I dunno, the article is full of 'what if' and 'could be' and 'possibly'. The theory itself seems to be an alternate consequence of the Global Warming theory, which in itself hasn't been conclusively proven or disproven.
Somthing that's always bothered me about people's understanding of science and the way it works. Statements like, "it's not proven" or "It's just a theory" demonstrate ones lack of knowledge in the ways of science. This isn't necessarily your fault, this stuff isn't taught in the sub university educational system nor in many of the lower level science classes. It should be, but it isn't. Personally, I learned the most about the ways of science from being a research assistant for a professor and from my elementary stats class. I've picked up bits from Carl Sagans "Demon Haunted World" and the skeptic column in Scientific American. Anyhow, theories are not proven true, only proven false, and a theory must be falsifiable to be a scientifically valid theory. For instance, the theory of gravity by Newton stood for several hundred years before Einstein turned it over. His theory of gravity may someday be proven not quite right. Theories, in science are a lot different than theories for a layman. A theory for a layman is more like a hypothesis. A scientific theory is a well tested idea about somthing.
You call the Supreme Court of the United States, the final authority on law and order in this country "irregular means?" When something is as close as the election in Florida was, there's not much choice but to get the Supreme Court involved. Do you have a better solution? They made the right call, and many "recounts" since bear that fact out, whether you like the results of it or not.
Last time I checked, the Supreme Court declaring the winner of the Presidential election was highly irregular. In fact, it has never happened before, and I hope it never happens again. Better solution? How about we all go to the poles again?
Umm... Had to think about this for a bit - Does the Taliban rule "most of the world?" Maybe I missed a late breaking news flash or something....
No, but we do have troops all over the world. We appear to be involved in some conflict around the world just about all the time, and America has been for last 20 years. Do you remember the "axis of evil" rhetoric? Gulf War, Bosnia, Somalia? Troops in the Phillipines?
Both maintained secret and clandestine governments.
Sure... Right... The Illuminati are really in power in the US, right?
Don't you remember the news reports about the shadow government that was revealed shortly after September 11th? From CNN
Both led "witch-hunts" against the accused minority.
No - looking for terrorists does not, in my book, qualify as a witch hunt.
No, but arrestingthousands of people does in most people's books. Don't forget many of these people were not charged with anyhting.
Big Deal. Just about all of our genes (maybe even all at our point) our mutations. That's how you get new features, like, jaws, hair, genitals, brains, insert your favorite feature. If the mutation manages not to kill you, and be passed on to your kids, that's evolution. If it makes your life easier or manages to make you more succesful in getting laid, having more kids, even better.
For instance, the cosmological redshift. Start with a universe that has one photon in it. The universe expands, and the photon redshifts. Now the photon has less energy. What happened to conservation of energy?
IANAP, so I may be completely wrong, and if so, please explain why, but, doesn't the photon get stretched out so that the rate of energy (e/s) recieved is less. Therefore the energy isn't lost and the photon actually has the same total energy, but the energy within a given length of the photon is less.
However, this *STILL* doesnt explain the ones in Brazil, and other parts of the world that were turning up also.
That's easy, copy cats. The tools neccesary to make crop circles are simple, and once it's reported on international news, any joker in any country with access to a field of wheat and an idea of how to do it can make them.
Plus, I'd like to know how they get into some of these places that are guarded now.. (some of the farmers have put their fields under video surveillance, found no evidence of people wandering around and had a crop circle the next morning..).
Compliance of the farmer? Have you seen these tapes? It would not be difficult to fake it. A little planning, maybe some cheap video editing equipment. Change dates and times on cameras.
Next those two will claim they built the bizarre desert mounds that are only visible from aircraft!
What are these? Hills?
Im not a nutcase, and I dont believe there are spaceships landing to play bocce in wheat fields, but two pranksters from England claiming they did them all is kind of ridiculous as well.
I don't believe they claimed they made all of them, just English ones, and probably not even all of those. See copycats above.
Any science fiction writer who sees himself as a prophet for the future needs to find a new line of work, like say, I don't know, start a cult for instance.
Starting cults has a long and honorable tradition. Please don't tarnish it's reputation by suggesting that any loony sci-fi writer should start one.
...would consist of a network in which the highest-flying of the A. V.'s 'will communicate with headquarters, transmitting data and receiving commands. The commands will be passed along to a team of lower-flying A.V.'s that will relay them in turn to single drones serving as liaisons for squadrons of A.V.'s.'
Seems like the easiest thing to do would be to knock out that highest flying drone. Similar to how they won the battle in Episode 1. Though I don't think the lower level AVs will simply stop as the robot soldiers did.
And, especially for Slashdotters, don't use vitamin suppliments. Two studies just came out that said vitamin E (and, to a lesser extent, vitamin C) reduce the chances of getting Alzheimers; lesions relating to free radicals are found on most Alzheimer patients, and thus anti-oxidants are being viewed as a potential salvation. But only if you get it from natural sources. Pills had no effect.
And then there was the study on smokers who took beta carotene in pill form. They had a higher incidence of lung cancer than those who didn't take the vitamin pills.
Sources? What studies? Why should I just take your word for it?
The editors should really put the link to the majcher link in the front article. That and there should be a +1 Karma Whore moderation. I'm not trying to be a troll or insult you or anything and I don't have any problem with what you are doing. It's just that none of the moderations are really appropriate for this type of post. The service is appreciated. I am just suggesting a change to slashdot and burning off what little karma I do have.
Reminds me of my high school history class. We did the whole congress thing and somebody came up with a mandatory community service bill where everyone over some age was required to do 10 hours of community service per year. It was well intentioned but I immediately shot it down due to it being slavery and therefore unconstitutional.
Microsoft would also lose out from giving up the right to blast ads and spyware at all of the users of its network. Microsoft fully intends to leverage a monopoly in the instant messaging arena to further its desktop and server monopoly. At that point they will begin charging for service. This would be less effective if they opened their network. Keeping their network closed encourages more users to get Passport accounts, which Microsoft uses to harvest personal information and sell consumer dossiers and mailing lists."
From the Trillian homepage: Microsoft was kind enough to alert us to a change in the MSN servers that would have negatively affected Trillian. Thanks, Microsoft! "
Microsoft seems to be playing nice, maybe because they don't have the monopoly on IM and don't see themselves getting it anytime soon. Maybe because of the PR value. "Hey we didn't squelch tiny little Trillian." Whatever their motives, it is still good to see Microsoft playing nice for once. And it goes against your argument.
"The personal computer and the VCR trashed over 3,000 years of intuitive tool design. Before 1976, there was never a consumer product that needed a twenty-page instruction booklet (like a VCR), much less the shelf of books needed to operate a PC."
The more versatile a tool is, the more complex its use will be. While there are good and bad user interfaces, a gemeral purpose computer (GPC) will never be as simple to use as a refridgerater or a hammer. A GPC is capable of doing just about anything you want it to, and so its use will be very complex. Consider CD players. You can get an inexpensive CD player that just plays the CD and the few other basic functions for a CD player: stop, next, previous, and pause. You can also get one that comes with a grpahic equalizer, holds 100s of disks, allows you to program it to play in any order, turn on or off at a specific time, and even makes julien fries. But with these added features comes more buttons, more complex menus, and a thicker user manual. This is the tradeoff of increased fucntionality. The general purpose computer has the greatest variety of functions it is capable of performing of any tool I own.
"FWIW I think Bruce Ediger probably wanted to say "genetic knowledge" rather than "intuitive", but as another poster has pointed out, babies need to be taught about nipples too."
Actually, babies have an instinctive reflex to suck on anything that is remotely nipple shaped. THey are not taught about this.
Re:Katz is even more pathetic than usual
on
The Empire Stumbles
·
· Score: 1
"About the only thing I can say in your favour is how much discussion your articles tend to generate. Of course, 80% of it tends to be people criticizing your "ability" as a journalist."
Which increases page views, thus showing more ads, thus increasing revenue. Hence the reason Katz is kept.
If the state of the medical profession, HMOs, drug manufacturers, and other health services in the United States is any indication, I'd much rather be an unlicensed software engineer than an "ethical" doctor. Why is it that medicines and medical attention cost as much as ten times as what they cost in other countries?
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, the article is full of 'what if' and 'could be' and 'possibly'. The theory itself seems to be an alternate consequence of the Global Warming theory, which in itself hasn't been conclusively proven or disproven.
Somthing that's always bothered me about people's understanding of science and the way it works. Statements like, "it's not proven" or "It's just a theory" demonstrate ones lack of knowledge in the ways of science. This isn't necessarily your fault, this stuff isn't taught in the sub university educational system nor in many of the lower level science classes. It should be, but it isn't. Personally, I learned the most about the ways of science from being a research assistant for a professor and from my elementary stats class. I've picked up bits from Carl Sagans "Demon Haunted World" and the skeptic column in Scientific American. Anyhow, theories are not proven true, only proven false, and a theory must be falsifiable to be a scientifically valid theory. For instance, the theory of gravity by Newton stood for several hundred years before Einstein turned it over. His theory of gravity may someday be proven not quite right. Theories, in science are a lot different than theories for a layman. A theory for a layman is more like a hypothesis. A scientific theory is a well tested idea about somthing.
You call the Supreme Court of the United States, the final authority on law and order in this country "irregular means?" When something is as close as the election in Florida was, there's not much choice but to get the Supreme Court involved. Do you have a better solution? They made the right call, and many "recounts" since bear that fact out, whether you like the results of it or not.
Last time I checked, the Supreme Court declaring the winner of the Presidential election was highly irregular. In fact, it has never happened before, and I hope it never happens again. Better solution? How about we all go to the poles again?
Umm... Had to think about this for a bit - Does the Taliban rule "most of the world?" Maybe I missed a late breaking news flash or something....
No, but we do have troops all over the world. We appear to be involved in some conflict around the world just about all the time, and America has been for last 20 years. Do you remember the "axis of evil" rhetoric? Gulf War, Bosnia, Somalia? Troops in the Phillipines?
Both maintained secret and clandestine governments.
Sure... Right... The Illuminati are really in power in the US, right?
Don't you remember the news reports about the shadow government that was revealed shortly after September 11th? From CNN
Both led "witch-hunts" against the accused minority.
No - looking for terrorists does not, in my book, qualify as a witch hunt.
No, but arresting thousands of people does in most people's books. Don't forget many of these people were not charged with anyhting.
Office of Homeland Security
If not, where are the music-insensitive humanoid species?
That would be me.
Big Deal. Just about all of our genes (maybe even all at our point) our mutations. That's how you get new features, like, jaws, hair, genitals, brains, insert your favorite feature. If the mutation manages not to kill you, and be passed on to your kids, that's evolution. If it makes your life easier or manages to make you more succesful in getting laid, having more kids, even better.
That's easy, he lets a recently dead lawyer into purgatory (as opposed to hell) in exchange for representation.
First, where do you live that they still employ people to pump gas. Around here (California), every gas station I know of is self serve only.
Second, how does replacing human labor with machine labor allow mankind to evolve? How does our gene pool change?
For instance, the cosmological redshift. Start with a universe that has one photon in it. The universe expands, and the photon redshifts. Now the photon has less energy. What happened to conservation of energy?
IANAP, so I may be completely wrong, and if so, please explain why, but, doesn't the photon get stretched out so that the rate of energy (e/s) recieved is less. Therefore the energy isn't lost and the photon actually has the same total energy, but the energy within a given length of the photon is less.
Interested non physicist.
...correct about a number of things, many of which are still to be discovered.
How can you be correct about somthing wich has yet to be discovered?
However, this *STILL* doesnt explain the ones in Brazil, and other parts of the world that were turning up also.
That's easy, copy cats. The tools neccesary to make crop circles are simple, and once it's reported on international news, any joker in any country with access to a field of wheat and an idea of how to do it can make them.
Plus, I'd like to know how they get into some of these places that are guarded now.. (some of the farmers have put their fields under video surveillance, found no evidence of people wandering around and had a crop circle the next morning..).
Compliance of the farmer? Have you seen these tapes? It would not be difficult to fake it. A little planning, maybe some cheap video editing equipment. Change dates and times on cameras.
Next those two will claim they built the bizarre desert mounds that are only visible from aircraft!
What are these? Hills?
Im not a nutcase, and I dont believe there are spaceships landing to play bocce in wheat fields, but two pranksters from England claiming they did them all is kind of ridiculous as well.
I don't believe they claimed they made all of them, just English ones, and probably not even all of those. See copycats above.
Any science fiction writer who sees himself as a prophet for the future needs to find a new line of work, like say, I don't know, start a cult for instance.
Starting cults has a long and honorable tradition. Please don't tarnish it's reputation by suggesting that any loony sci-fi writer should start one.
Seems like the easiest thing to do would be to knock out that highest flying drone. Similar to how they won the battle in Episode 1. Though I don't think the lower level AVs will simply stop as the robot soldiers did.
And, especially for Slashdotters, don't use vitamin suppliments. Two studies just came out that said vitamin E (and, to a lesser extent, vitamin C) reduce the chances of getting Alzheimers; lesions relating to free radicals are found on most Alzheimer patients, and thus anti-oxidants are being viewed as a potential salvation. But only if you get it from natural sources. Pills had no effect.
And then there was the study on smokers who took beta carotene in pill form. They had a higher incidence of lung cancer than those who didn't take the vitamin pills.
Sources? What studies? Why should I just take your word for it?
The editors should really put the link to the majcher link in the front article. That and there should be a +1 Karma Whore moderation. I'm not trying to be a troll or insult you or anything and I don't have any problem with what you are doing. It's just that none of the moderations are really appropriate for this type of post. The service is appreciated. I am just suggesting a change to slashdot and burning off what little karma I do have.
Reminds me of my high school history class. We did the whole congress thing and somebody came up with a mandatory community service bill where everyone over some age was required to do 10 hours of community service per year. It was well intentioned but I immediately shot it down due to it being slavery and therefore unconstitutional.
"MSN
Microsoft would also lose out from giving up the right to blast ads and spyware at all of the users of its network.
Microsoft fully intends to leverage a monopoly in the instant messaging arena to further its desktop and server monopoly. At that point they will begin charging for service. This would be less effective if they opened their network.
Keeping their network closed encourages more users to get Passport accounts, which Microsoft uses to harvest personal information and sell consumer dossiers and mailing lists."
From the Trillian homepage: Microsoft was kind enough to alert us to a change in the MSN servers that would have negatively affected Trillian. Thanks, Microsoft! "
Microsoft seems to be playing nice, maybe because they don't have the monopoly on IM and don't see themselves getting it anytime soon. Maybe because of the PR value. "Hey we didn't squelch tiny little Trillian." Whatever their motives, it is still good to see Microsoft playing nice for once. And it goes against your argument.
"The personal computer and the VCR trashed over 3,000 years of intuitive tool design. Before 1976, there was never a consumer product that needed a twenty-page instruction booklet (like a VCR), much less the shelf of books needed to operate a PC."
The more versatile a tool is, the more complex its use will be. While there are good and bad user interfaces, a gemeral purpose computer (GPC) will never be as simple to use as a refridgerater or a hammer. A GPC is capable of doing just about anything you want it to, and so its use will be very complex. Consider CD players. You can get an inexpensive CD player that just plays the CD and the few other basic functions for a CD player: stop, next, previous, and pause. You can also get one that comes with a grpahic equalizer, holds 100s of disks, allows you to program it to play in any order, turn on or off at a specific time, and even makes julien fries. But with these added features comes more buttons, more complex menus, and a thicker user manual. This is the tradeoff of increased fucntionality. The general purpose computer has the greatest variety of functions it is capable of performing of any tool I own.
"FWIW I think Bruce Ediger probably wanted to say "genetic knowledge" rather than "intuitive", but as another poster has pointed out, babies need to be taught about nipples too."
Actually, babies have an instinctive reflex to suck on anything that is remotely nipple shaped. THey are not taught about this.
Which increases page views, thus showing more ads, thus increasing revenue. Hence the reason Katz is kept.
And cassette tapes, with moving parts, are cheaper.
Perhaps this movie should be encoded with enigma.
Agreed. For a reference see this.
The videogame generation is quite adept at using their thumbs for input on small handheld devices while older people still use the other fingers.
If the state of the medical profession, HMOs, drug manufacturers, and other health services in the United States is any indication, I'd much rather be an unlicensed software engineer than an "ethical" doctor. Why is it that medicines and medical attention cost as much as ten times as what they cost in other countries?
Lawyers. Lawsuits. Need I say more.
What about contamination of Mars? Although that's probably allready hapened. And it is not really of any great concern.
ps. 3rd post!
You could always get linux at your local library.
Of course, it's not the latest greatest version.