I've been running to work for several years (fortunate to have shower facilities and a reasonable proximity). The major advantage is that it's a very passive form of exercise, if you go to the gym you have to stop what you're doing and go to the gym, if you have to go for a run, same thing, in either case you have to expend some willpower and motivate yourself to do it which is probably the biggest obstacle to exercise.
But running to work? There's even less setup and maintenance involved than with a bike, and you don't have to worry about traffic or road conditions. I get two runs every day with very little effort (if I want to go to work I do it automatically) and as a bonus I've become a pretty damn good runner.
What the Hell are you arguing, exactly? That maybe Global Warming isn't happening? I'd like to hear that argument, that the observations, namely warming global temperatures and decreased population of pirates, is not actually proof of Global Warming.
Anyone who denies that the globe is warming is a fool. Anyone who claims the cause of global warming has been proven is also a fool.
What do you mean by 'proven'? We obviously don't have a mathematical proof that human released CO2 is causing global warming, but anyone who doubts that scientists are in general agreement, and not in some massive conspiracy or hallucination, is living in an alternate reality.
Of course, since gradual warming over centuries or millennia in the past was good for life in the past it makes sense that rapid warming over decades would be just as good now (though humans will have to acclimate to some floods and famine).
The youth of Kim Jong-un is a good point, for all the talk of North Korea being some monolithic blob it's going to have its own internal politics. There's a lot of high ranking military and political people who are very happy with the current system, and tomorrow if Kim Jong-un announced he was going to hold free elections he might have an unexpected heart attack. He might be a reform minded leader who knows he's on very thin ice and wants to reassure the current power structure, or he might be a despot with some western tastes, there's really no easy way to tell but escalating back is probably a bad idea.
I wouldn't put too much on Taubes' analysis of the data, his main claim to fame that insulin responses cause obesity is BS. He might be right about excess salt not being a health issue (I honestly don't know what the long term issues are supposed to be) but be warned that Taubes is more interested in generating a novel result than a right one.
This isn't about Card being openly anti-gay or having an opinion, he's a political advocate on the board of the National Organization for Marriage. The only reason anyone gives a damn what Card thinks is because he's a famous author, if he's willing to spend the voice he's earned as an author to brand himself with a particular brand of political advocacy I have no problem with people rejecting his art because of that political advocacy. You can't put a hyperbaric chamber around the story and separate it from the author, a superman story by Orson Scott Card is different than the same story by someone without prominent political views.
Change the culture so gun ownership is weird, so that when you tell someone you own a device designed to kill people they give you an odd look and get uncomfortable, once that happens you'll see a real drop in guns and violence.
That's already being done, but anyone who does so has the mental state of a child. A firearm is a tool, little different from a hammer. It is a mechanically complex hammer, but at the end of the day, it is a shaped hunk of steel and plastic (or wood). Yes, it is a tool designed to kill. That is why police carry them, right? To kill as many people in as short a time as possible, right? That is why peace-keeping NATO and UN forces have them, right? To massacre people in the nations they send aide too, right?
There are limited circumstances in which carrying a tool designed to kill is appropriate, military and law enforcement are two of them because they have legitimate circumstances in which they can use the threat of death.
The gun culture in the US does not result in CDC statistics. Gang Violence due to the black market created by federal bans on recreational drugs does.
The drug trade is a huge factor in gang violence, but if you took away all their guns and replaced them with knives I'd be shocked if the homicide rate didn't drop by at least half.
More than 50% of the "gun violence" in the US is suicide. Suicide rates are independent of method. It is not a 'gun problem'. It's a mental health problem.
Stop vilifying True Americans who value their freedom and protect yours.
Even if I was American the civilian gun owners wouldn't be protecting my freedom, they'd be taking it away. Seriously, if I was the president and I wanted to destroy your political movement or take away your freedom the first thing I would do is give you and every one of your buddies a gun. Then I'd send in an agent provocateur, get you or your buddies to start shooting, then I show the public how scary you are and they'd let me do whatever the hell I wanted. Why do you think Assad and the other Arab dictators were so brutal in reacting to the protests? They weren't trying to scare the people into submission, they were trying to rile them into violence, the only reason Assad is still around is all the Syrians not afraid of the resistance became terrified once the fighting started.
You have this macho fantasy that you're going to intimidate the government into submission, it's BS and people are dying because of it.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about more than his own personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” John Stuart Mill
The fact that just wars exist doesn't mean you need to go out and invent one.
when you tell someone you own a device designed to kill people they give you an odd look and get uncomfortable, once that happens you'll see a real drop in guns and violence.
None of my guns were designed to kill people. My shotgun was designed to kill birds and small game. The rest of my firearms were designed to fire a small lead ball at a target of my choosing. That is what guns are designed to do: hit what the person is aiming at. If the person is aiming at another person, then the gun might kill them. But that is the fault of the person firing the gun, not the gun itself. It is the person killing the other person. I do not and would not ever own something designed solely to kill someone.
If those other guns didn't kill people, if guns couldn't kill people and bullets bounced off our skin like BB pellets, do you think you'd still own those guns?
Guns aren't hard to acquire now and even with decent gun control they probably won't be that hard to acquire in the future.
The problem with the US (well a problem for me) is the gun culture where having a gun is considered cool and manly, as a result lots of people have guns and feel normal keeping them and using them. Change the culture so gun ownership is weird, so that when you tell someone you own a device designed to kill people they give you an odd look and get uncomfortable, once that happens you'll see a real drop in guns and violence. I don't see 3D printed guns as being a big factor either way.
Normally I'm suspicious of articles like this where we get one side of the story about some US law enforcement agency doing something bad, but in cases of seizing assets US law enforcement has an absolutely horrendous record.
And as for your claim that he should have just signed the form another case where someone took your advice led to the DHS seizing $35,000, I sure as hell wouldn't sign anything the DHS told me to if I knew there was an error.
I think so, at the end of the day alcoholism is a failure of willpower (not saying they have less willpower than non-alcoholics, just that the intoxication is too big a lure for them), they want the short term pleasure associated with being drunk. If they become sick while drinking that pleasurable objective is no attainable so the addiction should cease.
If you're on a roadtrip would you really want to wait around at a supercharger station for an hour? I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that if the person is 150 miles from their destination they're going to wait till the range estimator reads 155 then take off.
How long does it take to wait for a towtruck? Yes I would damn well wait at the super charging station until the car told me it could make the trip. I fully agree with everything you wrote. So I'm sure you'll also agree with me that Broder is a complete moron based on:
The final leg of his trip was 61 miles and yet he disconnected the charge cable when the range display stated 32 miles
So car tells me it won't make it, random person on the phone tells me it's fine? Go with the guy on the phone right? Yep I'm sticking with moron.
You say moron I say human being. People aren't rational, we do magical thinking all the time, assuming something will work because we don't want to deal with it not working, and if we think an authority on X told us something we'll believe them since being wrong will be their fault.
I think it's quite possible that neither is being entirely dishonest.
The main disagreement is about not fully charging the car. But it's pretty critical to remember that charging, even at a supercharger, takes a long time.
If you're on a roadtrip would you really want to wait around at a supercharger station for an hour? I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that if the person is 150 miles from their destination they're going to wait till the range estimator reads 155 then take off.
Also one thing not quite clear from the NYT article: "It was also Tesla that told me that an hour of charging (at a lower power level) at a public utility in Norwich, Conn., would give me adequate range to reach the Supercharger 61 miles away, even though the car’s range estimator read 32 miles – because, again, I was told that moderate-speed driving would “restore” the battery power lost overnight."
Note that this wasn't a supercharger station, this was just somewhere he could plug in so charging was slow. It's not quite clear to me whether he was told the car would be fine with the estimator at 32 miles, or the car would be fine after being plugged in for an hour. But I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who could do some magical thinking to convince themselves that the guy on the phone said it was enough so it must be so!
The speed discrepancy is hard to account for (unless it was a dumb thing like the wrong tire size), but as for the 80 mph spike, maybe he just floored it to pass someone, and even though the logs show he wasn't at 45 mph for the limping stage he did reduce his speed, which suggests he was trying to extend the range and not run it dry like Elon Musk suggested. As for all the charging stations along the final route there's no evidence Broder had access to this info.
As for the cabin temperature the data definitely shows he drops it quite a bit, Elon Musk is definitely fudging the interpretation when he suggests it was always around 72.
In short Broder tried to use the car like a lot of people would, spending the absolute minimal amount of time waiting at a charging station, and due to some misunderstandings and bad breaks that tend to happen when you're pushing the limits, got burned.
Maybe because they're not yet ready for prime time? Seemed to me the biggest problem in the article was the battery charge dropping overnight in the cold weather. Elon Musk forgot to rebut that. Maybe if global warming is real, that won't be a problem. Eventually. Oh, and an hour and a half to refuel at supercharged station? I can't be the only one who sees a problem with that.
Do you really think it was necessary to throw a little flamebait in?
Well I don't think it's well established that executions deter crime
It is 100% certain that an executed criminal will not commit another crime. So yes, execution deters crime.
Well the alternative to execution is generally life in prison (if they're not exonerated) so even if they commit more crimes it will just be against other criminals (which I'm guessing you wouldn't mind).
I'm sure you've heard of agent provocateurs, the reality is if someone is really looking to take your rights away they're not going to take away your guns, they're going to try to goad you into using them.
So... you figure his trainer was kicking that homeless person in the head in order to goad the (then) trainee cop into later attacking the police department? I have to say, that's a stretch. Not buying it.:)
Yeah... I wasn't saying that. You're saying a violent escalation makes the authorities afraid and keeps them in line, I'm saying agent provocateurs are proof that the government will actually encourage violent escalations against them in order to discredit you or take away your rights.
we've just lost the right not to be policed by drones
We never had such a right. After all the flowery verbiage dissipates, rights actually exist only in the context of someone with violent recourse available to them willing to stand up for a claim to a right. Almost always a group standing up for a member; (this case is particularly interesting because it's a member standing up for a group.) That's never been the case with drones; the government has repeatedly said it's ok to use them, and, they were already in use.
I didn't mean a literal legal right, I meant a strong social more against them being used regularly, but I could be mistaken and that was already the case.
When people start shooting drones down (and it's an absolute certainty that they will), that's when you'll develop some rights in the matter.
Uhhh no, that's when boatloads of people will start getting prosecuted for shooting down drones.
good cops have lost some ability to speak up about abuse without colleagues comparing them to this guy
As clearly demonstrated, there was no ability to speak up, to be lost. There can only be a gain in this department.
we've lost some right to walk down the street without being shot by some crazy cop
No, again, we didn't have any such right. Happens all the time. Rarely is there any blowback to the cop. And then there's this.
Neither are binary problems, you can make them a little better, or a little worse, this dude made both worse.
just like the 9/11 bombers made airports a hell of a lot less free
No, that was your legislature. Had nothing to do with the bombers, other than as an excuse. It'll backfire anyway. I stopped flying then; so did a lot of other people. We keep electing stupid, rich people. We keep getting stupid laws designed to benefit the rich.
Nah, your legislature, I'm Canadian (not that much better but we're not the ones driving it). And yes, the bombers were an excuse, just like this dude might be, are you starting to get it.
Not my war; it's this cop's. And near as I can tell, he's already won. He got his message out, he's generated a huge upwelling of sympathy, there's a lot of discussion of just how bad the cops really are, they haven't even caught him but he's already done more damage to them than remains available to do to him, he may yet do m
That's an assumption, one that goes counter to the ones this society is based upon. It has its corollary in "executing criminals and the consequent huge collateral damage to their families won't deter crime, it'll just turn others borderline and the borderline into criminals."
But in fact, what it does is breeds restraint and caution, which moves the borderline away from criminality, and keeps those who weren't even borderline well aware that living right is worth the candle. And when we execute the criminal, they stop committing crimes.
What you want to avoid doing is executing the innocent (or doing anything else to them, for that matter) because they and their families tend to get righteously pissed. Whereas the families of murderers and rapists also get hurt and pissed, but generally speaking, at the criminal, not the system. "YOU brought this on us!" "How could you!" and similar reactions.
Well I don't think it's well established that executions deter crime, and there's a lot to criticize in the US justice system, but in general punishing criminals with a fair punishment works.
Trouble comes up when people feel they've been treated unfairly. The problem with the bad cops is they don't necessarily think they're doing wrong, they think the public doesn't realize how bad the all the low lives and repeat offenders are so they feel justified in pushing the boundaries and throwing in some beatings, even the ones who get dirty and steal some drug money probably think they're justified for the stuff they're dealing with (and they're still better than the criminals). So when you try to punish them you don't make them afraid and cautious, you just give them more justification to do whatever the hell they want.
I'm sure you've heard of agent provocateurs, the reality is if someone is really looking to take your rights away they're not going to take away your guns, they're going to try to goad you into using them. That was the entire game plan of Bashar at the start of the revolution in Syria, commit atrocities until the revolution turns violent, then all of Bashar's backers dig in because they're terrified of what the revolutionaries will do if they get power. When you fight back violently that gives them the pretext to step up their game by restricting speech, imprisoning borderline individuals, or in this case, letting the cops use spy drones.
He's already done far more damage to them than they can do to him; will he be able to do enough to make a difference in the sick, decayed culture of police officers? Remains to be seen. I rather think he may have already done so.
Except I'm not worried about him, I'm worried about us, we've just lost the right not to be policed by drones, good cops have lost some ability to speak up about abuse without colleagues comparing them to this guy, and we've lost some right to walk down the street without being shot by some crazy cop. Guys shooting cops didn't give me freedom, they took away my right to relax and not worry about my hands if I get pulled over, just like the 9/11 bombers made airports a hell of a lot less free. Police will rightly just write him off as a one-off nutjob, if others pick up his cause and start shooting cops the response from the cops won't be "wow, we better clean up our act", it will be "ok, interact less with the public, and if anyone freaks you out shoot first and ask questions later".
This isn't a war you'll win, the most you'll do is create an enemy.
How is that any sort of legitimate fight against a government?
Cops murder people all the time. And they send innocent people off to their slaughterhouse prisons to die all the time. And they ruin innocent people's lives all the time. Families are hurt by that all the time. How is that a legitimate fight against crime? And why should their families be immune from the effects of their malfeasance, if the lives of the families of the people they abuse are not?
If you want to be righteous and violent then their families are fair game, and then you'll get a lot of other opportunities to be a hero when they re-escalate in response.
If you want to actually reduce the violence and killing, of both the cops and innocents, then you need to show restraint and fight them within the system. Killing bad cops won't get rid of bad cops so only the good ones are left, it will just turn good cops borderline and borderline cops bad.
Huh? Your citations seem to be consistent with what I have said regarding church beliefs. All seem to be saying that the church accepts the evolution of the physical body; believes that what truly distinguishes "humanity" from previous life is the introduction of the "soul"; believes that humanity is descended from "Adam" and "Eve", the first two with souls.
OK, you can stop right the hell there. You see that bit that you wrote that I bolded? Ignore everything else, because that is what I've been talking about this whole damned time. That bit, that everyone in the human race is descended from two people, is Catholic dogma. It is held as an infallibly correct part of Catholic theology. And it. Is. Wrong. That was my whole point, right there.
I am not saying that the figurative narrative is true, just that it is not far off from the scientific theory of a common matrilineal ancestor and a common patrilineal ancestor. The church's central point seems to be that all living humans have "souls" because of descent from "Adam", and science says that all living humans share something through a matrilineal line and through a patrilineal line. A "soul" could pass down these lines just as mitochondrial dna and a y chromosome do.
I don't think you quite understand the y-chromosome and mitochondrial Adam and Eve. The Y-chromosome is only passed by the male and the mitochondrial DNA by the female, there's random mutations but aside from that a male will always have his father's Y-chromosome and mother's mitochonrial DNA. It's a mathematical fact that there will always be a single male from who all other males have a direct male line descent (if you had two guys with different Y-chromosomes then just keep going back up the male line till you find their common male ancestor), and a single female who has a direct female line to all current women.
Unlike the biblical story they were not contemporaries, they don't seem to have been associated with any population bottleneck, they're just the most recent man and woman to have maintained a direct gendered line of offspring. You know who else contributed the Y-chromosome that every living man has? Adam's father, paternal grandfather, and paternal grand^(lots)father who is some sort of mouse-like creature. Maybe be there was an older adam or eve but their last gender line descendent got stepped on by a horse in the 15th century so someone more recent got the call. Also they were nowhere near to the most recent common ancestor who only lived about 5000-15000 years ago.
More so there appears to have been interbreeding with Neanderthals around 60,000 years ago. We separate from Neanderthals ~1.2 million years ago, so long after the "adam" and "eve" we were interbreeding with a separate species of humanity. It just so happens that those pairings never had and unbroken gender line descendents or the "Adam" and "Eve" would have had to move back about 1 million years.
We have no way of knowing if "Adam", "Eve", or the last common ancestor had multiple mates, they're just mathematical estimates in time, not identified individuals. But the handful of things it is possible to know, Adam and Eve being millenia apart, hybridizing with Neanderthals almost 100,000 years after Adam and Eve, all directly contradict the story in the bible.
I do believe you that it's not an ad (I didn't think it was an ad to begin with though didn't really express that well in my post).
I admit I'm not familiar with dice.com so I just guessed you were operating as a recruiting company. If I were to offer some constructive feedback it would be this. Slashdot has an anti-corporate reflex, even Red Hat, an open source company that contributes a ton of resources to open source, gets a lot of flack. So coming in with posts designed to direct traffic to your company's site (no shame, we all have to eat) you're already operating at a big disadvantage. I think the problem with this post was the Red Hat angle seemed really awkward and the rest, while good advice, wasn't news (like most people I didn't click the link). It just seemed so out of place for/. that people figured it must be an ad or it wouldn't get posted. Personally I think you just got a bad break in that timothy choose this story, I saw some of your other submissions and they looked pretty good, a bit of tech-job news with some interesting and relevant facts. I think if anyone is to blame for the flack you got it's timothy, maybe you did something to him at the last Dice company picnick:)
I'd be a lot more comfortable if there was an explicit acknowledgement as an ad, for all we know timothy saw Red Hat in the title and was friends with the Dice guy so decided it would make a good submission.
Even as an ad it's kinda pointless, all it does is say Red Hat is hiring, then gives some extremely general job application advice. Why not make it interesting by mentioning something about how Red Hat differs from non-open source companies in its hiring, or giving tips on how contributors to a big project could get themselves hired to work on that project.
"I'd argue no, you basically claimed that Einstein's physics and math abilities were almost irrelevant to his discovering relativity."
I said nothing of the sort. I clearly said of a next Einstein, "Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed."
I.E. Advanced Physics and mathematics skills among other prerequisites and the ability to see simplicity in complexity.
Actually what you wrote was:
"Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had."...
"Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it."
IE, many people could have/did come up with relativity, but only Einstein could get people to listen to him.
You just got hung up on my implication that someone who gained an understanding of physics from informal learning rather than university study could potentially have value and yet would have no opportunity to express their insight under the current peer review system. It got your back up and you read the rest of what I said as what you expected to hear. Namely an assertion of that oft repeated and poorly informed opinion that a great leap or out-of-the-box idea would come from someone without knowledge of the subject because they are an outsider. I did not claim that and I do not claim that.
I will say, there is nothing about theoretical (as opposed to applied) physics that you can learn at a university that you can't learn from an armchair at home. Note, I didn't just assert that armchair physicists are equally educated to university trained. I said the POTENTIAL for an armchair physicist to attain that level is there.
I don't argue that you could educate yourself sufficiently on your own, but it would be incredibly difficult and you still seem to be missing the point that physics is fundamentally equations. Let me put it this way, neither you nor I understand relativity. If we went back in time before Einstein we could explain some of what it means, we could list off some experiments and say 'E=MC^2', but to really understand why relativity works, to really explain why the universe has to be that way, that needs a deep understanding of math and physics we don't have.
Such an individual would have expended as least as much effort as one university trained and would be barred from even reaching peer review in the traditional journals. Surely you can admit that isn't a good thing? Such individuals attempting to get published should be viewed on the merits of what they are trying to publish rather than personal credentials. Perhaps tossing such submissions in an online archive where those with better and more established reputation can choose to voluntarily review a few here and there where individuals with more formal credentials and with a positive history get fast tracked for peer review. Additionally those with a poor historical record (regardless of credentials) could be tossed into yet a third pile where especially open minded or bored individuals could review them.
You realize everything you just said was anticipated and answered within text from my post you quoted right?
I'd argue no, you basically claimed that Einstein's physics and math abilities were almost irrelevant to his discovering relativity.
"Einstein needed an immense understanding of math and physics to understand that some new math and physics was, when he developed that new math and physics he called it relativity and figured out how to explain it to us non-math/physics folk."
There were dozens of people as skilled as Einstein when it came to math and equally knowledgeable about physics. There are thousands of them today. Einstein had a portion of the brain known to be related to visuospatial cognition that was 15% larger than normal. That particular area of the brain activates when unusual creative thinking is occurring. That is what set him apart.
I probably not dozens, maybe a dozen but I'd be doubtful, but not only do you need to understand the math, you need a deep understanding of it. I'd say if anything set Einstein apart it was knowing the math and physics so well that he could make a intuitive leaps that made sense, that's almost opposite of what you implied. I don't argue that Einstein needed to be creative, but that's not what really set him apart.
Einstein was such a man in a world that appeared to be filled with mature science to those of the day. It all began with a mind who could visualize things others found vastly complex as simple abstractions. Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had.
You have that backwards, Einstein didn't come up with the inspiration of relativity then just throw out some math and physics to convince people. Einstein needed an immense understanding of math and physics to understand that some new math and physics was, when he developed that new math and physics he called it relativity and figured out how to explain it to us non-math/physics folk.
Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it.
Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed. But they will come. Probably several in a fairly short period of time.
Anyone can see simplicity in complexity, just listen to drunk people talking, the thing that is incredibly hard is to see the right simplification, if I don't understand the complexity I can come up with a hundred simplifications, but they'll probably be wrong, and even if by sheer luck one is dead right I'll have no idea which one it is.
No one discovered relativity before Einstein, I'm sure lots of people randomly said energy and matter were equivalent, but they didn't discover relativity, didn't understand why it has to work, why the universe can't have some other solution, they just made some random statement about a topic they didn't understand.
Saying you're going to revolutionize physics with 'high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning' is like saying you'll write the definitive translation of Voyna i mir without speaking Russian.
CERN wasn't a great example, if there's anything that compares to relativity in changing how we look look at the Universe it's string theory (if we can ever verify it), and if we look at the history of string theory, there must be twenty names listed.
Think of science like a sports league, when it's a small town league you'll regularly get kids who dominate every aspect of the game, but as the level of competition gets higher and higher those outliers become more and more rare. There may be a dozen physicists today with the same talent as Einstein, maybe a few with more, and because everyone is so talented no one can really stand out from among the rest.
Added to this is the fact that a lot of the previous big discoveries were relatively low hanging fruit, the amount of work you need to do climbing the tree of knowledge to get anything new really limits how much you can pick.
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I've been running to work for several years (fortunate to have shower facilities and a reasonable proximity). The major advantage is that it's a very passive form of exercise, if you go to the gym you have to stop what you're doing and go to the gym, if you have to go for a run, same thing, in either case you have to expend some willpower and motivate yourself to do it which is probably the biggest obstacle to exercise.
But running to work? There's even less setup and maintenance involved than with a bike, and you don't have to worry about traffic or road conditions. I get two runs every day with very little effort (if I want to go to work I do it automatically) and as a bonus I've become a pretty damn good runner.
What the Hell are you arguing, exactly? That maybe Global Warming isn't happening? I'd like to hear that argument, that the observations, namely warming global temperatures and decreased population of pirates, is not actually proof of Global Warming.
Anyone who denies that the globe is warming is a fool. Anyone who claims the cause of global warming has been proven is also a fool.
What do you mean by 'proven'? We obviously don't have a mathematical proof that human released CO2 is causing global warming, but anyone who doubts that scientists are in general agreement, and not in some massive conspiracy or hallucination, is living in an alternate reality.
Of course, since gradual warming over centuries or millennia in the past was good for life in the past it makes sense that rapid warming over decades would be just as good now (though humans will have to acclimate to some floods and famine).
The youth of Kim Jong-un is a good point, for all the talk of North Korea being some monolithic blob it's going to have its own internal politics. There's a lot of high ranking military and political people who are very happy with the current system, and tomorrow if Kim Jong-un announced he was going to hold free elections he might have an unexpected heart attack. He might be a reform minded leader who knows he's on very thin ice and wants to reassure the current power structure, or he might be a despot with some western tastes, there's really no easy way to tell but escalating back is probably a bad idea.
I wouldn't put too much on Taubes' analysis of the data, his main claim to fame that insulin responses cause obesity is BS. He might be right about excess salt not being a health issue (I honestly don't know what the long term issues are supposed to be) but be warned that Taubes is more interested in generating a novel result than a right one.
This isn't about Card being openly anti-gay or having an opinion, he's a political advocate on the board of the National Organization for Marriage. The only reason anyone gives a damn what Card thinks is because he's a famous author, if he's willing to spend the voice he's earned as an author to brand himself with a particular brand of political advocacy I have no problem with people rejecting his art because of that political advocacy. You can't put a hyperbaric chamber around the story and separate it from the author, a superman story by Orson Scott Card is different than the same story by someone without prominent political views.
Change the culture so gun ownership is weird, so that when you tell someone you own a device designed to kill people they give you an odd look and get uncomfortable, once that happens you'll see a real drop in guns and violence.
That's already being done, but anyone who does so has the mental state of a child. A firearm is a tool, little different from a hammer. It is a mechanically complex hammer, but at the end of the day, it is a shaped hunk of steel and plastic (or wood). Yes, it is a tool designed to kill. That is why police carry them, right? To kill as many people in as short a time as possible, right? That is why peace-keeping NATO and UN forces have them, right? To massacre people in the nations they send aide too, right?
There are limited circumstances in which carrying a tool designed to kill is appropriate, military and law enforcement are two of them because they have legitimate circumstances in which they can use the threat of death.
The gun culture in the US does not result in CDC statistics. Gang Violence due to the black market created by federal bans on recreational drugs does.
The drug trade is a huge factor in gang violence, but if you took away all their guns and replaced them with knives I'd be shocked if the homicide rate didn't drop by at least half.
More than 50% of the "gun violence" in the US is suicide. Suicide rates are independent of method. It is not a 'gun problem'. It's a mental health problem.
No suicide rates are not independent of method, guns are far more reliable at killing you than other forms of suicide, and when you remove guns suicides drop. One thing we can be certain with gun control is it will prevent suicides. And frankly, considering the suicide statistics if you own a gun you're putting you and your family in additional danger.
Stop vilifying True Americans who value their freedom and protect yours.
Even if I was American the civilian gun owners wouldn't be protecting my freedom, they'd be taking it away. Seriously, if I was the president and I wanted to destroy your political movement or take away your freedom the first thing I would do is give you and every one of your buddies a gun. Then I'd send in an agent provocateur, get you or your buddies to start shooting, then I show the public how scary you are and they'd let me do whatever the hell I wanted. Why do you think Assad and the other Arab dictators were so brutal in reacting to the protests? They weren't trying to scare the people into submission, they were trying to rile them into violence, the only reason Assad is still around is all the Syrians not afraid of the resistance became terrified once the fighting started.
You have this macho fantasy that you're going to intimidate the government into submission, it's BS and people are dying because of it.
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about more than his own personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance at being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” John Stuart Mill
The fact that just wars exist doesn't mean you need to go out and invent one.
when you tell someone you own a device designed to kill people they give you an odd look and get uncomfortable, once that happens you'll see a real drop in guns and violence.
None of my guns were designed to kill people. My shotgun was designed to kill birds and small game. The rest of my firearms were designed to fire a small lead ball at a target of my choosing. That is what guns are designed to do: hit what the person is aiming at. If the person is aiming at another person, then the gun might kill them. But that is the fault of the person firing the gun, not the gun itself. It is the person killing the other person. I do not and would not ever own something designed solely to kill someone.
If those other guns didn't kill people, if guns couldn't kill people and bullets bounced off our skin like BB pellets, do you think you'd still own those guns?
Guns aren't hard to acquire now and even with decent gun control they probably won't be that hard to acquire in the future.
The problem with the US (well a problem for me) is the gun culture where having a gun is considered cool and manly, as a result lots of people have guns and feel normal keeping them and using them. Change the culture so gun ownership is weird, so that when you tell someone you own a device designed to kill people they give you an odd look and get uncomfortable, once that happens you'll see a real drop in guns and violence. I don't see 3D printed guns as being a big factor either way.
Normally I'm suspicious of articles like this where we get one side of the story about some US law enforcement agency doing something bad, but in cases of seizing assets US law enforcement has an absolutely horrendous record.
And as for your claim that he should have just signed the form another case where someone took your advice led to the DHS seizing $35,000, I sure as hell wouldn't sign anything the DHS told me to if I knew there was an error.
I think so, at the end of the day alcoholism is a failure of willpower (not saying they have less willpower than non-alcoholics, just that the intoxication is too big a lure for them), they want the short term pleasure associated with being drunk. If they become sick while drinking that pleasurable objective is no attainable so the addiction should cease.
They come to like the taste because they associate it with the feelings that come after.
This would change the feelings that happens after drastically, I think it could be extremely effective.
If you're on a roadtrip would you really want to wait around at a supercharger station for an hour? I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that if the person is 150 miles from their destination they're going to wait till the range estimator reads 155 then take off.
How long does it take to wait for a towtruck? Yes I would damn well wait at the super charging station until the car told me it could make the trip. I fully agree with everything you wrote. So I'm sure you'll also agree with me that Broder is a complete moron based on:
The final leg of his trip was 61 miles and yet he disconnected the charge cable when the range display stated 32 miles
So car tells me it won't make it, random person on the phone tells me it's fine? Go with the guy on the phone right? Yep I'm sticking with moron.
You say moron I say human being. People aren't rational, we do magical thinking all the time, assuming something will work because we don't want to deal with it not working, and if we think an authority on X told us something we'll believe them since being wrong will be their fault.
I think it's quite possible that neither is being entirely dishonest.
The main disagreement is about not fully charging the car. But it's pretty critical to remember that charging, even at a supercharger, takes a long time.
If you're on a roadtrip would you really want to wait around at a supercharger station for an hour? I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that if the person is 150 miles from their destination they're going to wait till the range estimator reads 155 then take off.
Also one thing not quite clear from the NYT article:
"It was also Tesla that told me that an hour of charging (at a lower power level) at a public utility in Norwich, Conn., would give me adequate range to reach the Supercharger 61 miles away, even though the car’s range estimator read 32 miles – because, again, I was told that moderate-speed driving would “restore” the battery power lost overnight."
Note that this wasn't a supercharger station, this was just somewhere he could plug in so charging was slow. It's not quite clear to me whether he was told the car would be fine with the estimator at 32 miles, or the car would be fine after being plugged in for an hour. But I'm pretty sure there are a lot of people who could do some magical thinking to convince themselves that the guy on the phone said it was enough so it must be so!
The speed discrepancy is hard to account for (unless it was a dumb thing like the wrong tire size), but as for the 80 mph spike, maybe he just floored it to pass someone, and even though the logs show he wasn't at 45 mph for the limping stage he did reduce his speed, which suggests he was trying to extend the range and not run it dry like Elon Musk suggested. As for all the charging stations along the final route there's no evidence Broder had access to this info.
As for the cabin temperature the data definitely shows he drops it quite a bit, Elon Musk is definitely fudging the interpretation when he suggests it was always around 72.
In short Broder tried to use the car like a lot of people would, spending the absolute minimal amount of time waiting at a charging station, and due to some misunderstandings and bad breaks that tend to happen when you're pushing the limits, got burned.
Maybe because they're not yet ready for prime time? Seemed to me the biggest problem in the article was the battery charge dropping overnight in the cold weather. Elon Musk forgot to rebut that. Maybe if global warming is real, that won't be a problem. Eventually. Oh, and an hour and a half to refuel at supercharged station? I can't be the only one who sees a problem with that.
Do you really think it was necessary to throw a little flamebait in?
It is 100% certain that an executed criminal will not commit another crime. So yes, execution deters crime.
Well the alternative to execution is generally life in prison (if they're not exonerated) so even if they commit more crimes it will just be against other criminals (which I'm guessing you wouldn't mind).
Yeah... I wasn't saying that. You're saying a violent escalation makes the authorities afraid and keeps them in line, I'm saying agent provocateurs are proof that the government will actually encourage violent escalations against them in order to discredit you or take away your rights.
I didn't mean a literal legal right, I meant a strong social more against them being used regularly, but I could be mistaken and that was already the case.
Uhhh no, that's when boatloads of people will start getting prosecuted for shooting down drones.
Neither are binary problems, you can make them a little better, or a little worse, this dude made both worse.
Nah, your legislature, I'm Canadian (not that much better but we're not the ones driving it). And yes, the bombers were an excuse, just like this dude might be, are you starting to get it.
That's an assumption, one that goes counter to the ones this society is based upon. It has its corollary in "executing criminals and the consequent huge collateral damage to their families won't deter crime, it'll just turn others borderline and the borderline into criminals."
But in fact, what it does is breeds restraint and caution, which moves the borderline away from criminality, and keeps those who weren't even borderline well aware that living right is worth the candle. And when we execute the criminal, they stop committing crimes.
What you want to avoid doing is executing the innocent (or doing anything else to them, for that matter) because they and their families tend to get righteously pissed. Whereas the families of murderers and rapists also get hurt and pissed, but generally speaking, at the criminal, not the system. "YOU brought this on us!" "How could you!" and similar reactions.
Well I don't think it's well established that executions deter crime, and there's a lot to criticize in the US justice system, but in general punishing criminals with a fair punishment works.
Trouble comes up when people feel they've been treated unfairly. The problem with the bad cops is they don't necessarily think they're doing wrong, they think the public doesn't realize how bad the all the low lives and repeat offenders are so they feel justified in pushing the boundaries and throwing in some beatings, even the ones who get dirty and steal some drug money probably think they're justified for the stuff they're dealing with (and they're still better than the criminals). So when you try to punish them you don't make them afraid and cautious, you just give them more justification to do whatever the hell they want.
I'm sure you've heard of agent provocateurs, the reality is if someone is really looking to take your rights away they're not going to take away your guns, they're going to try to goad you into using them. That was the entire game plan of Bashar at the start of the revolution in Syria, commit atrocities until the revolution turns violent, then all of Bashar's backers dig in because they're terrified of what the revolutionaries will do if they get power. When you fight back violently that gives them the pretext to step up their game by restricting speech, imprisoning borderline individuals, or in this case, letting the cops use spy drones.
He's already done far more damage to them than they can do to him; will he be able to do enough to make a difference in the sick, decayed culture of police officers? Remains to be seen. I rather think he may have already done so.
Except I'm not worried about him, I'm worried about us, we've just lost the right not to be policed by drones, good cops have lost some ability to speak up about abuse without colleagues comparing them to this guy, and we've lost some right to walk down the street without being shot by some crazy cop. Guys shooting cops didn't give me freedom, they took away my right to relax and not worry about my hands if I get pulled over, just like the 9/11 bombers made airports a hell of a lot less free. Police will rightly just write him off as a one-off nutjob, if others pick up his cause and start shooting cops the response from the cops won't be "wow, we better clean up our act", it will be "ok, interact less with the public, and if anyone freaks you out shoot first and ask questions later".
This isn't a war you'll win, the most you'll do is create an enemy.
Cops murder people all the time. And they send innocent people off to their slaughterhouse prisons to die all the time. And they ruin innocent people's lives all the time. Families are hurt by that all the time. How is that a legitimate fight against crime? And why should their families be immune from the effects of their malfeasance, if the lives of the families of the people they abuse are not?
If you want to be righteous and violent then their families are fair game, and then you'll get a lot of other opportunities to be a hero when they re-escalate in response.
If you want to actually reduce the violence and killing, of both the cops and innocents, then you need to show restraint and fight them within the system. Killing bad cops won't get rid of bad cops so only the good ones are left, it will just turn good cops borderline and borderline cops bad.
Huh? Your citations seem to be consistent with what I have said regarding church beliefs. All seem to be saying that the church accepts the evolution of the physical body; believes that what truly distinguishes "humanity" from previous life is the introduction of the "soul"; believes that humanity is descended from "Adam" and "Eve", the first two with souls.
OK, you can stop right the hell there. You see that bit that you wrote that I bolded? Ignore everything else, because that is what I've been talking about this whole damned time. That bit, that everyone in the human race is descended from two people, is Catholic dogma. It is held as an infallibly correct part of Catholic theology. And it. Is. Wrong. That was my whole point, right there.
I am not saying that the figurative narrative is true, just that it is not far off from the scientific theory of a common matrilineal ancestor and a common patrilineal ancestor. The church's central point seems to be that all living humans have "souls" because of descent from "Adam", and science says that all living humans share something through a matrilineal line and through a patrilineal line. A "soul" could pass down these lines just as mitochondrial dna and a y chromosome do.
I don't think you quite understand the y-chromosome and mitochondrial Adam and Eve. The Y-chromosome is only passed by the male and the mitochondrial DNA by the female, there's random mutations but aside from that a male will always have his father's Y-chromosome and mother's mitochonrial DNA. It's a mathematical fact that there will always be a single male from who all other males have a direct male line descent (if you had two guys with different Y-chromosomes then just keep going back up the male line till you find their common male ancestor), and a single female who has a direct female line to all current women.
Unlike the biblical story they were not contemporaries, they don't seem to have been associated with any population bottleneck, they're just the most recent man and woman to have maintained a direct gendered line of offspring. You know who else contributed the Y-chromosome that every living man has? Adam's father, paternal grandfather, and paternal grand^(lots)father who is some sort of mouse-like creature. Maybe be there was an older adam or eve but their last gender line descendent got stepped on by a horse in the 15th century so someone more recent got the call. Also they were nowhere near to the most recent common ancestor who only lived about 5000-15000 years ago.
More so there appears to have been interbreeding with Neanderthals around 60,000 years ago. We separate from Neanderthals ~1.2 million years ago, so long after the "adam" and "eve" we were interbreeding with a separate species of humanity. It just so happens that those pairings never had and unbroken gender line descendents or the "Adam" and "Eve" would have had to move back about 1 million years.
We have no way of knowing if "Adam", "Eve", or the last common ancestor had multiple mates, they're just mathematical estimates in time, not identified individuals. But the handful of things it is possible to know, Adam and Eve being millenia apart, hybridizing with Neanderthals almost 100,000 years after Adam and Eve, all directly contradict the story in the bible.
I do believe you that it's not an ad (I didn't think it was an ad to begin with though didn't really express that well in my post).
I admit I'm not familiar with dice.com so I just guessed you were operating as a recruiting company. If I were to offer some constructive feedback it would be this. Slashdot has an anti-corporate reflex, even Red Hat, an open source company that contributes a ton of resources to open source, gets a lot of flack. So coming in with posts designed to direct traffic to your company's site (no shame, we all have to eat) you're already operating at a big disadvantage. I think the problem with this post was the Red Hat angle seemed really awkward and the rest, while good advice, wasn't news (like most people I didn't click the link). It just seemed so out of place for /. that people figured it must be an ad or it wouldn't get posted. Personally I think you just got a bad break in that timothy choose this story, I saw some of your other submissions and they looked pretty good, a bit of tech-job news with some interesting and relevant facts. I think if anyone is to blame for the flack you got it's timothy, maybe you did something to him at the last Dice company picnick :)
I'd be a lot more comfortable if there was an explicit acknowledgement as an ad, for all we know timothy saw Red Hat in the title and was friends with the Dice guy so decided it would make a good submission.
Even as an ad it's kinda pointless, all it does is say Red Hat is hiring, then gives some extremely general job application advice. Why not make it interesting by mentioning something about how Red Hat differs from non-open source companies in its hiring, or giving tips on how contributors to a big project could get themselves hired to work on that project.
"I'd argue no, you basically claimed that Einstein's physics and math abilities were almost irrelevant to his discovering relativity."
I said nothing of the sort. I clearly said of a next Einstein, "Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed."
I.E. Advanced Physics and mathematics skills among other prerequisites and the ability to see simplicity in complexity.
Actually what you wrote was:
"Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had." ...
"Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it."
IE, many people could have/did come up with relativity, but only Einstein could get people to listen to him.
You just got hung up on my implication that someone who gained an understanding of physics from informal learning rather than university study could potentially have value and yet would have no opportunity to express their insight under the current peer review system. It got your back up and you read the rest of what I said as what you expected to hear. Namely an assertion of that oft repeated and poorly informed opinion that a great leap or out-of-the-box idea would come from someone without knowledge of the subject because they are an outsider. I did not claim that and I do not claim that.
I will say, there is nothing about theoretical (as opposed to applied) physics that you can learn at a university that you can't learn from an armchair at home. Note, I didn't just assert that armchair physicists are equally educated to university trained. I said the POTENTIAL for an armchair physicist to attain that level is there.
I don't argue that you could educate yourself sufficiently on your own, but it would be incredibly difficult and you still seem to be missing the point that physics is fundamentally equations. Let me put it this way, neither you nor I understand relativity. If we went back in time before Einstein we could explain some of what it means, we could list off some experiments and say 'E=MC^2', but to really understand why relativity works, to really explain why the universe has to be that way, that needs a deep understanding of math and physics we don't have.
Such an individual would have expended as least as much effort as one university trained and would be barred from even reaching peer review in the traditional journals. Surely you can admit that isn't a good thing? Such individuals attempting to get published should be viewed on the merits of what they are trying to publish rather than personal credentials. Perhaps tossing such submissions in an online archive where those with better and more established reputation can choose to voluntarily review a few here and there where individuals with more formal credentials and with a positive history get fast tracked for peer review. Additionally those with a poor historical record (regardless of credentials) could be tossed into yet a third pile where especially open minded or bored individuals could review them.
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You realize everything you just said was anticipated and answered within text from my post you quoted right?
I'd argue no, you basically claimed that Einstein's physics and math abilities were almost irrelevant to his discovering relativity.
"Einstein needed an immense understanding of math and physics to understand that some new math and physics was, when he developed that new math and physics he called it relativity and figured out how to explain it to us non-math/physics folk."
There were dozens of people as skilled as Einstein when it came to math and equally knowledgeable about physics. There are thousands of them today. Einstein had a portion of the brain known to be related to visuospatial cognition that was 15% larger than normal. That particular area of the brain activates when unusual creative thinking is occurring. That is what set him apart.
I probably not dozens, maybe a dozen but I'd be doubtful, but not only do you need to understand the math, you need a deep understanding of it. I'd say if anything set Einstein apart it was knowing the math and physics so well that he could make a intuitive leaps that made sense, that's almost opposite of what you implied. I don't argue that Einstein needed to be creative, but that's not what really set him apart.
Btw, according to wikipedia you left out a couple important bits about Einstein's brain, since the inferior parietal lobe was 15 percent wider than normal.[12] The inferior parietal region is responsible for mathematical thought, visuospatial cognition, and imagery of movement.. I just bolded the two you left out, but I'd say all three would be great for understanding math/physics (though we don't understand the brain well enough to put much weight on that).
Einstein was such a man in a world that appeared to be filled with mature science to those of the day. It all began with a mind who could visualize things others found vastly complex as simple abstractions. Was he the first with the primitive ideas that were the core of his model? Maybe, maybe not. But he was the first who had enough grounding in physics and mathematics to turn those abstractions into the universal language and to get someone to listen to him long enough to see if he had.
You have that backwards, Einstein didn't come up with the inspiration of relativity then just throw out some math and physics to convince people. Einstein needed an immense understanding of math and physics to understand that some new math and physics was, when he developed that new math and physics he called it relativity and figured out how to explain it to us non-math/physics folk.
Today the model employed by science as a whole would not tolerate such abstractions from someone who wasn't like Einstein with the credentials and proofs to back them up. Someone with high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning could know enough to come up with valid models but unless they have a family member or childhood friend who does have the right background nothing could ever come of it.
Those who have the advanced physics, mathematics, or other prerequisites make up a small minority of the population. Those who can see simplicity in complexity make up and even smaller portion of the population. Those who can do both and are either stupid or arrogant enough not to dismiss the possibilities that are so obvious to them as not having already been tried are very very rare indeed. But they will come. Probably several in a fairly short period of time.
Anyone can see simplicity in complexity, just listen to drunk people talking, the thing that is incredibly hard is to see the right simplification, if I don't understand the complexity I can come up with a hundred simplifications, but they'll probably be wrong, and even if by sheer luck one is dead right I'll have no idea which one it is.
No one discovered relativity before Einstein, I'm sure lots of people randomly said energy and matter were equivalent, but they didn't discover relativity, didn't understand why it has to work, why the universe can't have some other solution, they just made some random statement about a topic they didn't understand.
Saying you're going to revolutionize physics with 'high school physics understanding and/or armchair physics learning' is like saying you'll write the definitive translation of Voyna i mir without speaking Russian.
CERN wasn't a great example, if there's anything that compares to relativity in changing how we look look at the Universe it's string theory (if we can ever verify it), and if we look at the history of string theory, there must be twenty names listed.
Think of science like a sports league, when it's a small town league you'll regularly get kids who dominate every aspect of the game, but as the level of competition gets higher and higher those outliers become more and more rare. There may be a dozen physicists today with the same talent as Einstein, maybe a few with more, and because everyone is so talented no one can really stand out from among the rest.
Added to this is the fact that a lot of the previous big discoveries were relatively low hanging fruit, the amount of work you need to do climbing the tree of knowledge to get anything new really limits how much you can pick.