But the NHS is not the only way to access health care in Britain, any more than the various provincial medicare programmes are the only way to access health care in Canada. If you are rich in Britain you can get faster care, just as in the US. Even in Canada we have an extremely steeply stepped two-tier system, in which the second tier is known as the United States, where the ultra-rich like Liberal politician Belinda Stronach go to get the treatment they deny others in Canada.
In the US you also have a multi-tier system, and this would continue under any regime that, like Canada, provided a basic level of care, including preventative care, to everyone. The current heavily socialized system in the US, which spends more public money per capita than the Canadian system, is extremely inefficient and ineffective because it is not able to focus on preventative care.
No system of health insurance can provide all the care that everyone needs. Someone is always going to get the short end of the stick, either by long waiting lists in a well-ordered public system or lack of anything but emergency care in the disorganized mess that the US has. Most of us think that some basic level of care provided by the public purse is a justifiable expense in a free and democratic society.
We also know that the expense of a public system pays for itself many times over. I for example am a Canadian entrepreneur whose business career has been made much simpler because my health insurance is decoupled from my employment. Thus, Canada gets a dynamic and successful small company--and small companies are the engines of employment and economic growth--whereas in the US I would have had to stick to my corporate job with attached health care.
And strangely, we don't have mandatory DNA testing here yet, nor is there any impulse to do so under a public system because everyone is covered anyway. Unlike private insurance companies there is no incentive under a single payer system for any of the invasive and stupid games that get played with medical data in the US.
Good to see that the loony left hasn't dropped the "Yeah, but look at what the US did over HERE!" as a means of distracting people from the truth about bad behaviour by the Russian Empire.
Y'know: the Cold War is over. Your side lost. Get over it.
And grow up and learn how to present an argument rather than engaging in lame rhetorical distraction and misleading claims. What you can or cannot think of is completely irrelevant to what is actually true, which is that most of the shuttle Columbia's 64 tanks reached the ground intact after the spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry.
Non-ionizing radiation (which is all that cell phones produce) has little to no impact on the human body. ...that we know of. There, fixed that for you so you're saying something with a scientific basis.
The statement, "We do not know how this effect could possibly come about" does nothing to change the fact that the effect does, really, come about.
Claiming that your ignorance is proof that an empirically measurable phenomenon does not occur is not exactly a strong argument, and is in any case completely unscientific. It is exactly like the critics of Galileo who claimed that he could not possibly be seeing new "planets" (the moons of Jupiter) because there were "seven planets in the sky, seven openings in the skull, seven seas in the world..." Anti-scientific people like that were using their own fixed beliefs about the way the world must be to deny phenomena, which is exactly what you are doing.
That said, the actual abstract for the paper says that there is no effect in the population as a whole, so the conclusion that rural users with high exposures to cow shit as well as cell phone radiation is suspect (depending on how good the matching for controls is.)
Again, the Constitution expressely forbids this.. for now.
The Constitution also expressly forbids making any law that limits Habeas Corpus except in time of insurrection or invasion, but that didn't stop the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The Supreme Court has yet to weigh in, but it is very clear that neither the legislative nor the executive branch of the government of the United States of America has any intention of letting the Constitution limit the rules they make. I can't call them laws, because only the Constitution authorizes federal law-making, and any government branch that no longer acknowledges the supreme authority of the Constitution has no authority to make laws. Ergo, what they make are not laws but rules, enforced by thugs.
Was the earth even cold enough back then to have that much ice?
Possibly.
One of the ongoing problems in paleobiology is the "early quiet sun". Solar models, which we now know to be extremely accurate based on solar neutrino measurements, show that the sun was considerably dimmer in the distant past. So dim that by any reasonable standard we would expect the Earth to be substantially covered with... ice.
A mechanism that would cause life to form in an icy environment would give a lot of answers to open questions.
Google "standard solar model", "early quiet sun" and "Sudbury Neutrino Observatory" for some of the background on this.
The only reason Galileo could contradict the Church's position on how to read the Bible is because the Church was attempting to draw conclusions about the way the world is from it, which is science, not theology.
Any statement of the form, "The world is thus-and-so" is susceptible to scientific inquiry. It is therefore a scientific statement, and attempts to claim it as theology are wrong-headed at best.
...it has been used by someone else to understand and carry out the process it is supposed to document.
This is the same as "no code is reusable until it has been reused."
Far too many shops think that "documenting" something means writing the document, period. In fact, that's a necessary but insufficient condition. Anyone who has come in to a new shop and been told "here's our system configuration and build document" and tried to actually configure their environment and do a development build of the software knows that about half the time the document is either radically incomplete (with remarks like, "secret sauce here") or so outdated as to be useless. They eventually get their environment up with the help of the friendly folks in adjacent cubes, and forget out it until the next new hire comes to them for help.
I've seen this happen in ten person shops and in Fortune $smallnumber companies.
Ensuring that documents have been used is as important to documenting processes as writing the documents. Otherwise, no matter what you do, you will wind up with useless, out-of-date "documents" that have a high cost and low value.
Furthermore, the document should be updated (or at least reviewed for update) after each use, either by the person who used it or by a manager in conjunction with the person who used it.
This cycle of "write, use, update" can be introduced fairly painlessly as people turn over, and it can be made clear that it is part of the training of new hires, not an attempt to make existing employees more easily replaceable. In any case, all employees today know they are out the door the moment the CEOs six figure bonus is threatened, no matter how vital their knowledge is to the company, so their is not added risk to their jobs from having processes well-documented.
The world today is as it ever was: those in power attempting to disenfranchise the citizens by painting them as a bunch of untrustworthy morons who would never, ever let a bunch of wack-jobs, some with expired visas, train to fly aircraft into buildings...
The organs of the state are a far greater risk to everyone today than terrorists, and the only people who did anything to stop the one successful foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil were citizens who reported suspicious behaviour to the authorities, which ignored them. And the folks on United 93, who saved who knows how many lives at the cost of their own. The authorities have been no more successful in stopping domestic terrorism in the U.S., either.
There is no excuse for keeping citizens in ignorance against the possibility that they might make a mistake with the imperfect knowledge they have.
We, the people, have been far more endangered by governments panicing due to false alarms (WMDs anyone?) than anyone could possibly be endangered by any number of citizens with faulty air monitoring instruments. At least we have laws that can be used to punish people who give false alarms...
In physics parlance, the "diameter of the nucleus" means ~10^-15 m, which is the diameter of a proton. Because nucleons are close-packed, nuclear diameters are less variable than atomic diameters. The cube root of 240 is only about 6, so the heaviest nuclei are less than 10 times the diameter of the lightest.
That said, this is not a blow for GR. We do know (in the perfectly ordinary sense of "know", the same way you know you had at least one great-great-grandfather) that gravitational waves exist, based on things like the orbital decay of binary pulsars. So it is no part of LIGO's mission to put limits on the existence of gravitational waves.
Number of people who have been killed in the United States in the past five years by terrorism: zero.
Number of people who have been killed by the over-zealous organs of the state in the name of "security": greater than zero.
Ergo, increased "security" is killing people and stripping them of their privacy. So as a matter of empirical fact the things people are calling "security" are negative, and the loss of privacy is negative, so it is a lose-lose situation for ordinary law-abiding Americans. They would be SAFER with less "security", as well as having more privacy. And more of something else, too.
This means that compared to the total budget and per citizen, it is less.
And when did the laws of physics start taking the number of citizens into account?
If it cost $X absolute, inflation-adjusted dollars in the 1960's you'd reasonably expect it to cost a hell of a lot less today, given the improvements in materials science, CFD and miniaturization over the past forty years.
Increasing the population of the United States in the meantime has exactly zero effect on the consequences of spending $X absolute, inflation-adjusted dollars.
Increasing managerial incompetence, on the other hand...
It'll work great for the Semantic Web, then, which is only supposed to organize all the data in the world...
Personally, I don't see why they don't just stick trees in relational databases. I was doing this in 1996 or thereabouts, and with the right schema it is fast and efficient.
Nick (assuming it's the same guy and not some other Nick Mascarenas) was a post-doc in the same lab as me at Caltech in the early '90's. We were working on a reactor neutrino experiment (now defunct) looking for neutrino oscillations. Discriminating against fast neutron backgrounds was an important part of the design problem.
What has been done here is fairly clever, although I'm doubtful as to the ultimate viability due to low cross-sections and high backgrounds and easy work-arounds by the bad guys.
Spontaneous fission produces fast neutrons, which are relatively hard to shield against. First they have to thermalize, then get captured. Things that are good at shielding gamma rays (heavy elements) are lousy at thermalizing neutrons (light elements), so it makes the bad guy's shielding problems harder to solve.
Ergo, if you can detect fast neutrons, and determine where they are coming from, you have a backup bomb detector that is harder to beat. The way Nick is proposing to do this is with a setup in which you have two planar liquid scintillator detectors and look for coincidences (suitably delayed by the neutron's quite significant travel time) between them. Fast neutrons deposit energy into the detectors via proton recoil, which creates a distinct kind of optical event from electron-positron showers produced by gamma rays. Furthermore, you tend to get forward scattering, so you can at least tell which hemisphere the neutron originated from, most of the time.
The data analysis is tricky, the neutron detection rates will be low, and if I was designing this I'd go for a thick secondary detector and count on thermalization and capture to create the secondary signal, rather than having a thin secondary detector looking for another recoil event. With a segmented detector or similar you'd be able to still do a reasonable job of the kinematics.
Discriminating against cosmic ray neutrons is going to be painful for this technology, however, and furthermore the comment that another poster made that "this tech shows we don't need to give up our civil liberties to be safe because it proves we can catch stuff at the boarder" is to my mind utterly wrong-headed. It assumes the border can be made perfectly impermeable, and that is simply not the case, as a million kilos of grass or whatever it is a year proves. As long as there is a chance that one bad guy can slip something through, Americans have two choices: be willing to die for your freedom, or give up your freedom (and be willing to die anyway, because a police state will not protect you.)
Final thought: we used to joke, back in the day, that we could sell our detector design to the U.S. navy as a means of detecting stationary nuclear submarines (it took a couple of days for useful neutrino statistics to build up when the prototype detector was about 10 m from a reactor core.) It looks like Nick might have found a way to do something very close to that after all...
A long series of lame questions with no discussion of the problematic aspects of any answer at all is proof that you are an idiot.
To demonstrated, let me extend your hysterical little list with one more: what makes conception special?
Now, to demonstrate I am not an idiot, I will actually discuss this question rather than stupidly spewing forth an endless series of minor variations on it.
Genetic uniqueness is not required to make a human human. On the one hand we have identical twins, who are unique individuals despite being genetically identical. Likewise, a clone of a human would be a unique individual with the same political and moral status as anyone else (side note: all arguments about the supposed ethical conundrums surrounding human cloning can be solved by replacing the word "clone" everywhere by "child" or "adult" as appropriate.) And on the other hand we have chimeric individuals, who contain more than one complete set of genes in two different cell populations, yet are only one human.
So there is nothing special about conception due to it being the point of creation of a genetically unique human being, because there is nothing about genetic uniqueness that endows a human being with their political and moral status. Identical twins, on the one hand, and chimeric individuals, on the other, demonstrate that nothing about humans depends on the uniqueness or number of their genetic codes. But the only thing that happens at conception is the melding of two haploid cells to create a new genetically unique cell. There is nothing special about this genetically unique cell versus any of the billions in my body or yours. It is just a cell that has a non-zero probability of becoming an adult.
Yet that non-zero probability is not interesting either. A zygote has a fraught and difficult course to become an embryo, a fetus, a baby, a child and an adult. Depending on time and place each of these, particularly the first, have probabilities of well below 1.0.
Sperm and egg have much smaller probability of becoming zygotes, but it is with absolute certainty more than zero.
Ergo, given that you have a deep and apparently obsessive fascination with arbitrary numeric limits, and you furthermore seem to be concerned with zygotes and later rather than sperm/eggs and earlier: at what point does the probability of a cell becoming an adult drop low enough that it no longer enjoys any rights?
Only by invoking an arbitrary and subjective dividing line can you avoid this question, and whatever argument you use, that very same argument can be used to justify a different dividing line based on a different (but equally arbitrary) division.
You, of course, have already established you're an idiot, so no doubt this argument will have no effect on you. Idiots are remarkably resistant to anything that might wean them from their idiocy. So this whole post is rather pointless. But there are those of us who think that even idiots ought to be given an explanation of their errors once in a while.
Your company does well and STILL you get massive layoffs.
Yeah, this is how broken corporate America is. If your company does badly, lay people off to reduce costs (Motorola). If your company does well, lay people off to increase apparent productivity (Dell). And if you have a senior cadre of expensive workers who have built the foundation for your success over the years, lay them off (Circuit City).
If you have a problem, we have a layoff.
Take home message: no one should ever under any circumstances be loyal to any company beyond the exact penny of their last pay-cheque.
Why does that somehow make me think of the east india company?
Because the East India Company made a lot of money for a while and then went into decline and ultimately failed due to the huge cost of trying to maintain control of the areas it had attempted unsuccessfully to monopolize?
At least the Company's business model didn't violate the laws of nature, which is more than can be said for the studios.
Bits can be copied. Basing your business on the belief that some bits can't be copied, or that some bits can even be made quite hard to copy, is like basing your business on the belief that some mass can be made to have just a little bit less inertia than it normally would.
Perpetual motion machines are the only thing that is unpatentable because they cannot work. We will eventually see the time come when DRM systems are unpatentable for exactly the same reason.
We (SiteTruth), of course, are trying to promote the idea that you don't want to deal with a website unless the business behind the website can be clearly identified, so we do have a bias here. Nor do we have all the answers.
Sitetruth's rating of Sitetruth says: "Site ownership not clearly verified, or some issues exist with the business."
You claim to be applying California law, which says that a business must clearly identify itself and give its address to customers. Yet your silly little rating tool gives a site a negative rating if it does not contain the company address on the website. This is extremely odd, as only a blithering idiot would suggest that everyone who visits a company's website is a customer.
Many, many companies, my own included, do not sell things or take money over the web, and we always identify ourselves clearly to customers, in accordance with commercial law in many jurisdictions.
So your rating system, even if it could somehow manage to rate your own site properly, has absolutely nothing to do with the law it purports to apply.
Now that's a system I'm sure everyone on/. is willing to trust implicitly.
"Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in paragraph (3) [about registered post office boxes], the complete street address from which the business is actually conducted.
And indeed, my business conforms to this law. I do not take any payment over the Web, and my customers get invoices with the full company address on them.
So it is entirely unclear on what basis SiteTruth could possibly downgrade my site based on this law, other than the fallacious logic that a business that does not have the business address on its website does not not make the business address available to its customers.
Furthermore, the statement made for sites with a negative rating, "Unable to verify site ownership or existence of business, or significant negative information about the business was found" is simply false. It is, as I pointed out, trivial to verify the existence and address of the business behind my site with a simple whois query.
So a more accurate statement would be, "Unable to verity site ownership or existence of business without making a trivial amount of effort that we can't be bothered with."
Incidentally, SiteTruth.com is rated by SiteTruth.com as having, "Site ownership not clearly verified, or some issues exist with the business."
I would say, "some issues exist with the business" is an entirely accurate statement in that particular case.
One of the things we do with SiteTruth is filter out sites like this.
Unfortunately, it seems to filter out a lot of other businesses as well. My own company's site, which is registered to a perfectly legitimate nationally incorporated Canadian corporation that I own is rated as problematic. Several other small companies I am personally familiar with are given similar ratings.
Many web businesses do not list a mailing address on their site--I don't because I operate out of my home and have no interest in publishing my home address. However, simply running a whois query on the site will give you the company address. It appears that SiteTruth doesn't do this, and that is completely illegitimate. A whois query is a public record of site ownership, and easily fulfills the requirements of US and California law that SiteTruth says they apply.
Ergo, this is a good idea, but as it stands is a very poorly implemented service.
IANAP, but I have some training and hands on experience with structural integrity under adverse conditions. First, metal doesn't have to melt to be weakened. Blacksmiths do not reduce iron to a liquid, they ruin the structural integrity with heat, then use pressure to deform it. Steel columns could easily buckle under the given stresses.
Actually, no, they couldn't. That's the problem.
I am a physicist, and have worked with people who have worked with Steve Jones, who describe him as "a very careful guy."
The thing that distinguishes physicists from other people is that we believe, with Lord Kelvin, "when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science, whatever the matter may be."
Jones is making some legitimate numerical points. It is a little unfortunate that he is mixing an alternative hypothesis in with his critique of the NIST analysis, because the two have nothing to do with each other. But the NIST analysis is clearly badly flawed. If you run the numbers, you find that fire alone is insufficient to raise the temperature of the structural members of any of the three towers to the levels required to cause collapse.
You also find that molten aluminum, even when contaminated with hydrocarbons, does not look like the streams of falling material that were seen.
You also find that the presence of cooled liquid metal, and metal that is still glowing yellow-hot in the debris some weeks later, is inexplicable given the energies available from the burning jet fuel or office materials.
These are all facts. They do not prove anything by themselves, except that we do not understand what happened to the Twin Towers or two WTC Building 7, which suffered a nearly symmetrical collapse after being heavily damaged on one side and burning for seven hours after the planes hit the adjacent towers.
So even though you can wave your hands and say, "It seems plausible that the steel might be weakened due to fire..." the undisputed fact is that when you behave as a scientist you find that the numbers don't add up. This is what we do, and this is what all the technology you use depends on. Remember, your GPS wouldn't work if 19th century astronomers had shrugged and said, "Well, it's true that the orbit or Mercury precesses at a higher-than-expected rate, but it's probably just due to some funny mass distribution in the sun. Ok, let's go for a beer."
Scientists do not quit until the numbers add up. There is no doubt that with regard to the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 on 9/11 the numbers do not add up.
I've had just about all I can stand of American one-party-two-names politics. (Not that I actually know that it's better in Canada.)
It's almost too much better.
Canada is not without its issues, but one of our more interesting traditions is to throw up nutjob fringe political parties every couple of decades. These parties never make it to power, but they wind up having a lot of influence on the democratic debate, and drive the more mainstream parties to evolve or risk getting pushed out by the interlopers.
In the past century we've had the Social Credit (eventually watered down to various conservative flavours); the Progressives (merged with the Conservatives to make the oxymoronic "Progressive Conservatives"); The Canadian Commonwealth Federation, an agrarian reform socialist party that morphed into the New Democratic Party, a British-style labour party that is currently trying to reinvent itself as a green social democratic party with no success whatsoever; and most recently the Reform Party, a populist social conservative party that merged with the Progressive Conservatives to create the new Conservative Party that is currently clinging to minority government status, and this in a nation that was five years ago in fear of one-party rule by the Liberals.
We have a fertile and diverse political spectrum, although for all that we still have plenty of politically homeless people (as well as a fair number of the other kind) whose votes are up for grabs in any given election. The Green Party is desperately trying to become a national political voice, although their recent shift to the left isn't helping them any.
I've lived in the US, and my taxes plus health care costs there were very close to what my taxes are here. Our health care system is imperfect, but we live longer than Americans and have better health while doing it. Health care reform is happening as we speak, as enterprising Canadians find ways round the draconian Canada Health Act, which practically makes it illegal to pay for medical services that are nominally covered by provincial insurance programmes.
It is also possible to incorporate federally online, for a total cost of $220. We are in the top few nations in the world in terms of delivering government services over the Web, and the climate is currently VERY friendly to small business.
You can't own a gun legally unless you take a safety course and fill out some forms. If you want to own a handgun you'll have to become a registered collector. There were about 150 people killed by guns in Canada last year. Yes, you read that right, and no, I didn't drop any zeros. We kill each other with knives and blunt instruments, mostly.
We are a foreign, sovereign, nation. We are not like you. And frankly, we'd rather you stayed home and fixed your country. We'd really like that a lot. But if you're really fed up--come on up, and be welcome.
What part of, "Fair use is not piracy" do you not understand?
The OP is pointing out, quite correctly, that we have a legal right to fair use, which may include the right to make backup copies. I neither know nor care what you or anyone else feels about the necessity of backup copies. Your experience, needs, desires and wants are totally irrelevant to the legal fact of fair use rights.
DRM is a failed attempt to prevent me from exercising my fair use rights. Again, whether or not you think I'm a moron for wanting to do so is irrelevant. It is not piracy to do so. It is a matter of legal fact that I have those rights. Even the RIAA once admitted that, in front of the Supreme Court no less.
In my experience each and every innovation can trace its roots back to one key insight in the mind of one person.
This is either trivially true, inasmuch as every thought occurs first in an individual mind, and for a sufficiently small quantum of innovation it will be just one person who first has that insight and acts on it; or it is trivially false, because most of what is thought of as "innovation" is a collection of such individual insights.
In my experience as an innovator and inventor there are quite different kinds of innovation, which could be called "invention" and "aggregation." Invention means solving a novel, atomic problem. Aggregation means putting together the inventions of others into a new configuration. Both of these are equally important: without invention aggregators would have nothing to aggregate, and without aggregation far too many inventions would never have a very large impact on human capability.
Inventors are people like Newcomb and Watt, and perhaps the Wright brothers. Henry Ford was perhaps the world's greatest aggregator. Edison managed to do a bit of both.
Inventors tend to be excessively protective of their priority. Aggregators tend to be excessively lax in giving inventors credit (and payment.)
But again, both are required, and to disparage or ignore one of them is to miss an extremely important aspect of innovation.
130' and you start hitting nitrogen narcosis as O2 gets toxic as the pressure increases.
Nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity are completely unrelated and quite separate phenomenon
Nitrogen narcosis makes you stupid due to the effects of a high partial pressure of INERT nitrogen on nerves, probably specifically on synapses. In my experience you reason so slowly when narc'd that you may as well not be able to reason at all, although the effects differ depending on circumstances and the individual involved.
Oxygen toxicity is due to the extreme REACTIVITY of O2 at high partial pressure, and it results in various physiological failure modes that are not specifically related to nervous tissue.
Slashdot Mirror
But the NHS is not the only way to access health care in Britain, any more than the various provincial medicare programmes are the only way to access health care in Canada. If you are rich in Britain you can get faster care, just as in the US. Even in Canada we have an extremely steeply stepped two-tier system, in which the second tier is known as the United States, where the ultra-rich like Liberal politician Belinda Stronach go to get the treatment they deny others in Canada.
In the US you also have a multi-tier system, and this would continue under any regime that, like Canada, provided a basic level of care, including preventative care, to everyone. The current heavily socialized system in the US, which spends more public money per capita than the Canadian system, is extremely inefficient and ineffective because it is not able to focus on preventative care.
No system of health insurance can provide all the care that everyone needs. Someone is always going to get the short end of the stick, either by long waiting lists in a well-ordered public system or lack of anything but emergency care in the disorganized mess that the US has. Most of us think that some basic level of care provided by the public purse is a justifiable expense in a free and democratic society.
We also know that the expense of a public system pays for itself many times over. I for example am a Canadian entrepreneur whose business career has been made much simpler because my health insurance is decoupled from my employment. Thus, Canada gets a dynamic and successful small company--and small companies are the engines of employment and economic growth--whereas in the US I would have had to stick to my corporate job with attached health care.
And strangely, we don't have mandatory DNA testing here yet, nor is there any impulse to do so under a public system because everyone is covered anyway. Unlike private insurance companies there is no incentive under a single payer system for any of the invasive and stupid games that get played with medical data in the US.
Good to see that the loony left hasn't dropped the "Yeah, but look at what the US did over HERE!" as a means of distracting people from the truth about bad behaviour by the Russian Empire.
Y'know: the Cold War is over. Your side lost. Get over it.
And grow up and learn how to present an argument rather than engaging in lame rhetorical distraction and misleading claims. What you can or cannot think of is completely irrelevant to what is actually true, which is that most of the shuttle Columbia's 64 tanks reached the ground intact after the spacecraft disintegrated on re-entry.
Non-ionizing radiation (which is all that cell phones produce) has little to no impact on the human body. ...that we know of. There, fixed that for you so you're saying something with a scientific basis.
The statement, "We do not know how this effect could possibly come about" does nothing to change the fact that the effect does, really, come about.
Claiming that your ignorance is proof that an empirically measurable phenomenon does not occur is not exactly a strong argument, and is in any case completely unscientific. It is exactly like the critics of Galileo who claimed that he could not possibly be seeing new "planets" (the moons of Jupiter) because there were "seven planets in the sky, seven openings in the skull, seven seas in the world..." Anti-scientific people like that were using their own fixed beliefs about the way the world must be to deny phenomena, which is exactly what you are doing.
That said, the actual abstract for the paper says that there is no effect in the population as a whole, so the conclusion that rural users with high exposures to cow shit as well as cell phone radiation is suspect (depending on how good the matching for controls is.)
Again, the Constitution expressely forbids this.. for now.
The Constitution also expressly forbids making any law that limits Habeas Corpus except in time of insurrection or invasion, but that didn't stop the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The Supreme Court has yet to weigh in, but it is very clear that neither the legislative nor the executive branch of the government of the United States of America has any intention of letting the Constitution limit the rules they make. I can't call them laws, because only the Constitution authorizes federal law-making, and any government branch that no longer acknowledges the supreme authority of the Constitution has no authority to make laws. Ergo, what they make are not laws but rules, enforced by thugs.
Was the earth even cold enough back then to have that much ice?
Possibly.
One of the ongoing problems in paleobiology is the "early quiet sun". Solar models, which we now know to be extremely accurate based on solar neutrino measurements, show that the sun was considerably dimmer in the distant past. So dim that by any reasonable standard we would expect the Earth to be substantially covered with... ice.
A mechanism that would cause life to form in an icy environment would give a lot of answers to open questions.
Google "standard solar model", "early quiet sun" and "Sudbury Neutrino Observatory" for some of the background on this.
The only reason Galileo could contradict the Church's position on how to read the Bible is because the Church was attempting to draw conclusions about the way the world is from it, which is science, not theology.
Any statement of the form, "The world is thus-and-so" is susceptible to scientific inquiry. It is therefore a scientific statement, and attempts to claim it as theology are wrong-headed at best.
...it has been used by someone else to understand and carry out the process it is supposed to document.
This is the same as "no code is reusable until it has been reused."
Far too many shops think that "documenting" something means writing the document, period. In fact, that's a necessary but insufficient condition. Anyone who has come in to a new shop and been told "here's our system configuration and build document" and tried to actually configure their environment and do a development build of the software knows that about half the time the document is either radically incomplete (with remarks like, "secret sauce here") or so outdated as to be useless. They eventually get their environment up with the help of the friendly folks in adjacent cubes, and forget out it until the next new hire comes to them for help.
I've seen this happen in ten person shops and in Fortune $smallnumber companies.
Ensuring that documents have been used is as important to documenting processes as writing the documents. Otherwise, no matter what you do, you will wind up with useless, out-of-date "documents" that have a high cost and low value.
Furthermore, the document should be updated (or at least reviewed for update) after each use, either by the person who used it or by a manager in conjunction with the person who used it.
This cycle of "write, use, update" can be introduced fairly painlessly as people turn over, and it can be made clear that it is part of the training of new hires, not an attempt to make existing employees more easily replaceable. In any case, all employees today know they are out the door the moment the CEOs six figure bonus is threatened, no matter how vital their knowledge is to the company, so their is not added risk to their jobs from having processes well-documented.
The world today is as it ever was: those in power attempting to disenfranchise the citizens by painting them as a bunch of untrustworthy morons who would never, ever let a bunch of wack-jobs, some with expired visas, train to fly aircraft into buildings...
The organs of the state are a far greater risk to everyone today than terrorists, and the only people who did anything to stop the one successful foreign terrorist attack on U.S. soil were citizens who reported suspicious behaviour to the authorities, which ignored them. And the folks on United 93, who saved who knows how many lives at the cost of their own. The authorities have been no more successful in stopping domestic terrorism in the U.S., either.
There is no excuse for keeping citizens in ignorance against the possibility that they might make a mistake with the imperfect knowledge they have.
We, the people, have been far more endangered by governments panicing due to false alarms (WMDs anyone?) than anyone could possibly be endangered by any number of citizens with faulty air monitoring instruments. At least we have laws that can be used to punish people who give false alarms...
In physics parlance, the "diameter of the nucleus" means ~10^-15 m, which is the diameter of a proton. Because nucleons are close-packed, nuclear diameters are less variable than atomic diameters. The cube root of 240 is only about 6, so the heaviest nuclei are less than 10 times the diameter of the lightest.
That said, this is not a blow for GR. We do know (in the perfectly ordinary sense of "know", the same way you know you had at least one great-great-grandfather) that gravitational waves exist, based on things like the orbital decay of binary pulsars. So it is no part of LIGO's mission to put limits on the existence of gravitational waves.
Number of people who have been killed in the United States in the past five years by terrorism: zero.
Number of people who have been killed by the over-zealous organs of the state in the name of "security": greater than zero.
Ergo, increased "security" is killing people and stripping them of their privacy. So as a matter of empirical fact the things people are calling "security" are negative, and the loss of privacy is negative, so it is a lose-lose situation for ordinary law-abiding Americans. They would be SAFER with less "security", as well as having more privacy. And more of something else, too.
This means that compared to the total budget and per citizen, it is less.
And when did the laws of physics start taking the number of citizens into account?
If it cost $X absolute, inflation-adjusted dollars in the 1960's you'd reasonably expect it to cost a hell of a lot less today, given the improvements in materials science, CFD and miniaturization over the past forty years.
Increasing the population of the United States in the meantime has exactly zero effect on the consequences of spending $X absolute, inflation-adjusted dollars.
Increasing managerial incompetence, on the other hand...
It may sound pedantic, but in quantum mechanics, teleporting the wavefunction really is teleporting the photon.
Use of the word "really" to imply you are describing the true ontology of quantum states is proof that you don't understand it.
That's why it works best for small data sets
It'll work great for the Semantic Web, then, which is only supposed to organize all the data in the world...
Personally, I don't see why they don't just stick trees in relational databases. I was doing this in 1996 or thereabouts, and with the right schema it is fast and efficient.
Nick (assuming it's the same guy and not some other Nick Mascarenas) was a post-doc in the same lab as me at Caltech in the early '90's. We were working on a reactor neutrino experiment (now defunct) looking for neutrino oscillations. Discriminating against fast neutron backgrounds was an important part of the design problem.
What has been done here is fairly clever, although I'm doubtful as to the ultimate viability due to low cross-sections and high backgrounds and easy work-arounds by the bad guys.
Spontaneous fission produces fast neutrons, which are relatively hard to shield against. First they have to thermalize, then get captured. Things that are good at shielding gamma rays (heavy elements) are lousy at thermalizing neutrons (light elements), so it makes the bad guy's shielding problems harder to solve.
Ergo, if you can detect fast neutrons, and determine where they are coming from, you have a backup bomb detector that is harder to beat. The way Nick is proposing to do this is with a setup in which you have two planar liquid scintillator detectors and look for coincidences (suitably delayed by the neutron's quite significant travel time) between them. Fast neutrons deposit energy into the detectors via proton recoil, which creates a distinct kind of optical event from electron-positron showers produced by gamma rays. Furthermore, you tend to get forward scattering, so you can at least tell which hemisphere the neutron originated from, most of the time.
The data analysis is tricky, the neutron detection rates will be low, and if I was designing this I'd go for a thick secondary detector and count on thermalization and capture to create the secondary signal, rather than having a thin secondary detector looking for another recoil event. With a segmented detector or similar you'd be able to still do a reasonable job of the kinematics.
Discriminating against cosmic ray neutrons is going to be painful for this technology, however, and furthermore the comment that another poster made that "this tech shows we don't need to give up our civil liberties to be safe because it proves we can catch stuff at the boarder" is to my mind utterly wrong-headed. It assumes the border can be made perfectly impermeable, and that is simply not the case, as a million kilos of grass or whatever it is a year proves. As long as there is a chance that one bad guy can slip something through, Americans have two choices: be willing to die for your freedom, or give up your freedom (and be willing to die anyway, because a police state will not protect you.)
Final thought: we used to joke, back in the day, that we could sell our detector design to the U.S. navy as a means of detecting stationary nuclear submarines (it took a couple of days for useful neutrino statistics to build up when the prototype detector was about 10 m from a reactor core.) It looks like Nick might have found a way to do something very close to that after all...
A long series of lame questions with no discussion of the problematic aspects of any answer at all is proof that you are an idiot.
To demonstrated, let me extend your hysterical little list with one more: what makes conception special?
Now, to demonstrate I am not an idiot, I will actually discuss this question rather than stupidly spewing forth an endless series of minor variations on it.
Genetic uniqueness is not required to make a human human. On the one hand we have identical twins, who are unique individuals despite being genetically identical. Likewise, a clone of a human would be a unique individual with the same political and moral status as anyone else (side note: all arguments about the supposed ethical conundrums surrounding human cloning can be solved by replacing the word "clone" everywhere by "child" or "adult" as appropriate.) And on the other hand we have chimeric individuals, who contain more than one complete set of genes in two different cell populations, yet are only one human.
So there is nothing special about conception due to it being the point of creation of a genetically unique human being, because there is nothing about genetic uniqueness that endows a human being with their political and moral status. Identical twins, on the one hand, and chimeric individuals, on the other, demonstrate that nothing about humans depends on the uniqueness or number of their genetic codes. But the only thing that happens at conception is the melding of two haploid cells to create a new genetically unique cell. There is nothing special about this genetically unique cell versus any of the billions in my body or yours. It is just a cell that has a non-zero probability of becoming an adult.
Yet that non-zero probability is not interesting either. A zygote has a fraught and difficult course to become an embryo, a fetus, a baby, a child and an adult. Depending on time and place each of these, particularly the first, have probabilities of well below 1.0.
Sperm and egg have much smaller probability of becoming zygotes, but it is with absolute certainty more than zero.
Ergo, given that you have a deep and apparently obsessive fascination with arbitrary numeric limits, and you furthermore seem to be concerned with zygotes and later rather than sperm/eggs and earlier: at what point does the probability of a cell becoming an adult drop low enough that it no longer enjoys any rights?
Only by invoking an arbitrary and subjective dividing line can you avoid this question, and whatever argument you use, that very same argument can be used to justify a different dividing line based on a different (but equally arbitrary) division.
You, of course, have already established you're an idiot, so no doubt this argument will have no effect on you. Idiots are remarkably resistant to anything that might wean them from their idiocy. So this whole post is rather pointless. But there are those of us who think that even idiots ought to be given an explanation of their errors once in a while.
Your company does well and STILL you get massive layoffs.
Yeah, this is how broken corporate America is. If your company does badly, lay people off to reduce costs (Motorola). If your company does well, lay people off to increase apparent productivity (Dell). And if you have a senior cadre of expensive workers who have built the foundation for your success over the years, lay them off (Circuit City).
If you have a problem, we have a layoff.
Take home message: no one should ever under any circumstances be loyal to any company beyond the exact penny of their last pay-cheque.
Why does that somehow make me think of the east india company?
Because the East India Company made a lot of money for a while and then went into decline and ultimately failed due to the huge cost of trying to maintain control of the areas it had attempted unsuccessfully to monopolize?
At least the Company's business model didn't violate the laws of nature, which is more than can be said for the studios.
Bits can be copied. Basing your business on the belief that some bits can't be copied, or that some bits can even be made quite hard to copy, is like basing your business on the belief that some mass can be made to have just a little bit less inertia than it normally would.
Perpetual motion machines are the only thing that is unpatentable because they cannot work. We will eventually see the time come when DRM systems are unpatentable for exactly the same reason.
We (SiteTruth), of course, are trying to promote the idea that you don't want to deal with a website unless the business behind the website can be clearly identified, so we do have a bias here. Nor do we have all the answers.
/. is willing to trust implicitly.
Sitetruth's rating of Sitetruth says: "Site ownership not clearly verified, or some issues exist with the business."
You claim to be applying California law, which says that a business must clearly identify itself and give its address to customers. Yet your silly little rating tool gives a site a negative rating if it does not contain the company address on the website. This is extremely odd, as only a blithering idiot would suggest that everyone who visits a company's website is a customer.
Many, many companies, my own included, do not sell things or take money over the web, and we always identify ourselves clearly to customers, in accordance with commercial law in many jurisdictions.
So your rating system, even if it could somehow manage to rate your own site properly, has absolutely nothing to do with the law it purports to apply.
Now that's a system I'm sure everyone on
"Before accepting any payment or processing any debit or credit charge or funds transfer, the vendor shall disclose to the buyer in writing or by electronic means of communication, such as e-mail or an on-screen notice, the vendor's return and refund policy, the legal name under which the business is conducted and, except as provided in paragraph (3) [about registered post office boxes], the complete street address from which the business is actually conducted.
And indeed, my business conforms to this law. I do not take any payment over the Web, and my customers get invoices with the full company address on them.
So it is entirely unclear on what basis SiteTruth could possibly downgrade my site based on this law, other than the fallacious logic that a business that does not have the business address on its website does not not make the business address available to its customers.
Furthermore, the statement made for sites with a negative rating, "Unable to verify site ownership or existence of business, or significant negative information about the business was found" is simply false. It is, as I pointed out, trivial to verify the existence and address of the business behind my site with a simple whois query.
So a more accurate statement would be, "Unable to verity site ownership or existence of business without making a trivial amount of effort that we can't be bothered with."
Incidentally, SiteTruth.com is rated by SiteTruth.com as having, "Site ownership not clearly verified, or some issues exist with the business."
I would say, "some issues exist with the business" is an entirely accurate statement in that particular case.
One of the things we do with SiteTruth is filter out sites like this.
Unfortunately, it seems to filter out a lot of other businesses as well. My own company's site, which is registered to a perfectly legitimate nationally incorporated Canadian corporation that I own is rated as problematic. Several other small companies I am personally familiar with are given similar ratings.
Many web businesses do not list a mailing address on their site--I don't because I operate out of my home and have no interest in publishing my home address. However, simply running a whois query on the site will give you the company address. It appears that SiteTruth doesn't do this, and that is completely illegitimate. A whois query is a public record of site ownership, and easily fulfills the requirements of US and California law that SiteTruth says they apply.
Ergo, this is a good idea, but as it stands is a very poorly implemented service.
IANAP, but I have some training and hands on experience with structural integrity under adverse conditions. First, metal doesn't have to melt to be weakened. Blacksmiths do not reduce iron to a liquid, they ruin the structural integrity with heat, then use pressure to deform it. Steel columns could easily buckle under the given stresses.
Actually, no, they couldn't. That's the problem.
I am a physicist, and have worked with people who have worked with Steve Jones, who describe him as "a very careful guy."
The thing that distinguishes physicists from other people is that we believe, with Lord Kelvin, "when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science, whatever the matter may be."
Jones is making some legitimate numerical points. It is a little unfortunate that he is mixing an alternative hypothesis in with his critique of the NIST analysis, because the two have nothing to do with each other. But the NIST analysis is clearly badly flawed. If you run the numbers, you find that fire alone is insufficient to raise the temperature of the structural members of any of the three towers to the levels required to cause collapse.
You also find that molten aluminum, even when contaminated with hydrocarbons, does not look like the streams of falling material that were seen.
You also find that the presence of cooled liquid metal, and metal that is still glowing yellow-hot in the debris some weeks later, is inexplicable given the energies available from the burning jet fuel or office materials.
These are all facts. They do not prove anything by themselves, except that we do not understand what happened to the Twin Towers or two WTC Building 7, which suffered a nearly symmetrical collapse after being heavily damaged on one side and burning for seven hours after the planes hit the adjacent towers.
So even though you can wave your hands and say, "It seems plausible that the steel might be weakened due to fire..." the undisputed fact is that when you behave as a scientist you find that the numbers don't add up. This is what we do, and this is what all the technology you use depends on. Remember, your GPS wouldn't work if 19th century astronomers had shrugged and said, "Well, it's true that the orbit or Mercury precesses at a higher-than-expected rate, but it's probably just due to some funny mass distribution in the sun. Ok, let's go for a beer."
Scientists do not quit until the numbers add up. There is no doubt that with regard to the collapse of the Twin Towers and WTC 7 on 9/11 the numbers do not add up.
I've had just about all I can stand of American one-party-two-names politics. (Not that I actually know that it's better in Canada.)
It's almost too much better.
Canada is not without its issues, but one of our more interesting traditions is to throw up nutjob fringe political parties every couple of decades. These parties never make it to power, but they wind up having a lot of influence on the democratic debate, and drive the more mainstream parties to evolve or risk getting pushed out by the interlopers.
In the past century we've had the Social Credit (eventually watered down to various conservative flavours); the Progressives (merged with the Conservatives to make the oxymoronic "Progressive Conservatives"); The Canadian Commonwealth Federation, an agrarian reform socialist party that morphed into the New Democratic Party, a British-style labour party that is currently trying to reinvent itself as a green social democratic party with no success whatsoever; and most recently the Reform Party, a populist social conservative party that merged with the Progressive Conservatives to create the new Conservative Party that is currently clinging to minority government status, and this in a nation that was five years ago in fear of one-party rule by the Liberals.
We have a fertile and diverse political spectrum, although for all that we still have plenty of politically homeless people (as well as a fair number of the other kind) whose votes are up for grabs in any given election. The Green Party is desperately trying to become a national political voice, although their recent shift to the left isn't helping them any.
I've lived in the US, and my taxes plus health care costs there were very close to what my taxes are here. Our health care system is imperfect, but we live longer than Americans and have better health while doing it. Health care reform is happening as we speak, as enterprising Canadians find ways round the draconian Canada Health Act, which practically makes it illegal to pay for medical services that are nominally covered by provincial insurance programmes.
It is also possible to incorporate federally online, for a total cost of $220. We are in the top few nations in the world in terms of delivering government services over the Web, and the climate is currently VERY friendly to small business.
You can't own a gun legally unless you take a safety course and fill out some forms. If you want to own a handgun you'll have to become a registered collector. There were about 150 people killed by guns in Canada last year. Yes, you read that right, and no, I didn't drop any zeros. We kill each other with knives and blunt instruments, mostly.
We are a foreign, sovereign, nation. We are not like you. And frankly, we'd rather you stayed home and fixed your country. We'd really like that a lot. But if you're really fed up--come on up, and be welcome.
You can (continue to?) pirate the content.
What part of, "Fair use is not piracy" do you not understand?
The OP is pointing out, quite correctly, that we have a legal right to fair use, which may include the right to make backup copies. I neither know nor care what you or anyone else feels about the necessity of backup copies. Your experience, needs, desires and wants are totally irrelevant to the legal fact of fair use rights.
DRM is a failed attempt to prevent me from exercising my fair use rights. Again, whether or not you think I'm a moron for wanting to do so is irrelevant. It is not piracy to do so. It is a matter of legal fact that I have those rights. Even the RIAA once admitted that, in front of the Supreme Court no less.
In my experience each and every innovation can trace its roots back to one key insight in the mind of one person.
This is either trivially true, inasmuch as every thought occurs first in an individual mind, and for a sufficiently small quantum of innovation it will be just one person who first has that insight and acts on it; or it is trivially false, because most of what is thought of as "innovation" is a collection of such individual insights.
In my experience as an innovator and inventor there are quite different kinds of innovation, which could be called "invention" and "aggregation." Invention means solving a novel, atomic problem. Aggregation means putting together the inventions of others into a new configuration. Both of these are equally important: without invention aggregators would have nothing to aggregate, and without aggregation far too many inventions would never have a very large impact on human capability.
Inventors are people like Newcomb and Watt, and perhaps the Wright brothers. Henry Ford was perhaps the world's greatest aggregator. Edison managed to do a bit of both.
Inventors tend to be excessively protective of their priority. Aggregators tend to be excessively lax in giving inventors credit (and payment.)
But again, both are required, and to disparage or ignore one of them is to miss an extremely important aspect of innovation.
130' and you start hitting nitrogen narcosis as O2 gets toxic as the pressure increases.
Nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity are completely unrelated and quite separate phenomenon
Nitrogen narcosis makes you stupid due to the effects of a high partial pressure of INERT nitrogen on nerves, probably specifically on synapses. In my experience you reason so slowly when narc'd that you may as well not be able to reason at all, although the effects differ depending on circumstances and the individual involved.
Oxygen toxicity is due to the extreme REACTIVITY of O2 at high partial pressure, and it results in various physiological failure modes that are not specifically related to nervous tissue.