving on streets in an urban environment, replete with potholes, manholes, constantly grooved pavement and the like, then the only thing you'll get out of a stiff suspension is a harsh ride.
Nonetheless, for other conditions -- "normal" roads -- if your springs are too soft, your car *will* lean (AKA roll), which shifts more of the weight to the outer wheels, and also sets up an inverted pendulum-type scenario when you turn the other way. One possibility to cope with that is to use really stiff anti-sway bars, but you necessarily sacrifice independence when you do that, which causes its own set of problems.
The Hydractive suspension is just an implementation of a nonlinear spring, which allows a degree of softness before the spring rate increases. It gives you most of the ride benefits of softer springs with most of the handling benefits of stiffer springs. It's a compromise, but it's one that makes sense, and would probably be ideal for the vast majority of drivers. Unfortunately, the auto industry seems to like to keep those technologies in the upper echelon of their offerings, or in commercial vehicles where they have to compete more on actual substance and less on BS.
I agree with the discomfort of the seats, but a stiff suspension is a prerequisite for good handling. You can either have good handling, or a soft ride, but not both, at least not at the same time. Some vehicles have dynamic suspensions to switch between the two, with varying results. And for some people, good ride quality is a vehicle that doesn't feel like it's floating over the pavement or lean at a 30 degree angle when taking a curve.
Of course if we made decent roads and kept them maintained, stiff suspensions would provide just as smooth of a ride.
I'm agnostic, since I believe taking a position on something non-disprovable is pointless at best. I do, however, think that people shouldn't be worried about how other people celebrate. We happen to live in a country where the majority of people are Christian, and so that culture should be accepted. (The fact that Christmas was co-opted from winter solstice festivals to begin with is sort of irrelevant at this point in time.) Complaining about Christmas dominating the figurative landscape of holidays in the US is like going to Japan and complaining about Buddhist parks dominating the physical landscape. It's just part of the culture. Live and let live.
In a capitalist system, that's not theft. If the price is agreed to by all involved parties then it's fair.
Agreeing to a price based on incomplete knowledge may be legal, but it's not what I'd call fair. And most people make purchasing decisions with little or no knowledge other than what someone else is asking for a similar or the same item. Indeed, that's often the only information that's available.
With many items/services the buyer doesn't have to worry too much about it, because other providers will step in if there's a chance to sell at a lower cost, which drives prices downward. The problem is, the consumer begins to expect this market efficiency, but when the barrier to entry is too high for competition (whether that barrier is startup cost, availability of infrastructure, or just patent protections) then prices and profits are allowed to grow nearly unchecked. "What the market will bear" trends toward a function of available funds for the average buyer -- the way corporations like it -- rather than a function of the efficiency of the corporation -- the way consumers like it. (I think government-granted monopolies should come with a stipulation that their implementation be limited to something like a 20% profit margin, though that would be nearly impossible to enforce, and I digress.)
The thing is, corporations benefit more from efficiency than from maximizing profits, because taking all of the consumer's available funds (and more) leads to economic stagnation. It's killing the golden goose. It might not seem to matter if corporate exec Alice already has all the money she could ever use, but that's the problem, isn't it? The people who have to suffer for extremely successful short-term strategies are not the same people who execute those strategies. Alice's personal long-term success is guaranteed even if her short-term strategy proves ruinous to the company. This is a fairly serious failing of the market, and we're seeing the results manifest in income disparity of third-world proportions, which is exactly where we could be headed if we don't create a disincentive for irresponsible profiteering.
Only if you work on Wall Street.
Indeed.
You get an A for effort though.
What users don't get is that the more people use adblock, the more marketers will have to extract every last penny they can out of the users they can. That means dirtier, high ROI ads, pop-ups, etc. Most users aren't going to install adblock no matter what they do.
First of all, ad views don't make money; clickthroughs make money. And I may be in a minority (though probably not), but I'm usually not interested in any of the products or services advertised and don't trust the sales pitch of an online ad regardless.
Second, if advertisers create more intrusive ads (which didn't work so well when they did), that's just too bad. I will either avoid the ad, or else avoid the site promoting the ad. The only thing that forcing an ad on my display would accomplish is to make me not want to look at your site, and therefore be extremely unlikely to recommend your site to someone else who might actually click on an ad. If I want to learn about a product or service, I'll do the research on my own, and ads will never be a factor. I am not an early adopter, I do not make impulse purchases, and I am not your target demographic.
People who either don't know how or choose not to block ads will have to decide for themselves whether they want to patronize a site that tolerates or facilitates intrusive advertisements.
It's not that I want to hide the ads. What I want is to hide the annoyance of the ads.
Those two things are synonymous to me. Anything that distracts or takes screen real estate away from what I'm trying to see is an annoyance.
Above link may be NSFW.
Nice. I'd mod you up if I could.
I know I'd be ticked if a $600 per hour patent lawyer was billing me for the time he spends calling his Swiss banker, why should I be any less ticked by a customer support person at $20 per hour is doing the same thing? (It may cost me less, but I'm still paying for work I'm not getting).
Uh, yes, because it costs you less. Or do you get just as upset when you lose a pencil as when you lose your phone?
And please show a correlation between productivity and/or quality of work and time spent (pretending to) work, especially where that time spent being under a microscope leads to unhappy workers.
People aren't robots. They're doing the task you paid them to do, and they get it done in a reasonable amount of time, or they don't. If they're not meeting your productivity expectations, you should probably discuss it with them or find a replacement, though if your expectations are unreasonable, chances are you won't have much luck.
First of all, if you're in an accident where you're incapacitated, it's probably not the sort where you're going to park your car in the garage afterwards. But putting that aside...
First responders aren't going to help much if there's a fire in the situation I described (not uncommon) when it takes >0 minutes to get there... usually >10. It's much easier to manage an even *before* it occurs rather than while it's occurring. As I said in another post, now that everyone's aware of the risk, we won't park our punctured battery EVs in the garage, the same way we don't idle our ICE vehicles in the garage with the door closed. FFS, I can't believe people are actually arguing over this.
Yes, but now that we're all aware that there's a delayed risk of fire, that risk can be managed appropriately. I have no doubt there will be cases where a battery puncture goes unnoticed and leads to fire that kills someone later. There are also cases where fuel hoses fail, generally without prior warning, and spray gasoline all over a hot engine block. Both events are theoretically preventable, and can be managed with proper inspections, but we all know mistakes happen.
Having personally been in an accident which ruptured my fuel tank and left me unconscious until the paramedics arrived and woke me up with smelling salts, and having seen more than one accident with passengers literally pinned inside, I'd much rather take my chances with an event I can mitigate -- a future fire -- than one I can't.
to me it isn't so much as because it's "new" but rather because it is delayed.. in a normal car wreck if you have a fire it happens then.. not 3 weeks after the car was repaired.
Right, I'd much rather have the fire break out while I'm trapped unconscious and injured in my vehicle immediately following an accident.
It will force the US to rejig the comms to their drones, and promote one hell of a fuss in the US command chain as arses are covered and blame transferred to the least well protected elements.
Only if their version of events is true. For all we know the operator performed an emergency landing because we thought we could get to it before the Iranians did. Or maybe it landed itself for some reason. Who knows? But even if they're correct, and even if comms have to be re-tooled, that's not exactly a huge undertaking. It's not like they have to redesign the bird from the ground up.
The point is, it's a relatively embarrassing story at worst, but not quite as embarrassing as making a childish parody of the US flag with skulls on it and then lending further legitimacy by airing it on national TV with the president standing in front of it. And they wonder why nobody trusts them with nukes.
GMO is simply a product produced by an *engineering technique*. It's perfectly reasonable to point out specific products, such as your fish tomato which was never marketed and probably wouldn't contain seafood allergens anyway, but saying that all GMO is bad because a poor product was produced is like saying mechanical engineering is bad because, hey, guns. And just like guns have also been used for good, your argument also ignores the fact a frost-resistant tomato would *definitely* lower the cost of producing food, which would be a much greater social good than the (speculated) consequence that people with severe food allergies would have to *continue* to be careful of what they eat and carry epinephrine with them at all times.
Incidentally, while you couldn't naturally cross-breed a fish and a tomato, it's not only possible for plants and animals to share some common DNA; they already do. And there's absolutely no reason you couldn't select successive generations of mutations until you had a gene that also happened to be found in a fish. It would probably take a long time -- a very long time -- but if you were determined enough, you could probably do it. Like I said, GM is simply a more efficient technique than relying on chance.
It's reasonable to subject GMO foods to testing for known hazards -- we expect this of all of our food, GMO or not -- and it's even reasonable to subject GMO foods to testing for otherwise unexpected allergens and toxins before they're marketed. But it's not reasonable to say that GMO is inherently more dangerous or unhealthy just because the genes were modified by a different method.
Finally, you're creating a strawman with regards to Monsanto: Just because they're a producer of GMO doesn't mean I'm defending their business practices. I'm not. I'm saying that making blanket statements about products based solely on the fact that they're genetically altered is reactionary, alarmist, and unproductive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Global_Health_Program
Sources can be found near the bottom, under "Notes and References."
Which is, frankly, stupid. ALL living things are Genetically Modified Organisms, it's just that the mechanism of modification is usually either more random (natural evolution), or takes longer (breeding and hybridization, AKA ranching and farming). Manipulating genes directly is both more efficient and more effective. If it wasn't, farmers wouldn't buy the seed.
Now it's true that we don't really know the extent of the role that the genetics of our food supply plays in our health, but that's just as true for non-GMO/organic foodstuff as it is for GMO. It's not like we have much in the way of conclusive evidence or scientific consensus that any particular food is healthy or unhealthy, with the obvious exception of substances that are acutely toxic. It's natural to be wary of things that are new and unknown, but the reality is that the existing things (foods) are unknown in this case, except for the fact that we don't generally keel over dead from eating them. And on top of that, you never know when you might be getting something new anyway thanks to spontaneous genetic mutations.
I'm not saying that food and nutrition shouldn't continue to be studied, certainly they should, but dismissing a food source out of hand because it's "GMO" is simply alarmist.
These stories about Dutch CA's are really clogging up the system.
I can see someone "loosing" a couple
Me too. I think it was called goatse.
At work? Count me in. It's not my computer.