Why not pick a topic that effects everyone now? Perhaps, politicians who flip flop (almost all of them), unjust wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Iran soon), dollar devaluation and the fed who prints money and causes inflation, spend time blogging about politicians that the main stream media ignores (Ron Paul), or any number of actually important topics.
Perhaps the reason they picked the environment is because that does affect everyone? Sorry to burst your bubble but most of the rest of the world does not go around on a daily basis worrying about unknown US politicians, the value of the US currency, who it is planning to invade this month and the economic policies of its government. Sure the US does have impact beyond its borders but usually far less than the actions of the local government. Only really major events or changes in the US are worth noting for their local repercussions and, unless you happen to be in Iraq, Afganistan or Iran, these are not really good examples.
Amazingly though, irrespective of your position on man-made global warming, having stable environmental conditions really is important to all of us wherever we are on the planet.
Even with a WTO judgement the US still wouldn't pay up.
Actually that was a NAFTA judgement, or rather judgements since they kept appealing and losing. I knew one of the guys who negotiated with the US on the softwood lumber and apparently the final deal was a "gift" from Bush to show his friendliness to our then new PM.
What really irritated him was that our government refused to consider using an export tax on oil to the US as a means to recover the money, even though this was perfectly allowable under NAFTA
So perhaps by the end of the cretaceous there is some evidence for something akin to grass...but dinosaurs were around for a long time before the cretaceous.
Practically whenever I see dinosaurs depicted in movies, TV or other mass media, they're shown living in deserts, among volcanoes
There is actually some logic to this: grass had not evolved while the Dinosaurs were around. There are now not many places on the planet where there is no grass except where nothing grows so volcanoes and deserts are logical locations. This was mentioned in the "Making of Walking With Dinosaurs" as one of the biggest problems with finding good filming locations.
Only if you have a large quantity of the item in question. In this case I suppose it depends on where you set your threshold for "best". If you set your standards low enough then I suppose you can have "many" and still not have "most"...however then you are beginning to stretch the meaning of "best".
You're hotly contesting something that doesn't exist. "Many" implies at least a substantial minority.
many: "3. a large or considerable number of persons or things"
This is not consistent with an interpretation of "a substantial minority". Educational gaps like this are one of the reasons that some of us are not convinced about the wonders of the US educational system.
India has a billion people. China has a billion people. America has 300,000 people
Actually India has 1.1 billion and China has 1.3 billion and the US 0.3 billion.
Consider that many of the best grad schools are in America--plenty of Indians and Chinese come to America for grad school
I would hotly contest your claim that most of the best grad schools are in the US - many of the world rankings I've seen rely heavily on budget size and it is ridiculous to think that, for example, Canadian grad programs have all spontaneously improved this year because the Canadian dollar is worth a lot more.
I suspect the real reason they are popular with Indians and Chinese are two-fold. First the US is a lot more affordable than Europe and secondly if you are going to be in business and likely have to trade with the US it helps to know about its society.
The question we all need to ask is why do we even need to go back?
It is far easier to launch craft from the moon than from the earth so if we want to go further afield a moon base would be useful. In addition it would be a great way to test a long term, enclosed ecosystem for support human life. Finally there is all the helium-3 which does not exist on Earth and, if we improve our fusion tech, will make an excellent power source and possibly a rocket fuel...and that is the stuff we know at the moment that we can do there. Who knows what else we might find useful once we set up shop permanently there.
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
I agree with you that the first sentence is meaningless in assessing the effectiveness of the cameras but the second is not. The cameras are supposed to deter crime by making it easier to catch the criminals. If the latter is not the case then they will not act as a deterent. Of course to know this you would want to understand a lot more: does the amount of crime mke it harder to catch the criminals? Is this statistic based on the fraction or absolute rate of crimes solved? etc.
Now, I'll admit that I've only read the summary, but it should be safe to assume that the summary will contain the most important statistics
I agree that it should be safe to assume this but given that the writer of the summary has clearly demonstrated a lack of understanding of relevant statistics it is clearly not a safe assumption in this case!
In the end Universal is crippling itself.... they also just released DVD's with out even so much as a menu (ie, zero special features) you put the disk in, watched a couple previews you didn't want to watch, and then the movie started.
How is this bad? I would frankly really prefer a simple "movie only" DVD. Having to wait for the menu video intro to play and then shift the cursor around to "play" every time I stick the disk in is not as convenient as simply inserting the disc and having it play right away as it does for the DVDs I make from our camcorder.
Having several hours of extra "documentary" footage on how wonderful it was to make the film really doesn't do much for me. I realize that some people might like it but does it really sell the DVD? Your comment seems to suggest that there are people out there who will base their decision on whether to purchase the DVD on whether it comes with these extra features and not on whether the film was any good.
No the city did miss an opportunity to make money. With a no parking zone you can immediately ticket and then tow a car whereas with a parking meter you have to wait for it to expire. Thus with a no parking zone, if you efficiently tow parked cars you could get as many a 4 tickets/hour perhaps vs. 0.5-1/hour for a parking meter.
If you take someone's money by using a pirated copy of Windows, that's theft of money.
Actually it is fraud: you tell them you are selling them a legal copy of windows and then you sell them an illegal copy. Making an illegal copy is copyright infringement.
Your beloved Engadgets and Gizmodos will write articles saying "THIS THING IS AWESOME", paid for by the manufacturer.
...but since it is the manufacturers who sometimes pay for the ads is there such a huge difference? Could they afford to right lots of reviews panning products without suffering a hit to their ad revenue? It might not be quite as tightly coupled as you suggest but there is still some coupling there even with ads.
a world where we're exposed to more information in a day than many people experienced in a lifetime thousands of years ago.
Not really more, just different. For example prehistoric hunters tracking down their wooly mammoth would be faced with just as much info but it would be information they could gather with their own senses: wind speed, behavioural tendencies of the target, location of fellow hunters etc. rather than what someone else is doing half the world away.
Of course if they knew that Ogg half a world away had discovered a better way of making stone spears then he might be able to duplicate it, possibly improving on it, and hunt better. But does that make him more intelligent?
My belief is that it is not intelligence that is causing the rapid rise in the rate of invention but the improvement of communication. This allows us to pool our intelligence far more effectively than ever before. In modern times I would say that evolutionary tendencies would argue for lower intelligence. Many studies show that the assumedly more intelligent members of society tend to have fewer children and have them later in life (so fewer generations).
How can you possibly put together a list of the IT wonders of the world with out including the world wide web - especially when you put the article on a website!
I was also not impressed and that was my initial reaction too...but then I thought. Is the impressive thing that we shot a tin can out of the solar system or that it can tell us what it is seeing out there? I think it is really the latter so it really is a information technology marvel in the most basic sense of the term.
My point is that, even if you factor an order of magnitude increase in rate, you need a long time after the initial invention: 10k years, 1k years, 100 years etc. may be an explosion on a geological timescale but not a human one.
Arguably, humans have become more intelligent.
No - that just shows that they have become better at doing IQ tests which I can easily agree with- what would your average caveman do with a multiple choice question?
It does even have to be that. Arguably humans have been just as intelligent for the past 10,000 years and have failed to design a machine smarter than ourselves. So, even if tomorrow we build a smarter machine who is to say how long it will take it to design a machine even smarter than it (or even whether it wants to!)?
A slight increase in intelligence every 10,000 years or so is hardly an "explosion" on a human timescale.
Imagine two entangled photons travelling away from each other after a radioactive decay, each moving at the speed of light and each with opposite polarizations: lets say one up and one down for one particular instance.
Now each strikes a polaroid filter both aligned at +45 degrees i.e. both have same orientation. This means that each photon has a 50% chance of passing through the filter. However in the entangled case exactly one photon will pass the filters EVERY time.
Since SR tells us that there can be no information transmitted between the two after the decay we can imagine doing the same thing with two computers. At the start they can transmit any info they like between themselves, then they are disconnected and each, separately told the angle of the polaroid filter. Now each has to decide indpendently whether or not their photon should pass the filter and every time they do exactly one should always say "pass".
You can come up with a good approximation to what actually happens in rel life but it is impossible to come up with exactl one photon passing everytime. The only way that you can do that is to allow some communication between the two photons...which SR tells us is not possible. While the overall effect does not violate SR the problem is in understanding how the two photons decide which is going to pass without invoking FTL communication.
...one of the two universities which pretty much single handedly produce the lawyers, politicians and civil servants of this country
Really? So you think that degrees from Durham, St. Andrews, Birmingham etc. don't count? Just because quite a few high ranked politicians and lawyers come from there does not mean that most lawyers and politicians do. With an attitude like this may I suggest that it is your thinking which needs updating?
you would distance yourself from Oxbridge, and do what religious dissenters had to do prior to C20: set up their own Universities.
You do know that this is exactly how Cambridge was founded right?
Slashdot Mirror
Humans are often trying to keep personal secrets from us, so stealing it all directly from your brain is a preferred option.
Just wait till the RIAA hear about this...
Why not pick a topic that effects everyone now? Perhaps, politicians who flip flop (almost all of them), unjust wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Iran soon), dollar devaluation and the fed who prints money and causes inflation, spend time blogging about politicians that the main stream media ignores (Ron Paul), or any number of actually important topics.
Perhaps the reason they picked the environment is because that does affect everyone? Sorry to burst your bubble but most of the rest of the world does not go around on a daily basis worrying about unknown US politicians, the value of the US currency, who it is planning to invade this month and the economic policies of its government. Sure the US does have impact beyond its borders but usually far less than the actions of the local government. Only really major events or changes in the US are worth noting for their local repercussions and, unless you happen to be in Iraq, Afganistan or Iran, these are not really good examples.
Amazingly though, irrespective of your position on man-made global warming, having stable environmental conditions really is important to all of us wherever we are on the planet.
Even with a WTO judgement the US still wouldn't pay up.
Actually that was a NAFTA judgement, or rather judgements since they kept appealing and losing. I knew one of the guys who negotiated with the US on the softwood lumber and apparently the final deal was a "gift" from Bush to show his friendliness to our then new PM.
What really irritated him was that our government refused to consider using an export tax on oil to the US as a means to recover the money, even though this was perfectly allowable under NAFTA
So perhaps by the end of the cretaceous there is some evidence for something akin to grass...but dinosaurs were around for a long time before the cretaceous.
Practically whenever I see dinosaurs depicted in movies, TV or other mass media, they're shown living in deserts, among volcanoes
There is actually some logic to this: grass had not evolved while the Dinosaurs were around. There are now not many places on the planet where there is no grass except where nothing grows so volcanoes and deserts are logical locations. This was mentioned in the "Making of Walking With Dinosaurs" as one of the biggest problems with finding good filming locations.
A minority can still be "large or considerable".
Only if you have a large quantity of the item in question. In this case I suppose it depends on where you set your threshold for "best". If you set your standards low enough then I suppose you can have "many" and still not have "most"...however then you are beginning to stretch the meaning of "best".
You're hotly contesting something that doesn't exist. "Many" implies at least a substantial minority.
many: "3. a large or considerable number of persons or things"
This is not consistent with an interpretation of "a substantial minority". Educational gaps like this are one of the reasons that some of us are not convinced about the wonders of the US educational system.
India has a billion people. China has a billion people. America has 300,000 people
Actually India has 1.1 billion and China has 1.3 billion and the US 0.3 billion.
Consider that many of the best grad schools are in America--plenty of Indians and Chinese come to America for grad school
I would hotly contest your claim that most of the best grad schools are in the US - many of the world rankings I've seen rely heavily on budget size and it is ridiculous to think that, for example, Canadian grad programs have all spontaneously improved this year because the Canadian dollar is worth a lot more.
I suspect the real reason they are popular with Indians and Chinese are two-fold. First the US is a lot more affordable than Europe and secondly if you are going to be in business and likely have to trade with the US it helps to know about its society.
The question we all need to ask is why do we even need to go back?
It is far easier to launch craft from the moon than from the earth so if we want to go further afield a moon base would be useful. In addition it would be a great way to test a long term, enclosed ecosystem for support human life. Finally there is all the helium-3 which does not exist on Earth and, if we improve our fusion tech, will make an excellent power source and possibly a rocket fuel...and that is the stuff we know at the moment that we can do there. Who knows what else we might find useful once we set up shop permanently there.
...I think someone forgot to tell the sun.
You only quoted part of the statement:
In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.
I agree with you that the first sentence is meaningless in assessing the effectiveness of the cameras but the second is not. The cameras are supposed to deter crime by making it easier to catch the criminals. If the latter is not the case then they will not act as a deterent. Of course to know this you would want to understand a lot more: does the amount of crime mke it harder to catch the criminals? Is this statistic based on the fraction or absolute rate of crimes solved? etc.
Now, I'll admit that I've only read the summary, but it should be safe to assume that the summary will contain the most important statistics
I agree that it should be safe to assume this but given that the writer of the summary has clearly demonstrated a lack of understanding of relevant statistics it is clearly not a safe assumption in this case!
that means they won't see us coming for another 2.5 billion years.
Perhaps, but even if the Universe were not expanding, it will take us at least 7 billion years to get there so I'd hardly call it a surprise attack!
In the end Universal is crippling itself.... they also just released DVD's with out even so much as a menu (ie, zero special features) you put the disk in, watched a couple previews you didn't want to watch, and then the movie started.
How is this bad? I would frankly really prefer a simple "movie only" DVD. Having to wait for the menu video intro to play and then shift the cursor around to "play" every time I stick the disk in is not as convenient as simply inserting the disc and having it play right away as it does for the DVDs I make from our camcorder.
Having several hours of extra "documentary" footage on how wonderful it was to make the film really doesn't do much for me. I realize that some people might like it but does it really sell the DVD? Your comment seems to suggest that there are people out there who will base their decision on whether to purchase the DVD on whether it comes with these extra features and not on whether the film was any good.
No the city did miss an opportunity to make money. With a no parking zone you can immediately ticket and then tow a car whereas with a parking meter you have to wait for it to expire. Thus with a no parking zone, if you efficiently tow parked cars you could get as many a 4 tickets/hour perhaps vs. 0.5-1/hour for a parking meter.
If you take someone's money by using a pirated copy of Windows, that's theft of money.
Actually it is fraud: you tell them you are selling them a legal copy of windows and then you sell them an illegal copy. Making an illegal copy is copyright infringement.
Your beloved Engadgets and Gizmodos will write articles saying "THIS THING IS AWESOME", paid for by the manufacturer.
...but since it is the manufacturers who sometimes pay for the ads is there such a huge difference? Could they afford to right lots of reviews panning products without suffering a hit to their ad revenue? It might not be quite as tightly coupled as you suggest but there is still some coupling there even with ads.
a world where we're exposed to more information in a day than many people experienced in a lifetime thousands of years ago.
Not really more, just different. For example prehistoric hunters tracking down their wooly mammoth would be faced with just as much info but it would be information they could gather with their own senses: wind speed, behavioural tendencies of the target, location of fellow hunters etc. rather than what someone else is doing half the world away. Of course if they knew that Ogg half a world away had discovered a better way of making stone spears then he might be able to duplicate it, possibly improving on it, and hunt better. But does that make him more intelligent? My belief is that it is not intelligence that is causing the rapid rise in the rate of invention but the improvement of communication. This allows us to pool our intelligence far more effectively than ever before. In modern times I would say that evolutionary tendencies would argue for lower intelligence. Many studies show that the assumedly more intelligent members of society tend to have fewer children and have them later in life (so fewer generations).
How can you possibly put together a list of the IT wonders of the world with out including the world wide web - especially when you put the article on a website!
Voyager is hardly "IT," wonder that it is.
I was also not impressed and that was my initial reaction too...but then I thought. Is the impressive thing that we shot a tin can out of the solar system or that it can tell us what it is seeing out there? I think it is really the latter so it really is a information technology marvel in the most basic sense of the term.
My point is that, even if you factor an order of magnitude increase in rate, you need a long time after the initial invention: 10k years, 1k years, 100 years etc. may be an explosion on a geological timescale but not a human one.
Arguably, humans have become more intelligent.
No - that just shows that they have become better at doing IQ tests which I can easily agree with- what would your average caveman do with a multiple choice question?
It does even have to be that. Arguably humans have been just as intelligent for the past 10,000 years and have failed to design a machine smarter than ourselves. So, even if tomorrow we build a smarter machine who is to say how long it will take it to design a machine even smarter than it (or even whether it wants to!)?
A slight increase in intelligence every 10,000 years or so is hardly an "explosion" on a human timescale.
Imagine two entangled photons travelling away from each other after a radioactive decay, each moving at the speed of light and each with opposite polarizations: lets say one up and one down for one particular instance.
Now each strikes a polaroid filter both aligned at +45 degrees i.e. both have same orientation. This means that each photon has a 50% chance of passing through the filter. However in the entangled case exactly one photon will pass the filters EVERY time.
Since SR tells us that there can be no information transmitted between the two after the decay we can imagine doing the same thing with two computers. At the start they can transmit any info they like between themselves, then they are disconnected and each, separately told the angle of the polaroid filter. Now each has to decide indpendently whether or not their photon should pass the filter and every time they do exactly one should always say "pass".
You can come up with a good approximation to what actually happens in rel life but it is impossible to come up with exactl one photon passing everytime. The only way that you can do that is to allow some communication between the two photons...which SR tells us is not possible. While the overall effect does not violate SR the problem is in understanding how the two photons decide which is going to pass without invoking FTL communication.
Everyone should be at least a little familiar with vi. When the fit hits the shan, sometimes it's all you've got to get out of the doo doo.
When that happens you don't want 'vi' you need vim.
...one of the two universities which pretty much single handedly produce the lawyers, politicians and civil servants of this country
Really? So you think that degrees from Durham, St. Andrews, Birmingham etc. don't count? Just because quite a few high ranked politicians and lawyers come from there does not mean that most lawyers and politicians do. With an attitude like this may I suggest that it is your thinking which needs updating?
you would distance yourself from Oxbridge, and do what religious dissenters had to do prior to C20: set up their own Universities.
You do know that this is exactly how Cambridge was founded right?