There are a few more details from the case I'd like to point out. Mr. Pozsgai himself stated in that the police came to his property in August 1987 and showed him the EPA order to cease and desist dumping landfill on the property. In December 1987 the EPA sent Mr. Pozsgai an umpteenth letter which, aside from yet again informing him his activities were illegal, also informed him that he could remedy the situation and get permission to proceed with his landfill if he merely obtained a Water Quality Certification from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources.
But my favorite part is how on August 26 1988 a Court issued a temporary restraining order explicitly ordering him to cease. And how Mr. Pozsgai flagrantly defied that court order two days later, when he was videoed dumping 25 additional truckloads on the property and personally driving a bulldozer leveling the fill.
But of course only a wildly biased treehugger commie liberal would pay any attention to "facts" from the court record. A true conservative will go by the FreeRepublic account.
Have faith. Some day you will have two internet providers to choose from. Then you'll get to choose from a cartel menu of grilled shitburger with a side order of abuse, or fried shitburger with a side order of abuse.
Would you like fries with that? Only twice the price! It's got over ten times the recommended daily limit of lead and mercury included free!
Because He works in strange and mysterious ways. It doesn't matter that it doesn't make any sense, because out puny brains are too small to understand. So stop trying to understand any of it, and quit asking me annoying "why" questions that I can't answer ya damn kid.
Err... you seem to be labelling anything that "could not happen, according to Science", to be "falsifiable", aka "faked".
You misunderstood him. That's not what he meant. "Falsifiable" doesn't mean false. It means "testable".
"The moon is made of green cheese" is falsifiable. "The moon is made of rock" is falsifiable.
When tested, one of those statements ended up as falsifiable and falsified. When tested, the other statement ended up as falsifiable and confirmed.
Evolution is falsifiable. For example evolution implies "there are no precambrian human fossils". That is falsifiable - that is testable. If there are precambrian human fossils - or even precambrian rabbit fossils or any other mammal fossils, then evolution would be falsified.
There are a million ways to test evolution, a million tests any one of which could produce a result falsifying evolution. However, so far every such result turned out to confirm evolution. Just as every test so far confirms confirms the moon being made of rock. It would only take one solid result to falsify the moon-being-made-of-rock, and it would only take one solid result to falsify evolution. Finding just one precambrian rabbit would pretty well obliterate evolution.
"God exists" or "God exists and he hears prayers" are unfalsifiable. However once we get to "God hears prayers and sometimes he answers them", then we start getting into falsifiable territory. If you pray for an amputee to grow their legs back, and they do than that would be a pretty impressive confirmation. Failing that, you can say "Ok, God doesn't answer those prayers but that God sometimes answers prayers to help sick people". And you can check a few hundred heart attack patients and have people pray for half of them, which we've done. Prayer made zero difference in their survival rates or overall health. The idea that prayers help heart attack patient survival is falsifiable because it could have been confirmed, but it wasn't. So far every falsifiable claim of God answering prayers which has been tested, has ended up being falsified. Prayers have zero effect on patient survival rates, and among those who do survive the prayer has no effect on health.
Don't forget the shortbus vigilantes who go after paediatricians, and in at least one case the extra-shortbus vigilantes who went after a a podiatrist.
The boiler room crew says the afterburners are already on, and they'd like to know if they can take a rest break when the plane finishes taxiing to the runway.
I'd be most amused to run into an intelligent design advocate claiming God created families, and that genera and species evolved. A creationist finally admitting they're a monkey's uncle.
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Other (free!) geeky games from the same developer
on
The Games Programmers Play
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· Score: 3, Informative
The guy who made SpaceChem released several other free games, mostly flash games. He calls the series "games for engineers". Very geeky cool.
Bureau of steam engineering where you use steam valves and pipes to build control logic for steampunk battle robots.
A downloadable EXE game Ruckingenur II (requires Microsoft's DotNET 2.0 to be installed). The idea is that you use logic probes and stuff to hack electronic circuits. It's kinda cool and it's pretty realistic, but your options are fairly limited. It's more of a puzzle game than a simulator.
And then there's my favorite: Kohctpyktop engineer of the people. This one is definitely the geekiest and most intellectually sophisticated of them all. The idea of the game is that you have to build transistor circuits. You are given a blank playfield to draw circuitry, and the game does a full electric/logic simulation of your circuit. If the game board were arbitrarily large you could literally build an entire working CPU in there! If you manage complete the game you will have a very deep understanding of how computers work at the transistor level.
Unfortunately Kohctpyktop has almost no instructions, the help tab is a link to a tutorial video that is only marginally helpful, and it has a seriously steep learning curve. If anyone wants to give it a try be sure to use pause during the help video, it goes by really fast. You also need to know that you need to hold shift to switch from red to yellow silicon, and in delete mode hold shift to delete metal. For further help look for me in the Echo Hall chatroom on Kongregate. If I'm not there you can try asking for Kohctpyktop help in general chat - there are several Echo Hall regulars who know the game.
I've invented a solar panel that's 20% the size of a traditional solar panel, produces 20% of the power of a traditional solar panel, and I'm selling it at half the price of a traditional solar panel!
Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?
Right. It hasn't. And your link only demonstrates how radically unnatural the current warming is.
Check the slope of the graph you linked to. The "rapid" warming coming out of the last ice age has a rate of approximately 1 degree C per 2200 years.
Over the last hundred-odd years the earth has earth has recently warmed at a rate fourteen times faster than that. And the conservative end of the scale the current rate of warming is 2 degrees C over the next hundred years. That's 44 times faster than the unusually rapid rate of the planet thawing out of an ice age.
parking their car all day in the *sunlight* or inside a garage that is drenched in *sunlight*, then driving home at dusk and leaving it parked all night. There's got to be a way to refill at least a few miles' worth of power during that idle daytime.
I googled solar power figures and electric vehicle power figures and did some quick and dirty calculations. Under the ideal case of your car parked in full sunlight for a full day, facing in the ideal direction towards the sun, and with a solar panel covering a substantial area on the car, you could get maybe 2 or 3 miles of charge per day. In real world usage you'd be lucky to obtain even half that.
My first reaction was that a mile a day is not much, but yeah it's still, kinda cool and with an optimistic view maybe it could pay off the initial cost of the solar cells. But then I realized that solar cells are fairly fragile and that a car is a really really bad place to mount them. They would easily be damaged by the slightest fender bender, or by a nasty pothole, or if you (or someone else) sat on them, or possibly if you put moderately heavy stuff on top of your car like shopping bags, or other bumps and bruises of real life. The free solar power might barely pay off the initial cost of the solar cells, but there's no way it it would pay off against the risk of having to replace expensive solar cells one or more times over the life of the car.
It makes far more sense to mount solar panels in a safe stable place like the roof of your home. And even there, it's really hard for it to pay off the initial cost of panels.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure you want to know?
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is there any asymmetric key encryption algorithm that can't be cracked with quantum computers?
Yes and no.
The answer won't collapse until we open the quantum computer box and look inside.
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The Lockheed computer is a quantum computer in the same way that a glass abacus is a silicon computer.
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Being able to collapse 2^2048 super-positions seems a bit preposterous to me.
That's kinda like swimming 99.9% of the way from London to New York City, and quitting because the last mile might be "a bit" moist.
Everything about quantum mechanics is wildly preposterous.
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If I may contribute to your post, here's a link to the Third Circuit United States Court of Appeals ruling which explains Mr. Pozsgai's behavior in detail.
There are a few more details from the case I'd like to point out. Mr. Pozsgai himself stated in that the police came to his property in August 1987 and showed him the EPA order to cease and desist dumping landfill on the property. In December 1987 the EPA sent Mr. Pozsgai an umpteenth letter which, aside from yet again informing him his activities were illegal, also informed him that he could remedy the situation and get permission to proceed with his landfill if he merely obtained a Water Quality Certification from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources.
But my favorite part is how on August 26 1988 a Court issued a temporary restraining order explicitly ordering him to cease. And how Mr. Pozsgai flagrantly defied that court order two days later, when he was videoed dumping 25 additional truckloads on the property and personally driving a bulldozer leveling the fill.
But of course only a wildly biased treehugger commie liberal would pay any attention to "facts" from the court record. A true conservative will go by the FreeRepublic account.
-
Have faith. Some day you will have two internet providers to choose from.
Then you'll get to choose from a cartel menu of grilled shitburger with a side order of abuse, or fried shitburger with a side order of abuse.
Would you like fries with that? Only twice the price! It's got over ten times the recommended daily limit of lead and mercury included free!
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this administration has decided to come clean with the Martians and our contacts with them...
...and they want us to extend copyrights by another 20 years.
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I believe most people are reasonable, rational, and intelligent.
Oh wait, I guess I'm just proving your point. nevermind.
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it raises the rather obvious question of why
Because He works in strange and mysterious ways.
It doesn't matter that it doesn't make any sense, because out puny brains are too small to understand. So stop trying to understand any of it, and quit asking me annoying "why" questions that I can't answer ya damn kid.
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In other words: Don't anthropomorphize science, it hates when people do that.
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Err... you seem to be labelling anything that "could not happen, according to Science", to be "falsifiable", aka "faked".
You misunderstood him. That's not what he meant. "Falsifiable" doesn't mean false. It means "testable".
"The moon is made of green cheese" is falsifiable.
"The moon is made of rock" is falsifiable.
When tested, one of those statements ended up as falsifiable and falsified. When tested, the other statement ended up as falsifiable and confirmed.
Evolution is falsifiable. For example evolution implies "there are no precambrian human fossils". That is falsifiable - that is testable. If there are precambrian human fossils - or even precambrian rabbit fossils or any other mammal fossils, then evolution would be falsified.
There are a million ways to test evolution, a million tests any one of which could produce a result falsifying evolution. However, so far every such result turned out to confirm evolution. Just as every test so far confirms confirms the moon being made of rock. It would only take one solid result to falsify the moon-being-made-of-rock, and it would only take one solid result to falsify evolution. Finding just one precambrian rabbit would pretty well obliterate evolution.
"God exists" or "God exists and he hears prayers" are unfalsifiable. However once we get to "God hears prayers and sometimes he answers them", then we start getting into falsifiable territory. If you pray for an amputee to grow their legs back, and they do than that would be a pretty impressive confirmation. Failing that, you can say "Ok, God doesn't answer those prayers but that God sometimes answers prayers to help sick people". And you can check a few hundred heart attack patients and have people pray for half of them, which we've done. Prayer made zero difference in their survival rates or overall health. The idea that prayers help heart attack patient survival is falsifiable because it could have been confirmed, but it wasn't. So far every falsifiable claim of God answering prayers which has been tested, has ended up being falsified. Prayers have zero effect on patient survival rates, and among those who do survive the prayer has no effect on health.
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Don't forget the shortbus vigilantes who go after paediatricians, and in at least one case the extra-shortbus vigilantes who went after a a podiatrist.
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Fuck the American Christian Mothers' League
Never put your dick in crazy.
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{sigh} Grammar Nazis.
I cut & paste it from somebody else that mangled it.
The Nazi defense. Don't blame me, I blame the guy I was listening to.
Chuckle.
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The boiler room crew says the afterburners are already on, and they'd like to know if they can take a rest break when the plane finishes taxiing to the runway.
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Comic sans? Pffft!
Taking my inspiration from SCO, I'll be posting my science paper in symbol font.
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I'd be most amused to run into an intelligent design advocate claiming God created families, and that genera and species evolved. A creationist finally admitting they're a monkey's uncle.
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The guy who made SpaceChem released several other free games, mostly flash games. He calls the series "games for engineers". Very geeky cool.
The codex of alchemical engineering where you program robotic arms to assemble molecules.
The sequel: The codex of alchemical engineering magnum opus challenge
Bureau of steam engineering where you use steam valves and pipes to build control logic for steampunk battle robots.
A downloadable EXE game Ruckingenur II (requires Microsoft's DotNET 2.0 to be installed). The idea is that you use logic probes and stuff to hack electronic circuits. It's kinda cool and it's pretty realistic, but your options are fairly limited. It's more of a puzzle game than a simulator.
And then there's my favorite:
Kohctpyktop engineer of the people.
This one is definitely the geekiest and most intellectually sophisticated of them all. The idea of the game is that you have to build transistor circuits. You are given a blank playfield to draw circuitry, and the game does a full electric/logic simulation of your circuit. If the game board were arbitrarily large you could literally build an entire working CPU in there! If you manage complete the game you will have a very deep understanding of how computers work at the transistor level.
Unfortunately Kohctpyktop has almost no instructions, the help tab is a link to a tutorial video that is only marginally helpful, and it has a seriously steep learning curve. If anyone wants to give it a try be sure to use pause during the help video, it goes by really fast. You also need to know that you need to hold shift to switch from red to yellow silicon, and in delete mode hold shift to delete metal. For further help look for me in the Echo Hall chatroom on Kongregate. If I'm not there you can try asking for Kohctpyktop help in general chat - there are several Echo Hall regulars who know the game.
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I've invented a solar panel that's 20% the size of a traditional solar panel, produces 20% of the power of a traditional solar panel, and I'm selling it at half the price of a traditional solar panel!
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You want a Zune?
And you liked the brown model?
Lemme guess, you're one of the 14% who approves of US Congress's performance and you see a smiley face in your own brain scan?
(The link is The Daily Show)
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Microsoft is more like the "Me 1.5204 company".
While that might round off to 2, it always falls rather short.
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Because climate has never, ever, not even once, shifted quickly?
Right. It hasn't. And your link only demonstrates how radically unnatural the current warming is.
Check the slope of the graph you linked to. The "rapid" warming coming out of the last ice age has a rate of approximately 1 degree C per 2200 years.
Over the last hundred-odd years the earth has earth has recently warmed at a rate fourteen times faster than that. And the conservative end of the scale the current rate of warming is 2 degrees C over the next hundred years. That's 44 times faster than the unusually rapid rate of the planet thawing out of an ice age.
-
parking their car all day in the *sunlight* or inside a garage that is drenched in *sunlight*, then driving home at dusk and leaving it parked all night. There's got to be a way to refill at least a few miles' worth of power during that idle daytime.
I googled solar power figures and electric vehicle power figures and did some quick and dirty calculations. Under the ideal case of your car parked in full sunlight for a full day, facing in the ideal direction towards the sun, and with a solar panel covering a substantial area on the car, you could get maybe 2 or 3 miles of charge per day. In real world usage you'd be lucky to obtain even half that.
My first reaction was that a mile a day is not much, but yeah it's still, kinda cool and with an optimistic view maybe it could pay off the initial cost of the solar cells. But then I realized that solar cells are fairly fragile and that a car is a really really bad place to mount them. They would easily be damaged by the slightest fender bender, or by a nasty pothole, or if you (or someone else) sat on them, or possibly if you put moderately heavy stuff on top of your car like shopping bags, or other bumps and bruises of real life. The free solar power might barely pay off the initial cost of the solar cells, but there's no way it it would pay off against the risk of having to replace expensive solar cells one or more times over the life of the car.
It makes far more sense to mount solar panels in a safe stable place like the roof of your home. And even there, it's really hard for it to pay off the initial cost of panels.
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We are the Space Robots. We are here to protect you. Please go stand by the stairs so I can protect you.
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In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the results weren't purely made up by a hungry "writer".
Yeah. And I bet he only spent one hour on it.
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