...possibly. While it is certainly true that Galileo did himself no favours if what you claim is true it unfortunately casts the Catholic church in a worse light because it would suggest that they went after Galileo for the "heresy" of claiming the Earth orbited the sun while actually believing he was correct! i.e. they were suppressing the truth for their own political gain which means that, instead of just being misguided, they were going against one of the core values of their own faith.
Oh, so you shift the burden of payment to countries that don't do this.
As an American you should really not need a Brit living in Canada to explain capitalism to you. Companies will charge the maximum price that they can for their products, NOT what it cost to develop it. Just because Canada cut a good deal with them does not mean that they will charge anyone else more. They will charge the US what they think you will pay.
I believe your president Roosevelt had the saying "speak softly but carry a big stick"...it is a tactic that has worked well for Canada and would undoubtedly work well for the US. The only casualties will be reduced profits for the shareholders of big pharma....although we would all need to be careful not to overdo it too much - they do need to make profits just not the obscenely large ones they do at the moment.
One of the nice things about slashdot is actually the fact that the readers are not segregated politically.
True, but the more important thing, I think, is that over the years I have often (but not always) discovered that opposing ideas I find on Slashdot have some merit behind them. Hence when someone says something I think it wrong I will often trust it enough to check into it a little and see whether I need to re-evaluate my position. This is why I like Slashdot.
However when reading some random website and encountering something contradictory I am far more likely to assume that the author was some random idiot that doesn't understand what they are talking about than I am to re-evaluate my position simply because experience has shown that this is the most probable case. Hence I would argue that the biggest problem is not so much a "filter bubble" but more that when you hear a dissenting voice you are unlikely to believe it because you do not trust it to be right...although I suppose you could call that a self-filter bubble.
That is because those drug purchases are subsidized by the government via taxes collected.
Wrong - it is because the federal government, in combination of the provincial governments, do a collective bargin with the drug companies so that all of Canada gets one price for a drug. This works out very well because the federal government controls the laws on patents and damages and can threaten greedy companies with changing the law to allow canadian companies to made copies of their drugs. Of course this would come at a large political price but at least they have a large enough stick to threaten the pharmaceutical companies with in order to keep them somewhat reasonable.
Literal bible interpretation is a protestant thing
Ever heard of Galileo? The Catholic church might not have a problem with evolution now but they used to have a problem with the earth orbiting the sun.
I think you're probably correct about the direction Apple is headed in.
I very much doubt this because there are many circumstances where it is crucial to be able to write and run your own code. Even if you are not writing the code many institutes and companies have their own internal programs which they want to run. So while I see commercial software distribution moving over to the App Store I cannot imagine that Apple would close off the ability to write and run your own programs because that is the key difference between a MacBook and an iPad with fold out keyboard.
What if the energy released by that explosion transcended space/time and created a unique signature at the quantum level only detectable with advanced alien technology?
We would know because we have the technology to detect it today. In fact the Large Hadron Collider is millions of times more powerful than an atomic bomb (but on a smaller scale obviously) and anything like a Black Hole would be readily detectable.
Helium escapes the atmosphere of non-gas giant planets...and, apart from not knowing the number of arms to expect why would fusion have any bearing on this?
However you need it to be air pollution for it to be visible. Agricultural and mining pollution tends to be solid or liquid and so will not be so readily detected.
It isn't, but neither is (1) worse than (2): you need both in balance. Governments are need to fund the "not yet even close to being profitable" fundamental research and private sector is needed, to convert those fundamental discoveries into profitable products.
Government is essential for the first step because you cannot tell which avenues of fundamental research will yield the most useful results. For example nobody at the turn of the last century could have predicted that quantum mechanics would lead to the modern computer 60+ years later. No private company would ever fund such research because there is considerable risk and any reward, while potentially huge, is decades in the future.
Private companies are excellent at capitalizing on the seond step. They avoid the government bureaucracy, can move fast and create useful products and provide jobs. However they need a continuous stream of new, fundamental research to apply and adapt. The problem in recent times is that governments seem to have forgotten their role and are trying to mimic private companies because they see it as a way to make money and lessen the cost of their part of the research bill and, if they keep doing this, they risk breaking the machine which has let the west lead the world in science and innovation for the past several centuries.
If they don't have that then you probably don't want to talk to them anyway because they: 1- are too primitive, have no tech- nothing to trade or steal. 2- are envioro-nazis
...or 3- have developed a clean source of power like fusion. In which case we very much would like to talk to them.
The detection of an atomic bomb throws off a unique signature not found in nature.
True but the question we then have to ask is do we want to contact an alien civilization that is throwing atomic bombs around...and is there any point given that chance are they will not be around for much longer? Even then atomic bombs are not that powerful considering that the planet is sitting not that far from a thermonuclear furnace many orders of magnitude larger than the entire planet.
That is an absurd complaint for 3D movies in the theater. Why? Because we only use the convergence of our eyes and focal length of our pupils for distances less than 30 feet.
Just think for a second and you will see how absurd your point is. The entire way that this technology work is by presenting each eye different pictures i.e. it only works in a region where we are using the convergence of our eyes! If it presented everything as so distant that our eyes are parallel and focussed at infinity it would be present each eye the same image and then it would be up to our brains to use references and prior knowledge to infer 3D...which is what we do with a 2D film! This is why 3D images are always closer than the screen, by the time you are focussing on the screen you are focussing at infinity.
Nuclear fission at least has the advantage of having reusable fuel, since significant amounts of fissionable material can be created in breeder reactors, or recovered from waste.
The fuel is not reusable. Once the nucleus has fissioned it is gone. You can breed more with a neutron source but ultimately it is a limited resource because it is a "fossil" fuel - you are releasing energy stored from the supernova which preceded the creation of the solar system.
To return to the original topic though censoring even inaccurate data like this is stupid because it will make people doubt the accuracy of official information. A better law would be to require any incidents of inaccurate reporting to include a link or text with the accurate information and then let people see for themselves. This is different from something like yelling "fire" in a crowded area because people have time to think before they act and so hysteria should not occur because there is opportunity to refute stupid arguments. If damage to commerce is caused then sue the idiot who posted the inaccurate information for libel. This is a system which has worked acceptably for decades/centuries, why should Fukushima be any different that the countless other disasters before it?
It may have some negative effects, but these will be minimized just like with any other evolving technology.
This technology fools the eye into thinking that objects are close while the actual image is still distant. This means you have to override your brain's real 3D focusing instinct. The only way to solve this would be to keep all the objects at the same distance as the image...which would effectively result in something close to a 2D film again.
The other advances you mention we all real advances. There was no disadvantage to the new system other than the cost. This is not the case for 3D. As for people paying more for useless, flashy features I'm happy to let people do that. However I am not happy when you are forced to pay for flashy, useless features and have no option to avoid them...which is what happens when cinemas only show a film in 3D.
but in a video game, generally, YOU decide where to focus
That's the problem with this 3D system. You generally cannot focus because your brain is telling you that an object is close to you but the actual image is at a fixed difference so, if you do focus up close everything gets blurry. The result is that you are constantly having to override the instinct that years of living in a real 3D world have given you. This is why people get headaches watching 3D films and I can only imagine it would be a lot worse for games.
I said 'operationally' not infrastructure. There's CO2 cost in *everything*
Exactly, so perhaps a better comparison is what would be the CO2 cost of NOT having the current network infrastructure? This would result in far more paper mail which has to be physically transported, more business trips because of poorer communications etc. Perhaps Greenpeace ought to consider that too.
Bright enough to know that the LHC has been the most powerful accelerator for a while. Power is energy per unit time, with a beam energy >3.5 times that of the Tevatron we need less that a third of the luminosity to beat the Tevatron in terms of power. This press release was about breaking the luminosity record i.e. the number of protons per area per second which is not the same as power.
The part of the metric system that's completely arbitrary...
All the metric system is completely arbitrary. A metre used to be defined as the distance between two scratches on a bar. Even the ancient definition of the gram based on water is completely arbitrary: why use water? why when it liquid? If you want a fundamental system based on the fundamental properties of the universe (given our currently understanding) you need to use natural units. Unfortunately you then end up with units of length ~10^-35 m, mass ~10^-8 kg, time ~10^-44s and temperature ~10^32 K. So these are not really very useful for typical, human scale measurements although they are very useful in particle physics.
No it isn't! When we first moved to Canada I shocked the local Home Depot by turning up and asking for some wood to be cut to metric measurements (fortunately the saw they used came from Germany so I did not have to recalculate). The second problem I encountered was that a 2x4 was NOT actually 2 inches by 4 inches!
I know I can easily divide a foot by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6.
That's great. Now try to divide a real measurement like 37 and 3/8 of an inch by 2,3,4 etc. remembering to end up with some fraction of an inch because that seems to be what imperial tape measures are marked in. Non-integer divisions are a lot easier in metric because everything is a power of 10. This could be fixed to some degree in imperial if the tape measure would mark off tenths and hundredths of inches and not the binary division scheme they seem to use.
And while I'm a metric guy myself, and hate having to work with imperial units, I can't say it's exactly "broken".
Really? So how many fluid ounces in a pint then? 12 or 16? What makes the US units particularly horrible is that they are different from the Imperial units that used to be used by the rest of the world. The result is that Imperial and US units ARE broken because you have no idea which particular unit system someone is referring to.
The US is a big country so it takes a while to change things....but for a larger country like the US it would be very expensive and take a long time.
Sorry but that's no excuse. Canada switched relatively quickly and if you care to check we are somewhat larger than the US. If you want to talk population have a look at India. Both did it over about 7 years. So as a smaller country than Canada with a far smaller population than India surely the US could manage to switch in even less time than that?
Slashdot Mirror
...possibly. While it is certainly true that Galileo did himself no favours if what you claim is true it unfortunately casts the Catholic church in a worse light because it would suggest that they went after Galileo for the "heresy" of claiming the Earth orbited the sun while actually believing he was correct! i.e. they were suppressing the truth for their own political gain which means that, instead of just being misguided, they were going against one of the core values of their own faith.
Oh, so you shift the burden of payment to countries that don't do this.
As an American you should really not need a Brit living in Canada to explain capitalism to you. Companies will charge the maximum price that they can for their products, NOT what it cost to develop it. Just because Canada cut a good deal with them does not mean that they will charge anyone else more. They will charge the US what they think you will pay.
I believe your president Roosevelt had the saying "speak softly but carry a big stick"...it is a tactic that has worked well for Canada and would undoubtedly work well for the US. The only casualties will be reduced profits for the shareholders of big pharma....although we would all need to be careful not to overdo it too much - they do need to make profits just not the obscenely large ones they do at the moment.
One of the nice things about slashdot is actually the fact that the readers are not segregated politically.
True, but the more important thing, I think, is that over the years I have often (but not always) discovered that opposing ideas I find on Slashdot have some merit behind them. Hence when someone says something I think it wrong I will often trust it enough to check into it a little and see whether I need to re-evaluate my position. This is why I like Slashdot.
However when reading some random website and encountering something contradictory I am far more likely to assume that the author was some random idiot that doesn't understand what they are talking about than I am to re-evaluate my position simply because experience has shown that this is the most probable case. Hence I would argue that the biggest problem is not so much a "filter bubble" but more that when you hear a dissenting voice you are unlikely to believe it because you do not trust it to be right...although I suppose you could call that a self-filter bubble.
That is because those drug purchases are subsidized by the government via taxes collected.
Wrong - it is because the federal government, in combination of the provincial governments, do a collective bargin with the drug companies so that all of Canada gets one price for a drug. This works out very well because the federal government controls the laws on patents and damages and can threaten greedy companies with changing the law to allow canadian companies to made copies of their drugs. Of course this would come at a large political price but at least they have a large enough stick to threaten the pharmaceutical companies with in order to keep them somewhat reasonable.
Literal bible interpretation is a protestant thing
Ever heard of Galileo? The Catholic church might not have a problem with evolution now but they used to have a problem with the earth orbiting the sun.
C isn't web scale.
Really? Then what language was your Web Browser or the Web server you connect to written with? It's most likely C/C++.
I think you're probably correct about the direction Apple is headed in.
I very much doubt this because there are many circumstances where it is crucial to be able to write and run your own code. Even if you are not writing the code many institutes and companies have their own internal programs which they want to run. So while I see commercial software distribution moving over to the App Store I cannot imagine that Apple would close off the ability to write and run your own programs because that is the key difference between a MacBook and an iPad with fold out keyboard.
What if the energy released by that explosion transcended space/time and created a unique signature at the quantum level only detectable with advanced alien technology?
We would know because we have the technology to detect it today. In fact the Large Hadron Collider is millions of times more powerful than an atomic bomb (but on a smaller scale obviously) and anything like a Black Hole would be readily detectable.
Helium escapes the atmosphere of non-gas giant planets...and, apart from not knowing the number of arms to expect why would fusion have any bearing on this?
However you need it to be air pollution for it to be visible. Agricultural and mining pollution tends to be solid or liquid and so will not be so readily detected.
Tell me why (2) is worse than (1)
It isn't, but neither is (1) worse than (2): you need both in balance. Governments are need to fund the "not yet even close to being profitable" fundamental research and private sector is needed, to convert those fundamental discoveries into profitable products.
Government is essential for the first step because you cannot tell which avenues of fundamental research will yield the most useful results. For example nobody at the turn of the last century could have predicted that quantum mechanics would lead to the modern computer 60+ years later. No private company would ever fund such research because there is considerable risk and any reward, while potentially huge, is decades in the future.
Private companies are excellent at capitalizing on the seond step. They avoid the government bureaucracy, can move fast and create useful products and provide jobs. However they need a continuous stream of new, fundamental research to apply and adapt. The problem in recent times is that governments seem to have forgotten their role and are trying to mimic private companies because they see it as a way to make money and lessen the cost of their part of the research bill and, if they keep doing this, they risk breaking the machine which has let the west lead the world in science and innovation for the past several centuries.
If they don't have that then you probably don't want to talk to them anyway because they: 1- are too primitive, have no tech- nothing to trade or steal. 2- are envioro-nazis
The detection of an atomic bomb throws off a unique signature not found in nature.
True but the question we then have to ask is do we want to contact an alien civilization that is throwing atomic bombs around...and is there any point given that chance are they will not be around for much longer? Even then atomic bombs are not that powerful considering that the planet is sitting not that far from a thermonuclear furnace many orders of magnitude larger than the entire planet.
Either in amplitude or PCM. Neutrinos interact with matter even less than Electromagnetic waves.
Exactly - so why would you want to use them to communicate?
That is an absurd complaint for 3D movies in the theater. Why? Because we only use the convergence of our eyes and focal length of our pupils for distances less than 30 feet.
Just think for a second and you will see how absurd your point is. The entire way that this technology work is by presenting each eye different pictures i.e. it only works in a region where we are using the convergence of our eyes! If it presented everything as so distant that our eyes are parallel and focussed at infinity it would be present each eye the same image and then it would be up to our brains to use references and prior knowledge to infer 3D...which is what we do with a 2D film! This is why 3D images are always closer than the screen, by the time you are focussing on the screen you are focussing at infinity.
Nuclear fission at least has the advantage of having reusable fuel, since significant amounts of fissionable material can be created in breeder reactors, or recovered from waste.
The fuel is not reusable. Once the nucleus has fissioned it is gone. You can breed more with a neutron source but ultimately it is a limited resource because it is a "fossil" fuel - you are releasing energy stored from the supernova which preceded the creation of the solar system.
To return to the original topic though censoring even inaccurate data like this is stupid because it will make people doubt the accuracy of official information. A better law would be to require any incidents of inaccurate reporting to include a link or text with the accurate information and then let people see for themselves. This is different from something like yelling "fire" in a crowded area because people have time to think before they act and so hysteria should not occur because there is opportunity to refute stupid arguments. If damage to commerce is caused then sue the idiot who posted the inaccurate information for libel. This is a system which has worked acceptably for decades/centuries, why should Fukushima be any different that the countless other disasters before it?
It may have some negative effects, but these will be minimized just like with any other evolving technology.
This technology fools the eye into thinking that objects are close while the actual image is still distant. This means you have to override your brain's real 3D focusing instinct. The only way to solve this would be to keep all the objects at the same distance as the image...which would effectively result in something close to a 2D film again.
The other advances you mention we all real advances. There was no disadvantage to the new system other than the cost. This is not the case for 3D. As for people paying more for useless, flashy features I'm happy to let people do that. However I am not happy when you are forced to pay for flashy, useless features and have no option to avoid them...which is what happens when cinemas only show a film in 3D.
but in a video game, generally, YOU decide where to focus
That's the problem with this 3D system. You generally cannot focus because your brain is telling you that an object is close to you but the actual image is at a fixed difference so, if you do focus up close everything gets blurry. The result is that you are constantly having to override the instinct that years of living in a real 3D world have given you. This is why people get headaches watching 3D films and I can only imagine it would be a lot worse for games.
I said 'operationally' not infrastructure. There's CO2 cost in *everything*
Exactly, so perhaps a better comparison is what would be the CO2 cost of NOT having the current network infrastructure? This would result in far more paper mail which has to be physically transported, more business trips because of poorer communications etc. Perhaps Greenpeace ought to consider that too.
Seem very bright.
Bright enough to know that the LHC has been the most powerful accelerator for a while. Power is energy per unit time, with a beam energy >3.5 times that of the Tevatron we need less that a third of the luminosity to beat the Tevatron in terms of power. This press release was about breaking the luminosity record i.e. the number of protons per area per second which is not the same as power.
The part of the metric system that's completely arbitrary...
All the metric system is completely arbitrary. A metre used to be defined as the distance between two scratches on a bar. Even the ancient definition of the gram based on water is completely arbitrary: why use water? why when it liquid? If you want a fundamental system based on the fundamental properties of the universe (given our currently understanding) you need to use natural units. Unfortunately you then end up with units of length ~10^-35 m, mass ~10^-8 kg, time ~10^-44s and temperature ~10^32 K. So these are not really very useful for typical, human scale measurements although they are very useful in particle physics.
A 2 x 4 is still a 2 x 4.
No it isn't! When we first moved to Canada I shocked the local Home Depot by turning up and asking for some wood to be cut to metric measurements (fortunately the saw they used came from Germany so I did not have to recalculate). The second problem I encountered was that a 2x4 was NOT actually 2 inches by 4 inches!
I know I can easily divide a foot by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6.
That's great. Now try to divide a real measurement like 37 and 3/8 of an inch by 2,3,4 etc. remembering to end up with some fraction of an inch because that seems to be what imperial tape measures are marked in. Non-integer divisions are a lot easier in metric because everything is a power of 10. This could be fixed to some degree in imperial if the tape measure would mark off tenths and hundredths of inches and not the binary division scheme they seem to use.
And while I'm a metric guy myself, and hate having to work with imperial units, I can't say it's exactly "broken".
Really? So how many fluid ounces in a pint then? 12 or 16? What makes the US units particularly horrible is that they are different from the Imperial units that used to be used by the rest of the world. The result is that Imperial and US units ARE broken because you have no idea which particular unit system someone is referring to.
Canada is bigger than the US. India is more populous that the US. Both converted in ~7 years. I'm sure the US can manage.
The US is a big country so it takes a while to change things....but for a larger country like the US it would be very expensive and take a long time.
Sorry but that's no excuse. Canada switched relatively quickly and if you care to check we are somewhat larger than the US. If you want to talk population have a look at India. Both did it over about 7 years. So as a smaller country than Canada with a far smaller population than India surely the US could manage to switch in even less time than that?