Theres nothing wrong with that though. Now, if you actually -do- any of those things, yes it is wrong. But talking about it? No one gets hurt so therefore it should not be prohibited.
So if a group of people are making extremely detailed plans about a terrorist attack you should just ignore it until they actually blow up a building and kill hundreds of people? I'll grant you that in most cases there will be actions to back up the plans but those might only be performed by a one or two members of the group. However surely all should be guilty of terrorism?
I agree with your principle and I am very reluctant to cross the line but I think there there are cases where it does need to be crossed to prevent loss of life.
It's next-best thing to having the virtual reality simulators or actors playing patients.
Exactly. So since you still have to have real people behind the avatars responding why on earth settle for the "next best thing" and actually go for the best thing? Its better for training, easier for the actors to participate in. True it does not involve computers so it isn't as "cool" as SL but I can see no pedagogical benefits from using SL.
If you're an engineer you call it a tuned resonator...
Not necessarily. One other way to make a building "invisible" to the shear waves of an Earthquake would be to float it. Shear waves cannot pass through liquids. Of course this is probably somewhat less practical...
Not the same. I use ebooks (not Kindle!) because they are far easier and lighter to carry around. A paper replacement is not as good and might would not be acceptable - in this case I just wasted several hours reading the start of the book. There is also the loss of use while they get me a replacement (if I did agree to it), the time I wasted calling them up to find out what had happened etc. etc. I'm sure a lawyer could probably find more but obviously it would be O($1k) not O($1M).
While its true that recent governments seem to have lost a sense of what is "reasonable fun" I think that is only part of it. With the UKs increasing population and the decreasing cost of amplifiers part of the issue is that parties are now loud enough and frequent enough to disturb far more people than before.
What troubles me more with this is not that the police turned up in force (everyone makes mistakes) but that they persisted in shutting down the party once it was explained to them what was happening. What happened to reasonable policing and a little trust? Take the guy's details if needed and if it did turn into a rave then at least you would know who was responsible. The police are supposed to use discretion when using their powers. Examples like this make us remove and restrict those police powers and that means that when they really do need them they won't have them available.
I seem to remember a similar discussion on the BBC a while back regarding incorrectly priced merchandise. In the UK at least the comment was that unless the price was so ludicrous that no reasonable person could possibly believe that it was right (e.g. a Rolls Royce for 10p), once they have charged your credit card there is a contract between you and the company for them to supply the goods and they have to supply them or pay damages for breaking the contract.
Hence if Amazon accepted the contract by charging the cards they have implicitly accepted the contract and must now deliver the goods as promised. If it turns out that they can no longer do so that would make them liable for any damages caused by their inability to fulfil the contract. Of course this may be rather limited in this case but you might be able to go for time wasted reading the book that you can no longer finish.
Portia won not by appealing to mercy but because she understood the fine print better than Shylock: Shylock wanted his pound of flesh, but Portia pointed out that he was entitled to exactly a pound, and if he took any more or less he'd be guilty of murder.
Not quite - she actually argued that he could take the pound of flesh but that he must not spill any blood since he was not entitled to that and that his lands and fortune would be forfeit under Venetian law should he take more than he was entitled to.
No they should have just said American. That's what it presumably says on their passport unless they have dual nationality.... and regardless of this it is utterly irrelevant for the story. Can you imagine the uproar had they said "white, male scientists"?
Not only that but I would imagine that it is somewhat insulting to Americans - are they really that ashamed of being a US citizen that they have to somehow dilute it by mentioning where their family emmigrated from?
XP still trumps Linux on a desktop where people want shit to just work.
I completely agree. However a lot of us don't want shit on our desktop, regardless of whether it is working or not. Apart from the unpleasant odour there is also a large risk of serious infection.
Lets compare scientifically. We cannot use the actual temperature of Venus since this is dominated by the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere so lets use radiation. The mean distance of Venus to the sun is 108M km vs. 146M km for Earth so Venus will receive 1.83 times the radiation from the sun (1/r^2). We can assume that it radiates the sun's energy at the same rate (i.e. assume equilibrium) so using Stefan's law we see that the radiation rate is proportional to T^4 (where T is in Kelvin).
Hence if Venus radiates at 1.83 times the energy of the Earth then (T_venus/T_Earth)^4=1.83 assuming that Venus and the Earth are identical bodies (which if Venus were terraformed is not a terrible assumption). Solving this we get that:
T_venus = 1.163*T_earth
...but remember this is in Kelvin NOT centigrade. The mean temperature of Earth is 14.6C=287.6K so the mean temp of a terraformed Venus would be 334.5K or 61.5C.
The mean high temperature in Phoenix is 41C in the height of summer. The AVERAGE temperature on Venus would be significantly higher than this. Indeed the temperature at which skin burns is ~55C hence you will literally burn given the mean Vesuvian temperature - going inside will not help! However Venus is slightly smaller than the Earth so the temp will actually be higher and even assuming variations it is unlikely that there will be any inhabitable parts of the surface without extreme air conditioning. Indeed liquid oceans may be a problem since if the mean temp is 61C there are very likely to be places above 100C which will increase humidity and then temperatures further.
It is also worth pointing out that cooling is a LOT harder than heating. To survive on Venus you would need air conditioned suits compared to just thick insulation for Mars. In addition to get even this far you have to remove the bulk of Venus' atmosphere. If you think adding an atmosphere to Mars would require "magic" then removing Venus' atmosphere requires this and more.
Compare Mars to the south pole (or even Edmonton, Alberta where the temperature in winter is below that on Mars in the summer - I remember coming in to work one day when it was -35C to find the NASA rovers were reporting a balmy -22C on Mars!) and, except for the atmosphere, there is not a huge amount of difference. Yes it would be colder than Earth but colder is easier to deal with - indeed we already know that there are organisms on Earth that can survive (but not prosper) on Mars as it is today which is why any craft that travel there have to be sterilized to avoid contamination of Mars.
Have them make a theremin [wikipedia.org] (see the "Similar instruments" section as well). It makes spooky music. Great for a late-October/Halloween project.
Better yet have them build an E-Meter. Since it is just a Wheatstone bridge they can learn something about physics. It doesn't produce spooky music but it would be great for scaring their parents at Hallowe'en.... "Mum, Dad look what I got for signing up with the scientologists!".
The problem with that is it would have to learn to recognize different gestures. For example in the UK we use two fingers a gesture dating back to Agincourt when the French would cut off those same two fingers of any English they captured so that they could not draw a longbow.
The problem with Venus is that it is closer to the sun. Even if you converted Venus into Earth 2.0 it would almost certainly be too hot to live on. This means that you would need some way to cool the planet significantly as well as shield it better from the increased UV radiation. Not impossible but I'm not so sure it is a better target than Mars. The advantage of Mars is that you can build structures on the surface as a step towards terraforming and build up the process gradually. This is close to impossible on Venus. Mars may have some disadvantages (cooler, lower gravity) but I'm not sure that these are bigger problems than Venus'.
There is the minor problem of the small fraction sulphuric acid and the small amount of nitrogen. If we really converted all the CO2 to O2 then fires would be a major concern. We would actually need to remove a large fraction of the atmosphere, add nitrogen (or other inert gas), filter out the H2SO4 and also find some way to massively increase the albedo to reduce the far greater heating from the sun.
If you can do all of that then you are right - Venus is terraformable. Short of them finding the cure for aging I doubt I'm going to live to see it happen though.
If you feel you can't keep up with the day to day in tech anymore ( a common concern ), then by all means jump to being the PHB.
If you can't keep up with the latest tech then should you really be managing those who are? How are you going to be able to judge those who are up with the latest tech when they come up with ideas? To be a GOOD manager you need to be be able to keep up with those you manage.
If you really feel so threatened, why can't you build a compelling case for your cause, gather people who think like you and try to change things instead of running away?
In order to want to do that you have to believe that there is a reasonable chance of success i.e. that you would be able in instigate meaningful improvements to society as a result of your efforts. Part of the problem in the UK is that I think very view people believe that that is possible.
I left the same year and feel exactly the same way. However, being a Yorkshireman, I can still be extremely proud of that (well as long as we ignore the last European parliamentary elections!). I'm now living in Canada and extremely happy here.
Edmonton, Alberta would be the northernmost city in North America
Completely correct: in Edmonton we get considerably more sunlight than where I grew up in Yorkshire, UK (about 0.5 deg latitude north of Liverpool). The main reason being that we actually get a lot of sun! What is very nice about Edmonton is that the summers are like a warm UK summer with lots of sunny days. Coming from the UK I used to find the summers in places like Chicago unbearable - extremely oppressive heat (30+C) and humidity (70+%) meant that rather than sit outside on a sunny summer day you wanted to stay inside with the air conditioner on maximum.
Of course nothing is free...the price you pay for the fantastic summers is a somewhat protracted and slightly nippy winter: -35C (before wind chill!) is common - but only for a few days. The snow usually melts in late April and the winters are at generally bright and sunny so there are some beautiful winter days to enjoy (just wrap up warm!). Having emigrated here from the UK I can thoroughly recommend it. I lived for a while in the US found their actual cultural values (not those they espouse) to be extremely different to mine which made it very hard/impossible to fit in - I always felt very much the foreigner. Canadian society has values that (at least from my point of view) are far more in line with European ones and I found it very easy to fit in and integrate into society here, especially since Canadians are so welcoming.
I live in the US and have looked at migrating to another country. Of course one that speaks english.
Why "of course"? Are you incapable of learning another language? It is certainly a barrier but by no means an insurmountable one especially if you build on one of the foreign languages you learnt at school. Besides there is a non-negligible (but admittedly far smalller) language barrier between English and American so if you do move to an English speaking country you will still have to learn new vocabulary and, if your job involves written reports, how to spell. Failure to do so will provide you colleagues with many hours of amusement....
Should be interesting to see if the current AV vendors try the anti-trust card with MS for this. I imagine it will be a vary hard case to make since really all they are trying to do is fix their broken OS.
....but that is a constant (in time) magnetic field. Living creatures can sustain far higher fields than that (lookup the video of the flying frog on You Tube - this uses fields ~10 times higher than NMR to suspend creatures and objects through diamagnetism). I doubt there is a problem for a varying magnetic field but the situation is not exactly the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Theres nothing wrong with that though. Now, if you actually -do- any of those things, yes it is wrong. But talking about it? No one gets hurt so therefore it should not be prohibited.
So if a group of people are making extremely detailed plans about a terrorist attack you should just ignore it until they actually blow up a building and kill hundreds of people? I'll grant you that in most cases there will be actions to back up the plans but those might only be performed by a one or two members of the group. However surely all should be guilty of terrorism?
I agree with your principle and I am very reluctant to cross the line but I think there there are cases where it does need to be crossed to prevent loss of life.
It's next-best thing to having the virtual reality simulators or actors playing patients.
Exactly. So since you still have to have real people behind the avatars responding why on earth settle for the "next best thing" and actually go for the best thing? Its better for training, easier for the actors to participate in. True it does not involve computers so it isn't as "cool" as SL but I can see no pedagogical benefits from using SL.
If you're an engineer you call it a tuned resonator...
Not necessarily. One other way to make a building "invisible" to the shear waves of an Earthquake would be to float it. Shear waves cannot pass through liquids. Of course this is probably somewhat less practical...
Not the same. I use ebooks (not Kindle!) because they are far easier and lighter to carry around. A paper replacement is not as good and might would not be acceptable - in this case I just wasted several hours reading the start of the book. There is also the loss of use while they get me a replacement (if I did agree to it), the time I wasted calling them up to find out what had happened etc. etc. I'm sure a lawyer could probably find more but obviously it would be O($1k) not O($1M).
While its true that recent governments seem to have lost a sense of what is "reasonable fun" I think that is only part of it. With the UKs increasing population and the decreasing cost of amplifiers part of the issue is that parties are now loud enough and frequent enough to disturb far more people than before.
What troubles me more with this is not that the police turned up in force (everyone makes mistakes) but that they persisted in shutting down the party once it was explained to them what was happening. What happened to reasonable policing and a little trust? Take the guy's details if needed and if it did turn into a rave then at least you would know who was responsible. The police are supposed to use discretion when using their powers. Examples like this make us remove and restrict those police powers and that means that when they really do need them they won't have them available.
I seem to remember a similar discussion on the BBC a while back regarding incorrectly priced merchandise. In the UK at least the comment was that unless the price was so ludicrous that no reasonable person could possibly believe that it was right (e.g. a Rolls Royce for 10p), once they have charged your credit card there is a contract between you and the company for them to supply the goods and they have to supply them or pay damages for breaking the contract.
Hence if Amazon accepted the contract by charging the cards they have implicitly accepted the contract and must now deliver the goods as promised. If it turns out that they can no longer do so that would make them liable for any damages caused by their inability to fulfil the contract. Of course this may be rather limited in this case but you might be able to go for time wasted reading the book that you can no longer finish.
Portia won not by appealing to mercy but because she understood the fine print better than Shylock: Shylock wanted his pound of flesh, but Portia pointed out that he was entitled to exactly a pound, and if he took any more or less he'd be guilty of murder.
Not quite - she actually argued that he could take the pound of flesh but that he must not spill any blood since he was not entitled to that and that his lands and fortune would be forfeit under Venetian law should he take more than he was entitled to.
No they should have just said American. That's what it presumably says on their passport unless they have dual nationality.... and regardless of this it is utterly irrelevant for the story. Can you imagine the uproar had they said "white, male scientists"?
Not only that but I would imagine that it is somewhat insulting to Americans - are they really that ashamed of being a US citizen that they have to somehow dilute it by mentioning where their family emmigrated from?
XP still trumps Linux on a desktop where people want shit to just work.
I completely agree. However a lot of us don't want shit on our desktop, regardless of whether it is working or not. Apart from the unpleasant odour there is also a large risk of serious infection.
Lets compare scientifically. We cannot use the actual temperature of Venus since this is dominated by the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere so lets use radiation. The mean distance of Venus to the sun is 108M km vs. 146M km for Earth so Venus will receive 1.83 times the radiation from the sun (1/r^2). We can assume that it radiates the sun's energy at the same rate (i.e. assume equilibrium) so using Stefan's law we see that the radiation rate is proportional to T^4 (where T is in Kelvin). Hence if Venus radiates at 1.83 times the energy of the Earth then (T_venus/T_Earth)^4=1.83 assuming that Venus and the Earth are identical bodies (which if Venus were terraformed is not a terrible assumption). Solving this we get that:
...but remember this is in Kelvin NOT centigrade. The mean temperature of Earth is 14.6C=287.6K so the mean temp of a terraformed Venus would be 334.5K or 61.5C.
T_venus = 1.163*T_earth
The mean high temperature in Phoenix is 41C in the height of summer. The AVERAGE temperature on Venus would be significantly higher than this. Indeed the temperature at which skin burns is ~55C hence you will literally burn given the mean Vesuvian temperature - going inside will not help! However Venus is slightly smaller than the Earth so the temp will actually be higher and even assuming variations it is unlikely that there will be any inhabitable parts of the surface without extreme air conditioning. Indeed liquid oceans may be a problem since if the mean temp is 61C there are very likely to be places above 100C which will increase humidity and then temperatures further.
It is also worth pointing out that cooling is a LOT harder than heating. To survive on Venus you would need air conditioned suits compared to just thick insulation for Mars. In addition to get even this far you have to remove the bulk of Venus' atmosphere. If you think adding an atmosphere to Mars would require "magic" then removing Venus' atmosphere requires this and more.
Compare Mars to the south pole (or even Edmonton, Alberta where the temperature in winter is below that on Mars in the summer - I remember coming in to work one day when it was -35C to find the NASA rovers were reporting a balmy -22C on Mars!) and, except for the atmosphere, there is not a huge amount of difference. Yes it would be colder than Earth but colder is easier to deal with - indeed we already know that there are organisms on Earth that can survive (but not prosper) on Mars as it is today which is why any craft that travel there have to be sterilized to avoid contamination of Mars.
Have them make a theremin [wikipedia.org] (see the "Similar instruments" section as well). It makes spooky music. Great for a late-October/Halloween project.
Better yet have them build an E-Meter. Since it is just a Wheatstone bridge they can learn something about physics. It doesn't produce spooky music but it would be great for scaring their parents at Hallowe'en.... "Mum, Dad look what I got for signing up with the scientologists!".
The problem with that is it would have to learn to recognize different gestures. For example in the UK we use two fingers a gesture dating back to Agincourt when the French would cut off those same two fingers of any English they captured so that they could not draw a longbow.
The problem with Venus is that it is closer to the sun. Even if you converted Venus into Earth 2.0 it would almost certainly be too hot to live on. This means that you would need some way to cool the planet significantly as well as shield it better from the increased UV radiation. Not impossible but I'm not so sure it is a better target than Mars. The advantage of Mars is that you can build structures on the surface as a step towards terraforming and build up the process gradually. This is close to impossible on Venus. Mars may have some disadvantages (cooler, lower gravity) but I'm not sure that these are bigger problems than Venus'.
There is the minor problem of the small fraction sulphuric acid and the small amount of nitrogen. If we really converted all the CO2 to O2 then fires would be a major concern. We would actually need to remove a large fraction of the atmosphere, add nitrogen (or other inert gas), filter out the H2SO4 and also find some way to massively increase the albedo to reduce the far greater heating from the sun. If you can do all of that then you are right - Venus is terraformable. Short of them finding the cure for aging I doubt I'm going to live to see it happen though.
I suspect a tax dodge somewhere.... aren't damages tax free?
If you feel you can't keep up with the day to day in tech anymore ( a common concern ), then by all means jump to being the PHB.
If you can't keep up with the latest tech then should you really be managing those who are? How are you going to be able to judge those who are up with the latest tech when they come up with ideas? To be a GOOD manager you need to be be able to keep up with those you manage.
If you really feel so threatened, why can't you build a compelling case for your cause, gather people who think like you and try to change things instead of running away?
In order to want to do that you have to believe that there is a reasonable chance of success i.e. that you would be able in instigate meaningful improvements to society as a result of your efforts. Part of the problem in the UK is that I think very view people believe that that is possible.
I left the same year and feel exactly the same way. However, being a Yorkshireman, I can still be extremely proud of that (well as long as we ignore the last European parliamentary elections!). I'm now living in Canada and extremely happy here.
A good place to start is usually economic freedom.
Edmonton, Alberta would be the northernmost city in North America
Completely correct: in Edmonton we get considerably more sunlight than where I grew up in Yorkshire, UK (about 0.5 deg latitude north of Liverpool). The main reason being that we actually get a lot of sun! What is very nice about Edmonton is that the summers are like a warm UK summer with lots of sunny days. Coming from the UK I used to find the summers in places like Chicago unbearable - extremely oppressive heat (30+C) and humidity (70+%) meant that rather than sit outside on a sunny summer day you wanted to stay inside with the air conditioner on maximum.
Of course nothing is free...the price you pay for the fantastic summers is a somewhat protracted and slightly nippy winter: -35C (before wind chill!) is common - but only for a few days. The snow usually melts in late April and the winters are at generally bright and sunny so there are some beautiful winter days to enjoy (just wrap up warm!). Having emigrated here from the UK I can thoroughly recommend it. I lived for a while in the US found their actual cultural values (not those they espouse) to be extremely different to mine which made it very hard/impossible to fit in - I always felt very much the foreigner. Canadian society has values that (at least from my point of view) are far more in line with European ones and I found it very easy to fit in and integrate into society here, especially since Canadians are so welcoming.
I live in the US and have looked at migrating to another country. Of course one that speaks english.
Why "of course"? Are you incapable of learning another language? It is certainly a barrier but by no means an insurmountable one especially if you build on one of the foreign languages you learnt at school. Besides there is a non-negligible (but admittedly far smalller) language barrier between English and American so if you do move to an English speaking country you will still have to learn new vocabulary and, if your job involves written reports, how to spell. Failure to do so will provide you colleagues with many hours of amusement....
.....beautiful women on every corner and lots of entertainment... Most of all, you won't find a city offering that much for that cheap!
I don't think that quite conjures up the picture of Montreal that you had in mind.
Should be interesting to see if the current AV vendors try the anti-trust card with MS for this. I imagine it will be a vary hard case to make since really all they are trying to do is fix their broken OS.
Oh come on mods! Clearly there are 10 responses to this joke: either you understand it or you don't.
....but that is a constant (in time) magnetic field. Living creatures can sustain far higher fields than that (lookup the video of the flying frog on You Tube - this uses fields ~10 times higher than NMR to suspend creatures and objects through diamagnetism). I doubt there is a problem for a varying magnetic field but the situation is not exactly the same.