As a scientist who has been integrally involved with both creating new and hiring existing scientists I find your blanket assertion to be rather insulting. Are you implying that the rate of bad scientists who get jobs is higher than say the rate of bad doctors who get jobs, or lawyers? Or are you just stating something that is so obviously true it lacks any substantial content? i.e. that you can point to a few bad apples in a large sample? Do you have any evidence to support your assertion?
If you irradiate a galactic dust with enough radiation to block out the visible portion of a supernova you will get dramatically increased thermal emission from the dust, this would very likely be visible. As now you have thermalized a large fraction of the energy released by the SN.
If a GRB went off in the Galaxy then a few years of increased radioisotopes would be the least of the indicators. A mass extinction would be associated with such an event as most of the ionosphere would be striped from the Earth causing cosmic rays to reach the surface, this would have dramatic and lasting effects on life. I also neither implied nor stated that this was associated with a GRB.
While supernova do not "stay lit in the sky for a very long time" you need to scale that with your time scale of the event. The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova that went off in 1054 (Earth time) and was visible to the human eye for a period of approximately 2 years after it went off. There is no associated increase in radioisotopes for that event, thus indicating that a larger (likely closer as well) event would have to be the cause of the increased radioisotopes observed in 775.
Two problems with your hypothesis: 1) if the Earth was hit by a huge burst of radiation coming from the direction of the Sun it would have been recorded as a solar flare or something odd. 2) There would be remnants of such a nearby super nova clearly visible now and most assuredly in the months immediately following the event.
You are asking someone to prove a negative. There has been quite a bit of historical discussion about why this is essentially impossible. For instance I cannot prove that pigs do not fly. There is a large amount of evidence that they don't but that is not a proof. So if your level of "religious nut job" requires simply taking a lack of ANY evidence for something as sufficient to not believe in it then I don't see how anyone doesn't fall into that category. Do you believe pigs fly?
You draw this conclusion from a sample group of 2 with 2 groups? Not saying it is wrong but it seems more reasonable to conclude, from all the post here, that more data is needed to understand the issues that are creating the discrepancies. Furthermore, regardless of how genetically or socially predisposed a group is to avoid certain fields if that group represents a sizable portion of your society (i.e. women) then NOT having them in the work place can lead to some very bad internal social norms.
Did you actually read the article? The press release referred to in the summary and in the actual news articles (not the forum post you refer to) give current dates. The press release is for May 23, 2012. So, unsurprisingly, the reverse engineering for 40 year old tech has taken some time and has been continuously documented for at least the past few years but, CURRENTLY, Iran is claiming to be releasing it. That is news.
You sir have succinctly summarized the content of the article in a (what I think of as) non-inflamitory way. Thank you! Many others in the thread think that NASA is going to send the MiB to your door to get you for messing with their stuff but I think you are correct: I and many others like me want to have the history of humanity's first baby steps into space kept as historical evidence and reminders of how far we have progressed.
You are suggesting that the USA was a shining example of how you want a country to be run between 1870 and 1913? A period of time in which the USA saw some of the most egregious examples of centralization of wealth within a very small population? A period of time characterized by robber barons and poor working conditions? When the USA was largely rural and practicing unsustainable farming? What exactly are we supposed to think is the shining example of how an country should be run?
If the parent to your reply is correct that "the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android" then Sun did need to register that it owns the copyright and could somehow limit the rights of the author to distribute the code.
The Amish, like every other culture, have a variety of things to do to pass the time and stave off boredom. I believe that the parent was trying to say people need entertainment of some for good mental health. e.g. playing ball and stick for a few hours is more healthy than staring at a blank wall.
Just as a note the Amish tend to be reasonably wealthy: virtually no costs but produce extra to sell. Check out the stories on the news sometimes about extravagant Amish kids who are experiencing their year outside the community.
So it is reasonable to force citizens to pay for a government issued ID to vote? I was under the impression that, as a citizen I had the right to vote and be free from unwarranted search by my government. Requiring me to obtain a government issued ID to express my opinion in a democracy is something that must either be encoded in the constitution or not allowed. Requiring government issued ID without requiring it at birth means you will disenfranchise legitimate voters who, until some law that they can now no longer vote out the representative who passed it made that impossible.
I have no issue with federally issued government ID that is given at birth and somehow actually tied the the individual. However I do not think here is any reasonable way of implementing such an ID and voter fraud (illegitimate voters casting votes) is NOT a problem in the US as many others in this thread have noted.
The only objective that requiring a government issued ID in the US accomplishes is disenfranchising the poor, the young, and the old.
From infinity is very difficult to hit even an Earth size object. When you bring that object closer it becomes rather easy, that is one reason satellites crash to the Earth when they become inactive, that is the path of least resistance. Over time all orbits are unstable and, since we have an atmosphere and other junk in orbit, generally decay. As a point of fact: it is reasonably common to lose a satellite intended for orbit around another celestial body through impact with said celestial body (e.g. the Mars Climate Orbiter).
Fair point, however, you then directly use the opposite assumption in your statement: "[The US tax rate] is for example only a few percentage point lower than Canada even through Canada has tax funded universal health coverage." So you too are comparing apples to orange by your own accounting.
That being said while Canada provides universal health care with their taxes they do it at a very low cost relative to even similar service in the US. That is Canada provides the same coverage for less. While the US collects less in taxes+health insurance, but only marginally by your assertion, while only providing health care to 84% of citizens at an average rate of 16% of GDP. While other countries are spending money providing universal health care, excellent public education, improved infrastructure, etc. the US is spending money on wars without end, a huge military industrial complex, and providing some of the least efficient health care in 1st worth nations. Our private sector does not provide an efficient solution to non-market driven problems e.g. health care, military. What is baffling to me is why anyone would think it would.
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself where tax dollars are being spent. We are not over spending on maintenance of government facilities (see the article), we are over spending by spending 20% of our budget on defense and even more out of budget. Instead of investing in infrastructure, a time proven way to stimulate long term growth, we are neglecting it and talking about cutting taxes when we are not taking in sufficient fund to pay the current budget.
As US citizens we live in one of the most affluent countries in the world and pay one of the smallest tax rates. While I disagree with how we spend some of the Federal budget I find it difficult to imagine how I am not getting far more than I pay for in taxes from my government. Living in a democracy requires that we compromise; that we accept that some things will be done that we disagree with; that we will not be happy with every decision our government makes. We, as citizens, have a duty to hold our elected officials accountable for their failing and to seek better representation when they do fail. We also have a duty to call out those within government who see it as a cash cow, as is the case with the GSA spending, as well as those outside government, as in the case of oil companies being given tax subsidies. Regardless of these few failings, hampering our government further will not lead to some magical land of plenty but to a cyberpunk dystopian brubdom.
While I can see ones reason for taking their frustration out on the TSA agents, this type of response will likely have the opposite effect. The TSA agents are acting as directed. To affect change we need to work to change the laws and regulations.
The summary makes it sound like there is a particle that physicists have been seeking called a Majorana particle when in fact a Majorana particle is named because of its quantum field theory behavior. In this case NO particle was discovered but an excitation of a novel condensed matter state which behaves in an analogous way to a Majorana fermion. So in conclusion this very interesting discovery was both summarized and publicized in a misleading way.
What you are suggesting is called investing, not donation, it legally requires far more hurdles for a fledgling business to jump through to obtain. Furthermore, until the recent signing of the JOBS Act it was illegal for average people to make such investments within the US.
While I would love to be able to invest directly with local businesses there is a real concern about fraud when dealing with hundreds of thousands of small investment options. The SEC, or anything like it, is incapable of ensuring a limited risk to fraud for investors. We are in the infancy of crowd funding and while I yearn for a well regulated and open marketplace to invest in local business I think it reasonable that we take it one step at a time and not rush into things.
As someone else who replied to your message noted: VISA (and in face MasterCard) explicitly forbid this in their terms of service. More can be found here which also links directly to the TOS in question.
You are conflating scientists with policy makers. Policy makers will use whatever information they can to push their agenda. That agenda may or may not be based on sound reasoning. And while there are certainly some scientists who like to spout off about things outside their field, they are in the minority.
I suspect that your distaste with science and scientists comes from how policy makers and the media portray it. Case in point would be the recent OPERA faster than light neutrino results. The OPERA collaboration made a clear scientific statement: they observed a signal in their detector that indicated that neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light, they had double checked their procedure and were in the process of triple checking, and that they would be grateful for another experiment to confirm their results. The media goes crazy with all the craziness that would ensue if there were such a thing, while OPERA and other experiments go along doing what they do: science. Then a few weeks ago OPERA says they found a flaw in their method and another experiment shows no faster than light neutrinos. The discussion on Slashdot during that time had many angry comments from people blaming OPERA for the hype. It was not they who created the hype but the media and people like us on continually talking about it.
As you claim to speak for all conservatives, would you mind providing a reason for not trusting scientists? Sure I can see why you don't trust scientists working at Philip Morris to tell you about the harms from smoking tobacco products, but "scientists" is a large category to mistrust for any single reason. I am a scientist, do you distrust what I post here because I am a scientist? If so why? What are your reasons.
I totally agree that the politicalization of science has been a detriment to both science and society. That we as a nation should remove politics from science. However you cannot remove science from politics. Our nation should not make policy decisions based on gut feelings when a rational understanding is available.
Simply stating that you don't trust scientists without providing a reason is a great analogy for the current problem as I see it: many people FEEL that they KNOW what the answer is and when evidence contradicts that they ignore it, when evidence validates it they claim victory. In reality very little is ever that cut and dry. Science will (in fact must) be wrong at times. There are many reasons for that but the number of times that it has been due to scientific misconduct are minuscule when compared to the number of times it was just a statistical fluke or experimental error. So what evidence do you have to support your distrust of scientists as a group?
I think there is one group missing from your "everyone wins" statement, mainly the companions that provide both cable and internet access. Such companies, Comcast being one, do not want its users to stop paying for cable AND internet. By allowing competing video services such as those you listed into their internal networks thereby reducing the network congestion they are letting their paying customers gain access to content they provide but are not being paid for.
That is I use Comcast as my ISP (no other choice) but not cable. I pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and watch lots of stuff on Hulu and PBS.com. I pay about 20 a month for my service. My colleagues watch about the same amount of TV I do but get a "deal" with Comcast where they get Cable, Internet and Phone for 100/month. They also pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime. So from Comcasts point of view I am not worth as much as a customer. By placing these caps they are trying to make customers like myself pay for cable so they can watch content online because if Comcast cannot figure out how to make people like me pay them more they are looking at significant drop in revenue when my colleagues realize that 100/month for what Comcast offers isn't worth it and switch to a data only solution.
Data caps have nothing to do with relieving network congestion nor passing costs to those who are driving those costs. Network congestion is about usage at peak usage times, not about total bits passing through a router over the course of a month. If Comcast's network is volume limited then they have oversold their network and should reduce the maximum bandwidth a user has access to or improve their network. The costs of having a non-volume-limited network in place for the peak volume are not driven by the person who downloads videos off peak hours but by the hordes of customers doing every type of thing all at once. Thus the costs are not linked to the total amount of data downloaded in a month but to the bandwidth you are using at peak usage hours.
Caps are just a way for content middle men to protect their profit margins. Selling internet service alone is not as profitable as selling cable and internet.
The point is that overall superconductors reduce the total power to heat output of any spacecraft and we have solved the problem of heat dissipation on spacecraft with the exception of near sun craft. So since we CAN dissipate the heat associated with what we currently produce in spacecraft and thus if we can keep the superconductors at the temp needed to be superconductors. That said I don't know why superconductors would be so useful on a spacecraft except for low noise instrumentation.
The US currently loses about 6.5% of the power generated to transmission losses. If we developed a material capable of being used for transmission lines (i.e. super conductive at >60 C and malleable enough to be made into wires) we would gain that back promptly which would also reduce our carbon emissions. It would become far more economically viable to build large scale solar and wind power farms in the central areas of the USA (further from the large population centers) as one would not be losing as much to transmission losses.
Slashdot Mirror
As a scientist who has been integrally involved with both creating new and hiring existing scientists I find your blanket assertion to be rather insulting. Are you implying that the rate of bad scientists who get jobs is higher than say the rate of bad doctors who get jobs, or lawyers? Or are you just stating something that is so obviously true it lacks any substantial content? i.e. that you can point to a few bad apples in a large sample? Do you have any evidence to support your assertion?
If you irradiate a galactic dust with enough radiation to block out the visible portion of a supernova you will get dramatically increased thermal emission from the dust, this would very likely be visible. As now you have thermalized a large fraction of the energy released by the SN.
If a GRB went off in the Galaxy then a few years of increased radioisotopes would be the least of the indicators. A mass extinction would be associated with such an event as most of the ionosphere would be striped from the Earth causing cosmic rays to reach the surface, this would have dramatic and lasting effects on life. I also neither implied nor stated that this was associated with a GRB.
While supernova do not "stay lit in the sky for a very long time" you need to scale that with your time scale of the event. The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova that went off in 1054 (Earth time) and was visible to the human eye for a period of approximately 2 years after it went off. There is no associated increase in radioisotopes for that event, thus indicating that a larger (likely closer as well) event would have to be the cause of the increased radioisotopes observed in 775.
Two problems with your hypothesis: 1) if the Earth was hit by a huge burst of radiation coming from the direction of the Sun it would have been recorded as a solar flare or something odd. 2) There would be remnants of such a nearby super nova clearly visible now and most assuredly in the months immediately following the event.
You are asking someone to prove a negative. There has been quite a bit of historical discussion about why this is essentially impossible. For instance I cannot prove that pigs do not fly. There is a large amount of evidence that they don't but that is not a proof. So if your level of "religious nut job" requires simply taking a lack of ANY evidence for something as sufficient to not believe in it then I don't see how anyone doesn't fall into that category. Do you believe pigs fly?
You draw this conclusion from a sample group of 2 with 2 groups? Not saying it is wrong but it seems more reasonable to conclude, from all the post here, that more data is needed to understand the issues that are creating the discrepancies. Furthermore, regardless of how genetically or socially predisposed a group is to avoid certain fields if that group represents a sizable portion of your society (i.e. women) then NOT having them in the work place can lead to some very bad internal social norms.
Did you actually read the article? The press release referred to in the summary and in the actual news articles (not the forum post you refer to) give current dates. The press release is for May 23, 2012. So, unsurprisingly, the reverse engineering for 40 year old tech has taken some time and has been continuously documented for at least the past few years but, CURRENTLY, Iran is claiming to be releasing it. That is news.
You sir have succinctly summarized the content of the article in a (what I think of as) non-inflamitory way. Thank you! Many others in the thread think that NASA is going to send the MiB to your door to get you for messing with their stuff but I think you are correct: I and many others like me want to have the history of humanity's first baby steps into space kept as historical evidence and reminders of how far we have progressed.
You are suggesting that the USA was a shining example of how you want a country to be run between 1870 and 1913? A period of time in which the USA saw some of the most egregious examples of centralization of wealth within a very small population? A period of time characterized by robber barons and poor working conditions? When the USA was largely rural and practicing unsustainable farming? What exactly are we supposed to think is the shining example of how an country should be run?
If the parent to your reply is correct that "the guy who wrote it gave it to both Sun AND Android" then Sun did need to register that it owns the copyright and could somehow limit the rights of the author to distribute the code.
The Amish, like every other culture, have a variety of things to do to pass the time and stave off boredom. I believe that the parent was trying to say people need entertainment of some for good mental health. e.g. playing ball and stick for a few hours is more healthy than staring at a blank wall.
Just as a note the Amish tend to be reasonably wealthy: virtually no costs but produce extra to sell. Check out the stories on the news sometimes about extravagant Amish kids who are experiencing their year outside the community.
So it is reasonable to force citizens to pay for a government issued ID to vote? I was under the impression that, as a citizen I had the right to vote and be free from unwarranted search by my government. Requiring me to obtain a government issued ID to express my opinion in a democracy is something that must either be encoded in the constitution or not allowed. Requiring government issued ID without requiring it at birth means you will disenfranchise legitimate voters who, until some law that they can now no longer vote out the representative who passed it made that impossible.
I have no issue with federally issued government ID that is given at birth and somehow actually tied the the individual. However I do not think here is any reasonable way of implementing such an ID and voter fraud (illegitimate voters casting votes) is NOT a problem in the US as many others in this thread have noted.
The only objective that requiring a government issued ID in the US accomplishes is disenfranchising the poor, the young, and the old.
From infinity is very difficult to hit even an Earth size object. When you bring that object closer it becomes rather easy, that is one reason satellites crash to the Earth when they become inactive, that is the path of least resistance. Over time all orbits are unstable and, since we have an atmosphere and other junk in orbit, generally decay. As a point of fact: it is reasonably common to lose a satellite intended for orbit around another celestial body through impact with said celestial body (e.g. the Mars Climate Orbiter).
Fair point, however, you then directly use the opposite assumption in your statement: "[The US tax rate] is for example only a few percentage point lower than Canada even through Canada has tax funded universal health coverage." So you too are comparing apples to orange by your own accounting.
That being said while Canada provides universal health care with their taxes they do it at a very low cost relative to even similar service in the US. That is Canada provides the same coverage for less. While the US collects less in taxes+health insurance, but only marginally by your assertion, while only providing health care to 84% of citizens at an average rate of 16% of GDP. While other countries are spending money providing universal health care, excellent public education, improved infrastructure, etc. the US is spending money on wars without end, a huge military industrial complex, and providing some of the least efficient health care in 1st worth nations. Our private sector does not provide an efficient solution to non-market driven problems e.g. health care, military. What is baffling to me is why anyone would think it would.
Perhaps you should familiarize yourself where tax dollars are being spent. We are not over spending on maintenance of government facilities (see the article), we are over spending by spending 20% of our budget on defense and even more out of budget. Instead of investing in infrastructure, a time proven way to stimulate long term growth, we are neglecting it and talking about cutting taxes when we are not taking in sufficient fund to pay the current budget.
As US citizens we live in one of the most affluent countries in the world and pay one of the smallest tax rates. While I disagree with how we spend some of the Federal budget I find it difficult to imagine how I am not getting far more than I pay for in taxes from my government. Living in a democracy requires that we compromise; that we accept that some things will be done that we disagree with; that we will not be happy with every decision our government makes. We, as citizens, have a duty to hold our elected officials accountable for their failing and to seek better representation when they do fail. We also have a duty to call out those within government who see it as a cash cow, as is the case with the GSA spending, as well as those outside government, as in the case of oil companies being given tax subsidies. Regardless of these few failings, hampering our government further will not lead to some magical land of plenty but to a cyberpunk dystopian brubdom.
While I can see ones reason for taking their frustration out on the TSA agents, this type of response will likely have the opposite effect. The TSA agents are acting as directed. To affect change we need to work to change the laws and regulations.
The summary makes it sound like there is a particle that physicists have been seeking called a Majorana particle when in fact a Majorana particle is named because of its quantum field theory behavior. In this case NO particle was discovered but an excitation of a novel condensed matter state which behaves in an analogous way to a Majorana fermion. So in conclusion this very interesting discovery was both summarized and publicized in a misleading way.
What you are suggesting is called investing, not donation, it legally requires far more hurdles for a fledgling business to jump through to obtain. Furthermore, until the recent signing of the JOBS Act it was illegal for average people to make such investments within the US.
While I would love to be able to invest directly with local businesses there is a real concern about fraud when dealing with hundreds of thousands of small investment options. The SEC, or anything like it, is incapable of ensuring a limited risk to fraud for investors. We are in the infancy of crowd funding and while I yearn for a well regulated and open marketplace to invest in local business I think it reasonable that we take it one step at a time and not rush into things.
As someone else who replied to your message noted: VISA (and in face MasterCard) explicitly forbid this in their terms of service. More can be found here which also links directly to the TOS in question.
You are conflating scientists with policy makers. Policy makers will use whatever information they can to push their agenda. That agenda may or may not be based on sound reasoning. And while there are certainly some scientists who like to spout off about things outside their field, they are in the minority.
I suspect that your distaste with science and scientists comes from how policy makers and the media portray it. Case in point would be the recent OPERA faster than light neutrino results. The OPERA collaboration made a clear scientific statement: they observed a signal in their detector that indicated that neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light, they had double checked their procedure and were in the process of triple checking, and that they would be grateful for another experiment to confirm their results. The media goes crazy with all the craziness that would ensue if there were such a thing, while OPERA and other experiments go along doing what they do: science. Then a few weeks ago OPERA says they found a flaw in their method and another experiment shows no faster than light neutrinos. The discussion on Slashdot during that time had many angry comments from people blaming OPERA for the hype. It was not they who created the hype but the media and people like us on continually talking about it.
As you claim to speak for all conservatives, would you mind providing a reason for not trusting scientists? Sure I can see why you don't trust scientists working at Philip Morris to tell you about the harms from smoking tobacco products, but "scientists" is a large category to mistrust for any single reason. I am a scientist, do you distrust what I post here because I am a scientist? If so why? What are your reasons.
I totally agree that the politicalization of science has been a detriment to both science and society. That we as a nation should remove politics from science. However you cannot remove science from politics. Our nation should not make policy decisions based on gut feelings when a rational understanding is available.
Simply stating that you don't trust scientists without providing a reason is a great analogy for the current problem as I see it: many people FEEL that they KNOW what the answer is and when evidence contradicts that they ignore it, when evidence validates it they claim victory. In reality very little is ever that cut and dry. Science will (in fact must) be wrong at times. There are many reasons for that but the number of times that it has been due to scientific misconduct are minuscule when compared to the number of times it was just a statistical fluke or experimental error. So what evidence do you have to support your distrust of scientists as a group?
I think there is one group missing from your "everyone wins" statement, mainly the companions that provide both cable and internet access. Such companies, Comcast being one, do not want its users to stop paying for cable AND internet. By allowing competing video services such as those you listed into their internal networks thereby reducing the network congestion they are letting their paying customers gain access to content they provide but are not being paid for.
That is I use Comcast as my ISP (no other choice) but not cable. I pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and watch lots of stuff on Hulu and PBS.com. I pay about 20 a month for my service. My colleagues watch about the same amount of TV I do but get a "deal" with Comcast where they get Cable, Internet and Phone for 100/month. They also pay for Netflix and Amazon Prime. So from Comcasts point of view I am not worth as much as a customer. By placing these caps they are trying to make customers like myself pay for cable so they can watch content online because if Comcast cannot figure out how to make people like me pay them more they are looking at significant drop in revenue when my colleagues realize that 100/month for what Comcast offers isn't worth it and switch to a data only solution.
Data caps have nothing to do with relieving network congestion nor passing costs to those who are driving those costs. Network congestion is about usage at peak usage times, not about total bits passing through a router over the course of a month. If Comcast's network is volume limited then they have oversold their network and should reduce the maximum bandwidth a user has access to or improve their network. The costs of having a non-volume-limited network in place for the peak volume are not driven by the person who downloads videos off peak hours but by the hordes of customers doing every type of thing all at once. Thus the costs are not linked to the total amount of data downloaded in a month but to the bandwidth you are using at peak usage hours.
Caps are just a way for content middle men to protect their profit margins. Selling internet service alone is not as profitable as selling cable and internet.
If you had RTFA you would have noted that the ban on cell phones is not being revisited. That is cell phones will continue to be banned during flight.
The point is that overall superconductors reduce the total power to heat output of any spacecraft and we have solved the problem of heat dissipation on spacecraft with the exception of near sun craft. So since we CAN dissipate the heat associated with what we currently produce in spacecraft and thus if we can keep the superconductors at the temp needed to be superconductors. That said I don't know why superconductors would be so useful on a spacecraft except for low noise instrumentation.
The US currently loses about 6.5% of the power generated to transmission losses. If we developed a material capable of being used for transmission lines (i.e. super conductive at >60 C and malleable enough to be made into wires) we would gain that back promptly which would also reduce our carbon emissions. It would become far more economically viable to build large scale solar and wind power farms in the central areas of the USA (further from the large population centers) as one would not be losing as much to transmission losses.