All you have to do is pull the ol' switcheroo when the pirates start to offload your booty. Switch your booty with remote-detonating incendiary explosives and, once they reach a safe distance, press down dramatically on your red plunger switch.
Every glass contains only a couple of molecules? More like it probably contains a couple of molecules that haven't passed thru some organism's system. The fact is that if most water had not, we wouldn't need a treatment plant, now would we? We'd just take the water that the treatment plant is treating and send it directly through to people's homes...
That toothbrush thing is a lie. It's been discounted both by Cecil Adams Mythbusters. If ever there was an Appeal to Authority that isn't a fallacy, that's it!
Classical particles do behave that way. If you have a one-pound sealed bottle of water and heat it up, it will increase in mass - not enough to make it weigh 20 pounds more, for any conceivable increase in temperature that a bottle could sustain.
Wha...?! I do not think this is correct, unless you're referring to quantum differences in mass. If you have a sealed container full of something, and change the temperature of that container and its contents, why would its mass change according to Newtonian physics? (I was just drawing this analogy to show what classical things would if they behaved as the quantum particles described in TFA do.)
But your first question is still a mystery to me. Why does energy manifest itself as resistance to changes in net inertia? If someone can explain that to me, I'd be appreciative.
"Resistance to changes in inertia" = "mass". Does that clarify what I was saying?
Well, I might agree with your sentiment, except that the schools have plenty of money. That's not the issue. The issue is how they're spending it.
The fact is that in this district, 25 prior, spending per student capita was less than 20% what it was when I was trying to volunteer (inflation-adjusted). Despite spending more than 5x in real dollars per student, the district had gone from one of the better ones in the state to getting taken over by the state in that time for substandard performance. And the median salary for teachers was lower, despite the number of teachers per student capita also going down slightly.
How can that be?, you ask. Where was all that extra money going? It turns out that the majority of the funds were allocated to administrative positions created over that time, jobs that exist between the teacher and superintendent levels. The rest of the money went to teacher salaries. But wait, you say, you said teacher salaries went down on average, and class sizes grew, so how can get be getting more money? Actually, I said that median salaries went down. In fact, average salaries went up. What happened is that the distribution of those salaries skewed much more heavily toward the teachers in top-level senior positions (the same teachers that also happen to be more influential in—you guessed it—the union).
If you look at the bottom of the teacher pay scale set by the union, all becomes clear. 25 years before, a brand new special ed teacher worked about 6 months out of the year and made $28k/yr (today's dollars). At the time I volunteered, that same teacher had to handle more kids and was making $18k/yr. The department head, however, was making 3x what they made 25 years prior. The union dues were also much higher, and those running the unions were making way more as well.
A very popular political sentiment coming from the teachers union around that time was that we didn't pay our teachers enough. In fact, the way the union structured the pay scales, the state was paying them more than ever—it's just that all the money is being directed to the top 10%-20%...in effect, the union is responsible for the ever-lower pay. And because the union has to negotiate with the administration, when they ask for more they prefer to keep good relations by trying to get it from the taxpayer rather than at the administration's expense, which is yet one more entity that's all too happy to milk the tax cow too.
None of this would be allowed to happen in a privatized school system...which is indeed why so many of the best teachers prefer to start or transfer at some point to private schools. They make more money and have better performing, smaller classes. The administration of private schools is lean, meaning they don't have to deal with excessive bureaucracy either. But that leaves the public schools with the kids that have parents who can't afford to pay out in the cold, and the schools get ever worse, the unions and administrations demand ever more money despite a continuing decline in student performance.
We need to change our K-12 model to the same model used by universities in this country. We have the best universities in the world because we have public institutions competing with private institutions of all levels and costs. Until we allow parents of all different levels of income to send their tax money and their kids to whatever school they like (either public or private), public schools will continue to get more and more bloated and ineffective while private schools get better and more constrained to the upper classes. We need radical voucher reform.
I'm surprised the teacher's union let you in the door. When I volunteered to help set up and maintain the local high school's network via a volunteer program, the teacher's union effectively shut me and several other willing volunteers out. They were bucking to get extra pay for one of their own or a whole new paid position created instead, and would rather see the work not get done at all than have it done by volunteers. (Same went for after-school tutoring.)
This happened about a year or so before the performance of that particular school slipped so badly it was taken over by the state of California in a NCLB-mandated move (I think it was NCLB-related...maybe just CA state policy).
As a twist of the knife, it wasn't enough for the teacher's union just to block me from volunteering, either. Those of us interested in helping out in the program that didn't happen to have kids were required to go through a process of registration that involved ceding significant rights of privacy to the school district and the state of CA. If we agreed to do it, we were essentially registered by the state and processed as if we were sex offenders; when I complained—considering I would not be working with any kids in my volunteer role—they told me unless I was a sick pedobear I should have no problem with it.
By the way...did anyone else notice that the OP's company required him to take vacation to do volunteer work? What kind of evil company does that? Any bosses out there have employees doing something worthwhile...COMP THE TIME for cryin' out loud. It's not like he went on a six month sabbatical...it was a day or two.
I don't get it. Jiggling around really fast, when you step back a bit, apparently manifests as resistance to changes in net inertia?
If classical particles behaved this way, let's say you had a bottle of water that weighed a pound. Then you heat it up so that it all turns to vapor inside the bottle and the molecules are flying around like crazy. Suddenly, the bottle behaves as though it's 20 pounds just because of all that internal activity.
Is this visualization represent a fairly good intuitive feel for what TFA is saying?
Exactly—though the main point of my response above was to make the point that the specific mechanics of how the process unfolds is irrelevant because a thermodynamic maxim must be adhered to: conservation of energy. (Actually, since Einstein, we know that mass is a form of energy, so conservation of mass-energy.)
It's useful to go into the details of energy state transformations only insofar as one would want to understand the process...but this isn't necessary to answer the question I was addressing. To understand whether a process will release energy for human use is fairly simple from the thermodynamic standpoint—all you have to do is calculate the total potential energy of the constituents at the beginning, and then calculate the total potential energy of the constituents at the end. If the sum of potential energy in the end state is less than the amount in the beginning constituents, the process is overall exothermic and can theoretically produce usable energy for human use (actually getting it is a different story...at least one reaction pathway from reactants to products must exist and that pathway must not release too much of the energy in unusable ways).
If you consider gas, for example, it has high potential energy. Adding a bit of energy in the form of a spark, in the presence of oxygen, provides a reaction pathway for the gas to react and form CO2, H20, CO, and a variety of other products. The sum of potential energies of the products is much lower than the initial reactants, gas & O2, so it's a net exothermic reaction and is useful.
Now that gas prices are high, you'll see scam sites that try to sell you the idea of increasing mileage using only water and no other additional energy source. One need not understand the proposed technology if you know basic thermodynamics, however, because water is an extremely low energy compound. Barring nuclear reactions, water is a product of reactions, not a reactant, because of this. Next time a child asks you why it's impossible to burn water, you'll have a ready answer: It's already been burnt. Sites selling a water-fuelled car technology typically try to confuse victims by discussing oxyhydrogen torches, or "water torches". These torches work by using electricity to electrolyze water—that is, split H2O into H2 and O2—and then burn the resulting gases to make a high-temperature flame. In these applications, though, H2O is an energy sink, not an energy source. The ultimate source of energy is vast amounts of electricity, which represents a lot more energy put in than comes out in the form of heat at the end of the process.
Actually, the service industry is a bad example. I worked at a convenience store for a summer and my wife worked at a coffee shop for a while. Both of us stopped getting paid when the doors were locked despite the fact that there was still cleanup to be done. The theory was that we were supposed to be cleaning as the shift was winding down, but time and customers rarely allowed for that.
My approach to that would be to do all the cleanup that needs doing and let customers wait. If my boss has a problem with it, I give him a choice—I can wait on customers now and leave at quittin' time, I can do it now while customers stack up and get steamed, or he can pay me OT when I stay late. There's no fourth option where I work for free.
The only way working and not getting paid for the time is acceptable is if I'm a salaried employee paid to meet Goals & Objectives. If I'm hourly, time spent doing something—anything—for my employer, whether booting up a machine or cleaning up a restaurant, is time I'm getting paid. IANAL but I understand that's basic labor law.
The fact is that trying to prove that God does or doesn't exist using science is absurd. You don't use a screwdriver to weld plate steel, because it's not the correct tool for the job.
I agree that science (and perhaps the philosophical approach called empiricism...but I haven't really thought it through) are useless when arguing about the existence of anything metaphysical (which is, by definition, "outside the physical realm"). Nor did I do so—where did I use the scientific or empirical methods to support my argument? My argument is based in pure logic. Essentially, the conclusions are: (1) there is a difference between absence of believe and disbelief in a positive assertion only when the context of the set of possible results is both known and understood, and (2) where context of the set of possible results is not known or understood, absence of belief is identical to disbelief in that positive assertion.
Again, if you do not agree, then the inescapable consequence is: you must accept the possibility—and plausibility—of every assertion that cannot be disproved. The example I gave in my argument is that, were I to assert there is an undetectable green basketball forever hovering next to my head, you must accept the possibility that my assertion may be true. Moreover, you must also accept that, in the absence of empirical evidence to the contrary, my absurd assertion is as likely to be true as it is to be false.
I didn't resort to using science of any kind in my argument. I just took the poster's viewpoint and extended it to its natural end. One other consequence of this line of reasoning is that it allows an obstructionist stance to any assertion, regardless of that assertion's empirical support, if it can be shown to be in conflict with any assertion from the set of assertions that cannot be disproved empirically. This is as close to a full-fledged reductio ad absurdum argument that can be had on this topic, I think.
Basic atheistic logic like you show above amounts to "I can't prove the existence or non-existence of God using my selected method, therefore he/she(/it? - pick a god, any god) can't exist."
That's not what I wrote above in the slightest. You have completely missed the main point of my post.
And here is where atheism becomes a religion:
The apparent need of atheists to convert those who do not share their views, and the zealotry of those trying to do the convincing.
Here you're simply wrong. You're confusing evangelism with religion. It's true that these two overlap in the evangelical faiths, but many faiths are not evangelical, and many non-religious ideas are evangelized (any kind of product marketing, for instance).
Besides, you didn't even get my position correct. I'm not attempting to convert anyone to atheism, nor would doing so serve any kind of personal agenda—not that it's relevant to this discussion in the slightest, but I am not an atheist, nor do I have any interest in this discussion in converting anyone to atheism. I'm simply arguing here that atheism itself does not belong to the class of religious beliefs as was asserted.
The architects of this EU patent system are silly fools! Why didn't they set it up as in the US, where you're out the fees regardless of whether the patent is granted?:-)
There is no evidence [of] the existence of god. I'm with you so far.
There is no evidence [of] the nonexistence of god. Even if we accept that this is an accurate statement about the beliefs of atheists—which I do not think it is—this still doesn't make atheism a religion.
Your error lies in the assumption that the existence of god is akin to flipping a fair coin. If a coin is flipped and the result is concealed by placing it under a hat, for example, it is reasonable to assume that the coin is in one of two states: heads or tails. You have no evidence of heads and no evidence of tails, therefore to commit to one position or the other is equally unfounded, regardless of whether you turn out to be correct.
The example of the coin is different than the existence of god, however; specifically, in the case of the coin, you have knowledge about the context of the outcome...you know the result will be one of two outcomes. Postulates about the existence of god, however, are context-free. There can be no context whatsoever that may "contain" god—if we accept the usual definition of god as an omniscient, omnipotent being, then, by this definition, there is no possible context in which god can be placed. We know nothing about the possible outcome if god were to exist.
Imagine if I were to assert there is an undetectable green basketball that always hovers next to my head. I could dismiss the lack of evidence for the existence of such a thing by simply pointing out that it is undetectable, and therefore the universe is necessarily devoid of supporting evidence. You would deny that assertion on the basis that there is no proof of it. Furthermore, I expect you would not simply deny my assertion, but that you would make an assertion of your own: that there is no undetectable green basketball hovering next to my head. Because of the arbitrary nature of my positive assertion, your negative assertion about the ball's existence is far more reasonable...in fact, it is similar if not the same as the simple denial of my assertion. Your error is in treating a negative assertion as though it were simply one of a set of alternatives, all of which are well-situated in a known context.
If we follow your line of thinking, then you would simply abstain from forming any opinion about the existence of the undetectable green basketball, and in doing so you must necessarily accept the possibility of its existence. You would not agree with my assertion that it's there, nor would you assert that it is not there; you would be forced to simply accept that you do not know. The relevant bit, though, is that you would essentially be admitting the possibility of its existence. In other words, your way of thinking leads to one result: you must necessarily allow for the possibility of each statement in the set of all possible undisprovable statements. Furthermore, you would ostensibly regard each statement in this set as not only possible, but with equally likely as not.
The interesting result about this erroneous approach is the total logical paralysis it causes if followed to its natural end. If at some point you care to make an assertion I don't wish to accept, regardless of whether it is provable or not, I can set about frustrating every possible proof you can propose by forcing you to admit ignorance of a relevant but undisprovable possibility that is in direct conflict with your assertion. You can't even argue based on the likelihood of whatever absurd statement I care to make, because as mentioned at the end of the last paragraph, you have no reason to regard its truth or falsity with anything other than 50-50 likelihood.
So, it is not only correct, but also practical to recognize that atheism is most definitely not a belief of a religious nature. The way of thinking that you propose is appropriate to situations like the coin flip, where the context of the set of possible results is understood. Indeed, in the case of a flipped coin concealed under a hat, it would be ludicrous to commit to belief in heads or tails specifically because the context of the set of possible results is understood.
Wow...reading this thread makes me a bit sad, and I can only hope that all the participants in this conversation up to now were not exclusively schooled in the US. (Sadly, I suspect it is so.)
Physics is the study of manifestations and transformations of energy. One of the basic laws of physics is that energy is conserved. If you pump so many GeV of energy in the form of coherent radiation into gold atoms, it seems from this article that some fraction of that energy is converted into positrons. When those positrons collide with electrons in equal numbers (as they're sure to do in this universe given even a very short period of time), the matter-antimatter pair annihilate each other and mass is converted back to radiation energy.
The amount of energy released in this annihilation is equal to the amount used to create the positrons in the first place, which is necessarily less than the energy of the laser light incident on the gold atoms. Some of that incident light is going to be lost knocking electrons off, knocking gold atoms out, heating the gold, getting absorbed and re-emitted as a different frequency of light, etc. We've only been looking at the actual point of energy transformation, too...if we go even further back in the chain, we have to look into the efficiency of the laser itself. Certainly less than 100% of the energy consumed by the device is emitted as a coherent light beam even before we look at how this beam is interacting with the gold.
So, by definition, antimatter cannot be a first energy source in this universe. Antimatter could be useful as a means of storing a large amount of energy, but not as an ultimate source. (Unless we find a naturally occurring, ready source of antimatter that we can harvest, which would probably require a wormhole to an alternate universe and a means of controlling that wormhole. Uh oh, queue up the Star Trek / Stargate SG-1 nerds...)
Obviously, the attempts to get more women enrolled is having the reverse effect. All of the diversity pushes that universities have been doing regard women as fundamentally different than men in that they need something extra to be attracted to the field.
In fact they don't. Just focus on interesting problems and don't worry about gender. We can't do worse in terms of diversity with this approach than what's already happened.
Actually, it's quite likely that a good forensic team could trace an image back to your individual camera. Every sensor has faulty photosites, and the in-camera processing algorithm automatically detects these and averages the values for neighboring photosites over them so they don't show up as a black or hot pixel in your images. The result of this is that your sensor will leave a fingerprint, much like a gun barrel leaves its individual signature on a bullet.
Up until now there was no way to make use of this sensor fingerprint that worked regardless of the post-processing done on the image, though, because the differences between types of sensors and manufacturer algorithms obscured which pixels were compensated for in the image. Now that this is apparently a separable part of the problem, however, I have no doubt that forensics ought to be able to trace images to an individual camera. (Like a gun, they'd need access to reference images from the same camera, though. I expect these are much easier to come by than reference bullets from a gun, however...most people have at least a couple of images they've made posted online for anyone that cares to look.)
I think you are confused about your perceptions of Chinese culture. They're no more about loyalty and honor than Americans or any other country...in fact, I would argue that they're less so because of the corruption that runs rampant through their government (and, as a result, the corruption they have to deal with in their everyday lives in China).
They are a culture concerned with saving face. This is a very different thing than what you have interpreted it to be. The Chinese culture is concerned with the appearance of honor and loyalty. The culture is only worried about these things insofar as others discover impropriety...as long as corruption continues undercover, or the parties involved have a reasonable chance it will never come to light, it continues unabated.
Think about it...is there any other possible explanation for the recent melamine scandal? In particular, consider the national cover-up that occurred for several months to keep it under wraps until after the Olympics had cleared out...all the while, babies continued suffering and dying from the poisoned milk products. This is something that simply would not have happened in the US.
I remember studying PDEs in university physics. My experience was that there was no more reliance on physical scenarios and physics background than when I encountered them in math. (The way the curriculum was structured that I went through, we learned PDEs first in math, though, as a prerequisite. I would not be surprised to discover this is standard and there is very little physics involved in the teaching of PDEs most anywhere.)
Looks like MS is back to it's old tricks again—namely: stealing someone else's idea (his own ex-employee, no less). The idea is to found a venture to create new ideas...savor the irony.
I'm actually a software developer, but I work at a place with a lot of small projects and we do our own IT...meaning that we don't get budget for a dedicated IT staff and we end up doing a lot of it ourselves.
So, the way I learned what I need to know was to mess up a lot and get yelled at a lot.:-)
In all seriousness, we have finally landed at a place where we host and run our projects on Amazon's EC2. Some projects are even sophisticated enough now to leverage the EC2 platform and third-party services such as Rightscale for truly distributed cloud computing...but this isn't absolutely necessary if all you want is a place to run your production system. Best of all, since it's all virtualized so it's foolproof to learn new tech. When you're going to make significant changes you just save a snapshot of the current system, use it to start up a new instance off to the side, and screw it up any way you want to figure out a solution, and you can always easily revert to your previous snapshot if necessary. Just make sure you keep organized on which snapshots are configured with what, and be diligent about removing old snapshots that no longer have any purpose (again, purely organizational).
We've found in our business that the cost of doing this is vastly less than maintaining a rack of servers...so even though most projects don't leverage the cloud, we still benefit. (And of course there's room to grow into the cloud, which is also very beneficial.)
Get started by reading up on EC2, S3, and get the ElasticFox plugin for Firefox.
Everything is an opportunity to educate the ignorant. And you might also want to google fine art tacos (I'm feeling lucky). They are related to this discussion.
Someone should start an organization that proposes an open source licensing standard that can go around and get all the other licensing schemes to sign up. It'll be great—they could have a committee, and that committee could make decisions by committee, and there would be conferences in Vegas or Hawaii...
It's time the open source community move to the end game that the entire movement has been aimed at all along—it's always just been a big ruse to bilk corporate expense accounts, and the time for action is nigh!
Slashdot Mirror
All you have to do is pull the ol' switcheroo when the pirates start to offload your booty. Switch your booty with remote-detonating incendiary explosives and, once they reach a safe distance, press down dramatically on your red plunger switch.
Every glass contains only a couple of molecules? More like it probably contains a couple of molecules that haven't passed thru some organism's system. The fact is that if most water had not, we wouldn't need a treatment plant, now would we? We'd just take the water that the treatment plant is treating and send it directly through to people's homes...
That toothbrush thing is a lie. It's been discounted both by Cecil Adams Mythbusters. If ever there was an Appeal to Authority that isn't a fallacy, that's it!
Classical particles do behave that way. If you have a one-pound sealed bottle of water and heat it up, it will increase in mass - not enough to make it weigh 20 pounds more, for any conceivable increase in temperature that a bottle could sustain.
Wha...?! I do not think this is correct, unless you're referring to quantum differences in mass. If you have a sealed container full of something, and change the temperature of that container and its contents, why would its mass change according to Newtonian physics? (I was just drawing this analogy to show what classical things would if they behaved as the quantum particles described in TFA do.)
But your first question is still a mystery to me. Why does energy manifest itself as resistance to changes in net inertia? If someone can explain that to me, I'd be appreciative.
"Resistance to changes in inertia" = "mass". Does that clarify what I was saying?
Well, I might agree with your sentiment, except that the schools have plenty of money. That's not the issue. The issue is how they're spending it.
The fact is that in this district, 25 prior, spending per student capita was less than 20% what it was when I was trying to volunteer (inflation-adjusted). Despite spending more than 5x in real dollars per student, the district had gone from one of the better ones in the state to getting taken over by the state in that time for substandard performance. And the median salary for teachers was lower, despite the number of teachers per student capita also going down slightly.
How can that be?, you ask. Where was all that extra money going? It turns out that the majority of the funds were allocated to administrative positions created over that time, jobs that exist between the teacher and superintendent levels. The rest of the money went to teacher salaries. But wait, you say, you said teacher salaries went down on average, and class sizes grew, so how can get be getting more money? Actually, I said that median salaries went down. In fact, average salaries went up. What happened is that the distribution of those salaries skewed much more heavily toward the teachers in top-level senior positions (the same teachers that also happen to be more influential in—you guessed it—the union).
If you look at the bottom of the teacher pay scale set by the union, all becomes clear. 25 years before, a brand new special ed teacher worked about 6 months out of the year and made $28k/yr (today's dollars). At the time I volunteered, that same teacher had to handle more kids and was making $18k/yr. The department head, however, was making 3x what they made 25 years prior. The union dues were also much higher, and those running the unions were making way more as well.
A very popular political sentiment coming from the teachers union around that time was that we didn't pay our teachers enough. In fact, the way the union structured the pay scales, the state was paying them more than ever—it's just that all the money is being directed to the top 10%-20%...in effect, the union is responsible for the ever-lower pay. And because the union has to negotiate with the administration, when they ask for more they prefer to keep good relations by trying to get it from the taxpayer rather than at the administration's expense, which is yet one more entity that's all too happy to milk the tax cow too.
None of this would be allowed to happen in a privatized school system...which is indeed why so many of the best teachers prefer to start or transfer at some point to private schools. They make more money and have better performing, smaller classes. The administration of private schools is lean, meaning they don't have to deal with excessive bureaucracy either. But that leaves the public schools with the kids that have parents who can't afford to pay out in the cold, and the schools get ever worse, the unions and administrations demand ever more money despite a continuing decline in student performance.
We need to change our K-12 model to the same model used by universities in this country. We have the best universities in the world because we have public institutions competing with private institutions of all levels and costs. Until we allow parents of all different levels of income to send their tax money and their kids to whatever school they like (either public or private), public schools will continue to get more and more bloated and ineffective while private schools get better and more constrained to the upper classes. We need radical voucher reform.
I'm surprised the teacher's union let you in the door. When I volunteered to help set up and maintain the local high school's network via a volunteer program, the teacher's union effectively shut me and several other willing volunteers out. They were bucking to get extra pay for one of their own or a whole new paid position created instead, and would rather see the work not get done at all than have it done by volunteers. (Same went for after-school tutoring.)
This happened about a year or so before the performance of that particular school slipped so badly it was taken over by the state of California in a NCLB-mandated move (I think it was NCLB-related...maybe just CA state policy).
As a twist of the knife, it wasn't enough for the teacher's union just to block me from volunteering, either. Those of us interested in helping out in the program that didn't happen to have kids were required to go through a process of registration that involved ceding significant rights of privacy to the school district and the state of CA. If we agreed to do it, we were essentially registered by the state and processed as if we were sex offenders; when I complained—considering I would not be working with any kids in my volunteer role—they told me unless I was a sick pedobear I should have no problem with it.
By the way...did anyone else notice that the OP's company required him to take vacation to do volunteer work? What kind of evil company does that? Any bosses out there have employees doing something worthwhile...COMP THE TIME for cryin' out loud. It's not like he went on a six month sabbatical...it was a day or two.
I don't get it. Jiggling around really fast, when you step back a bit, apparently manifests as resistance to changes in net inertia?
If classical particles behaved this way, let's say you had a bottle of water that weighed a pound. Then you heat it up so that it all turns to vapor inside the bottle and the molecules are flying around like crazy. Suddenly, the bottle behaves as though it's 20 pounds just because of all that internal activity.
Is this visualization represent a fairly good intuitive feel for what TFA is saying?
Exactly—though the main point of my response above was to make the point that the specific mechanics of how the process unfolds is irrelevant because a thermodynamic maxim must be adhered to: conservation of energy. (Actually, since Einstein, we know that mass is a form of energy, so conservation of mass-energy.)
It's useful to go into the details of energy state transformations only insofar as one would want to understand the process...but this isn't necessary to answer the question I was addressing. To understand whether a process will release energy for human use is fairly simple from the thermodynamic standpoint—all you have to do is calculate the total potential energy of the constituents at the beginning, and then calculate the total potential energy of the constituents at the end. If the sum of potential energy in the end state is less than the amount in the beginning constituents, the process is overall exothermic and can theoretically produce usable energy for human use (actually getting it is a different story...at least one reaction pathway from reactants to products must exist and that pathway must not release too much of the energy in unusable ways).
If you consider gas, for example, it has high potential energy. Adding a bit of energy in the form of a spark, in the presence of oxygen, provides a reaction pathway for the gas to react and form CO2, H20, CO, and a variety of other products. The sum of potential energies of the products is much lower than the initial reactants, gas & O2, so it's a net exothermic reaction and is useful.
Now that gas prices are high, you'll see scam sites that try to sell you the idea of increasing mileage using only water and no other additional energy source. One need not understand the proposed technology if you know basic thermodynamics, however, because water is an extremely low energy compound. Barring nuclear reactions, water is a product of reactions, not a reactant, because of this. Next time a child asks you why it's impossible to burn water, you'll have a ready answer: It's already been burnt. Sites selling a water-fuelled car technology typically try to confuse victims by discussing oxyhydrogen torches, or "water torches". These torches work by using electricity to electrolyze water—that is, split H2O into H2 and O2—and then burn the resulting gases to make a high-temperature flame. In these applications, though, H2O is an energy sink, not an energy source. The ultimate source of energy is vast amounts of electricity, which represents a lot more energy put in than comes out in the form of heat at the end of the process.
Actually, the service industry is a bad example. I worked at a convenience store for a summer and my wife worked at a coffee shop for a while. Both of us stopped getting paid when the doors were locked despite the fact that there was still cleanup to be done. The theory was that we were supposed to be cleaning as the shift was winding down, but time and customers rarely allowed for that.
My approach to that would be to do all the cleanup that needs doing and let customers wait. If my boss has a problem with it, I give him a choice—I can wait on customers now and leave at quittin' time, I can do it now while customers stack up and get steamed, or he can pay me OT when I stay late. There's no fourth option where I work for free.
The only way working and not getting paid for the time is acceptable is if I'm a salaried employee paid to meet Goals & Objectives. If I'm hourly, time spent doing something—anything—for my employer, whether booting up a machine or cleaning up a restaurant, is time I'm getting paid. IANAL but I understand that's basic labor law.
The fact is that trying to prove that God does or doesn't exist using science is absurd. You don't use a screwdriver to weld plate steel, because it's not the correct tool for the job.
I agree that science (and perhaps the philosophical approach called empiricism...but I haven't really thought it through) are useless when arguing about the existence of anything metaphysical (which is, by definition, "outside the physical realm"). Nor did I do so—where did I use the scientific or empirical methods to support my argument? My argument is based in pure logic. Essentially, the conclusions are: (1) there is a difference between absence of believe and disbelief in a positive assertion only when the context of the set of possible results is both known and understood, and (2) where context of the set of possible results is not known or understood, absence of belief is identical to disbelief in that positive assertion.
Again, if you do not agree, then the inescapable consequence is: you must accept the possibility—and plausibility—of every assertion that cannot be disproved. The example I gave in my argument is that, were I to assert there is an undetectable green basketball forever hovering next to my head, you must accept the possibility that my assertion may be true. Moreover, you must also accept that, in the absence of empirical evidence to the contrary, my absurd assertion is as likely to be true as it is to be false.
I didn't resort to using science of any kind in my argument. I just took the poster's viewpoint and extended it to its natural end. One other consequence of this line of reasoning is that it allows an obstructionist stance to any assertion, regardless of that assertion's empirical support, if it can be shown to be in conflict with any assertion from the set of assertions that cannot be disproved empirically. This is as close to a full-fledged reductio ad absurdum argument that can be had on this topic, I think.
Basic atheistic logic like you show above amounts to "I can't prove the existence or non-existence of God using my selected method, therefore he/she(/it? - pick a god, any god) can't exist."
That's not what I wrote above in the slightest. You have completely missed the main point of my post.
And here is where atheism becomes a religion: The apparent need of atheists to convert those who do not share their views, and the zealotry of those trying to do the convincing.
Here you're simply wrong. You're confusing evangelism with religion. It's true that these two overlap in the evangelical faiths, but many faiths are not evangelical, and many non-religious ideas are evangelized (any kind of product marketing, for instance).
Besides, you didn't even get my position correct. I'm not attempting to convert anyone to atheism, nor would doing so serve any kind of personal agenda—not that it's relevant to this discussion in the slightest, but I am not an atheist, nor do I have any interest in this discussion in converting anyone to atheism. I'm simply arguing here that atheism itself does not belong to the class of religious beliefs as was asserted.
The architects of this EU patent system are silly fools! Why didn't they set it up as in the US, where you're out the fees regardless of whether the patent is granted? :-)
There is no evidence [of] the existence of god. I'm with you so far.
There is no evidence [of] the nonexistence of god. Even if we accept that this is an accurate statement about the beliefs of atheists—which I do not think it is—this still doesn't make atheism a religion.
Your error lies in the assumption that the existence of god is akin to flipping a fair coin. If a coin is flipped and the result is concealed by placing it under a hat, for example, it is reasonable to assume that the coin is in one of two states: heads or tails. You have no evidence of heads and no evidence of tails, therefore to commit to one position or the other is equally unfounded, regardless of whether you turn out to be correct.
The example of the coin is different than the existence of god, however; specifically, in the case of the coin, you have knowledge about the context of the outcome...you know the result will be one of two outcomes. Postulates about the existence of god, however, are context-free. There can be no context whatsoever that may "contain" god—if we accept the usual definition of god as an omniscient, omnipotent being, then, by this definition, there is no possible context in which god can be placed. We know nothing about the possible outcome if god were to exist.
Imagine if I were to assert there is an undetectable green basketball that always hovers next to my head. I could dismiss the lack of evidence for the existence of such a thing by simply pointing out that it is undetectable, and therefore the universe is necessarily devoid of supporting evidence. You would deny that assertion on the basis that there is no proof of it. Furthermore, I expect you would not simply deny my assertion, but that you would make an assertion of your own: that there is no undetectable green basketball hovering next to my head. Because of the arbitrary nature of my positive assertion, your negative assertion about the ball's existence is far more reasonable...in fact, it is similar if not the same as the simple denial of my assertion. Your error is in treating a negative assertion as though it were simply one of a set of alternatives, all of which are well-situated in a known context.
If we follow your line of thinking, then you would simply abstain from forming any opinion about the existence of the undetectable green basketball, and in doing so you must necessarily accept the possibility of its existence. You would not agree with my assertion that it's there, nor would you assert that it is not there; you would be forced to simply accept that you do not know. The relevant bit, though, is that you would essentially be admitting the possibility of its existence. In other words, your way of thinking leads to one result: you must necessarily allow for the possibility of each statement in the set of all possible undisprovable statements. Furthermore, you would ostensibly regard each statement in this set as not only possible, but with equally likely as not.
The interesting result about this erroneous approach is the total logical paralysis it causes if followed to its natural end. If at some point you care to make an assertion I don't wish to accept, regardless of whether it is provable or not, I can set about frustrating every possible proof you can propose by forcing you to admit ignorance of a relevant but undisprovable possibility that is in direct conflict with your assertion. You can't even argue based on the likelihood of whatever absurd statement I care to make, because as mentioned at the end of the last paragraph, you have no reason to regard its truth or falsity with anything other than 50-50 likelihood.
So, it is not only correct, but also practical to recognize that atheism is most definitely not a belief of a religious nature. The way of thinking that you propose is appropriate to situations like the coin flip, where the context of the set of possible results is understood. Indeed, in the case of a flipped coin concealed under a hat, it would be ludicrous to commit to belief in heads or tails specifically because the context of the set of possible results is understood.
Wow...reading this thread makes me a bit sad, and I can only hope that all the participants in this conversation up to now were not exclusively schooled in the US. (Sadly, I suspect it is so.)
Physics is the study of manifestations and transformations of energy. One of the basic laws of physics is that energy is conserved. If you pump so many GeV of energy in the form of coherent radiation into gold atoms, it seems from this article that some fraction of that energy is converted into positrons. When those positrons collide with electrons in equal numbers (as they're sure to do in this universe given even a very short period of time), the matter-antimatter pair annihilate each other and mass is converted back to radiation energy.
The amount of energy released in this annihilation is equal to the amount used to create the positrons in the first place, which is necessarily less than the energy of the laser light incident on the gold atoms. Some of that incident light is going to be lost knocking electrons off, knocking gold atoms out, heating the gold, getting absorbed and re-emitted as a different frequency of light, etc. We've only been looking at the actual point of energy transformation, too...if we go even further back in the chain, we have to look into the efficiency of the laser itself. Certainly less than 100% of the energy consumed by the device is emitted as a coherent light beam even before we look at how this beam is interacting with the gold.
So, by definition, antimatter cannot be a first energy source in this universe. Antimatter could be useful as a means of storing a large amount of energy, but not as an ultimate source. (Unless we find a naturally occurring, ready source of antimatter that we can harvest, which would probably require a wormhole to an alternate universe and a means of controlling that wormhole. Uh oh, queue up the Star Trek / Stargate SG-1 nerds...)
Obviously, the attempts to get more women enrolled is having the reverse effect. All of the diversity pushes that universities have been doing regard women as fundamentally different than men in that they need something extra to be attracted to the field.
In fact they don't. Just focus on interesting problems and don't worry about gender. We can't do worse in terms of diversity with this approach than what's already happened.
Actually, it's quite likely that a good forensic team could trace an image back to your individual camera. Every sensor has faulty photosites, and the in-camera processing algorithm automatically detects these and averages the values for neighboring photosites over them so they don't show up as a black or hot pixel in your images. The result of this is that your sensor will leave a fingerprint, much like a gun barrel leaves its individual signature on a bullet.
Up until now there was no way to make use of this sensor fingerprint that worked regardless of the post-processing done on the image, though, because the differences between types of sensors and manufacturer algorithms obscured which pixels were compensated for in the image. Now that this is apparently a separable part of the problem, however, I have no doubt that forensics ought to be able to trace images to an individual camera. (Like a gun, they'd need access to reference images from the same camera, though. I expect these are much easier to come by than reference bullets from a gun, however...most people have at least a couple of images they've made posted online for anyone that cares to look.)
I think you are confused about your perceptions of Chinese culture. They're no more about loyalty and honor than Americans or any other country...in fact, I would argue that they're less so because of the corruption that runs rampant through their government (and, as a result, the corruption they have to deal with in their everyday lives in China).
They are a culture concerned with saving face. This is a very different thing than what you have interpreted it to be. The Chinese culture is concerned with the appearance of honor and loyalty. The culture is only worried about these things insofar as others discover impropriety...as long as corruption continues undercover, or the parties involved have a reasonable chance it will never come to light, it continues unabated.
Think about it...is there any other possible explanation for the recent melamine scandal? In particular, consider the national cover-up that occurred for several months to keep it under wraps until after the Olympics had cleared out...all the while, babies continued suffering and dying from the poisoned milk products. This is something that simply would not have happened in the US.
I remember studying PDEs in university physics. My experience was that there was no more reliance on physical scenarios and physics background than when I encountered them in math. (The way the curriculum was structured that I went through, we learned PDEs first in math, though, as a prerequisite. I would not be surprised to discover this is standard and there is very little physics involved in the teaching of PDEs most anywhere.)
Looks like MS is back to it's old tricks again—namely: stealing someone else's idea (his own ex-employee, no less). The idea is to found a venture to create new ideas...savor the irony.
Is killing [pirates] ... considered "evil" ?
No, it's considered 500 points a head.
Crap!
There goes my tinfoil budget!
I'm actually a software developer, but I work at a place with a lot of small projects and we do our own IT...meaning that we don't get budget for a dedicated IT staff and we end up doing a lot of it ourselves.
So, the way I learned what I need to know was to mess up a lot and get yelled at a lot. :-)
In all seriousness, we have finally landed at a place where we host and run our projects on Amazon's EC2. Some projects are even sophisticated enough now to leverage the EC2 platform and third-party services such as Rightscale for truly distributed cloud computing...but this isn't absolutely necessary if all you want is a place to run your production system. Best of all, since it's all virtualized so it's foolproof to learn new tech. When you're going to make significant changes you just save a snapshot of the current system, use it to start up a new instance off to the side, and screw it up any way you want to figure out a solution, and you can always easily revert to your previous snapshot if necessary. Just make sure you keep organized on which snapshots are configured with what, and be diligent about removing old snapshots that no longer have any purpose (again, purely organizational).
We've found in our business that the cost of doing this is vastly less than maintaining a rack of servers...so even though most projects don't leverage the cloud, we still benefit. (And of course there's room to grow into the cloud, which is also very beneficial.)
Get started by reading up on EC2, S3, and get the ElasticFox plugin for Firefox.
Everything is an opportunity to educate the ignorant. And you might also want to google fine art tacos (I'm feeling lucky). They are related to this discussion.
...otherwise in a few months someone driving the Mars rover is going to crap themselves: OMG U GUYZ!!! I FOUND WATER BEARS ON MARS!!!
Amazing! So what was North Dakota like before it became the vast, desolate wasteland devoid of any trace of humanity it is now?
Someone should start an organization that proposes an open source licensing standard that can go around and get all the other licensing schemes to sign up. It'll be great—they could have a committee, and that committee could make decisions by committee, and there would be conferences in Vegas or Hawaii...
It's time the open source community move to the end game that the entire movement has been aimed at all along—it's always just been a big ruse to bilk corporate expense accounts, and the time for action is nigh!