The problem is that they never actually bothered to define "hacking". They decided that a vague definition of "unauthorized use of a computer" was sufficient. To a certain degree, I can understand that, but in reality the issue with it is that it requires so much interpretation that it ends of being 'I would rather see 10 innocent users got to jail than one hacker go free'.
I believe what they're saying is that, while Facebook's ToS _is_ a civil contract, it is that contract that authorizes you to access their servers. If you break the terms of that contract you are no longer explicitly authorized to access their servers and thus guilty of hacking. Legally (though IANAL), that seems to be a valid, if horrifying, interpretation of their broken law.
With the law as is, the only saving grace I can see here is that to be guilty of hacking, one first has to be determined to be in violation of the terms of service. Determining if the contract is broken requires certain action (e.g. court, arbitration). Facebook cannot merely claim so and have that be binding. One may be able to argue that one is not accessing the servers in an unauthorized manner until the dispute has been settled. However, as IANAL, I can't say for sure.
Well, I imagine that those states and counties without oversight will put it in place because allowing fracking. Do you think that they just allow it by default? It's a big industrial drilling operation and requires approval due to even basic laws. Why would the feds need to step in?
As far as funding research is concerned, please don't be intentionally ignorant. Did you not see the first words of my post? They pointed out how every state already has their own little "EPA" (usually called DEP). Why would you assume I'm suggesting counties fund it? And even if it came to that, the counties could form a commission to investigate and not repeat work.
And you might say, 'what, like the EPA?' to which I say emphatically no. The EPA has it's accountability spread across the US, much of which isn't subject to fracking. It's a lot easier to buy representatives of places not affected by your activities than those of places that are. Local research is a lot more likely to be thorough because the politicians _will_ be voted out if something bad happens. Cynical? Sure, but really no more so than assuming the corporations are lying to the EPA and all that.
Every state has a Dept. of Environmental Protection (or similar), and I know a few states that have a moratorium on fracking. Presently my state does not, but my county does. Even lower than that, municipalities and property owners have a say in fracking. So regardless of whether of not the EPA is "all but dismantled", there is still quite a bit of oversight for fracking. Oversight (and, indeed, research funding) by the people most closely affected by it, not some massive federal bureaucracy.
The OP right, and seems to understand the issues far better than you. It isn't that the FPU is shared, it that nearly _everything_ is shared: Instruction cache, fetch and decode, FPU, L2 data cache. The only things that aren't shared are L1 data and integer operations (scheduler and ALU).
Instruction issuing and and cache misses are big performance areas, but these are precisely the resources the cores share! You're running two threads off (with the exception of L1 data) the same caches and instruction fetches. So, in reality, the second core in bulldozer is much more like ultra-hyperthreading than it is a second core. I think the fact that they're even listed as cores is a marketing strategy that has backfired pretty hard.
P.S. L3 cache has proven to be quite useless in many workloads... It helps a bit in servers, IIRC, but that's about it. So it's more a race to L2 cache, which, again, is a shared resource. AMD, in fact, has indicated that it may drop the L3 from desktop parts.
That sounds about right. Just because the universe is quite old doesn't make 2 billion years any less time. In reality, 1.7byr is actually a fair mount of time! Mind that the theorized first population of star (III) are theorized to have been super massive and very short lived (~10Myr), so they would mostly be dead and gone (kind of frustrating for trying to study them!) quite early in. So a 'modern' galaxy could easily form very early in the universe's life. And as Quasars are thought to be very young galaxies, I fail to see the inconsistency...
No, I'm someone that understands the legal system. But go ahead and assume that your poor understanding of it is better than the pretty good summary on Wikipedia.
Yeah, sure, you did blindly cover everything with "laws AND regulations", but you also said "No regulations, no standing..." which makes it quite clear you had no idea how regulations actually work.
But you know, whatever. Defend your ignorance. Being ignorant and persistent is better than actually learning something (and God forbid, admitting you were wrong). So, yes, you're done. You've completely proven the point I made at the very beginning: You are close minded and have such a shallow understanding of the issues you can only spout ridiculous hate speech. That's the truth, and to deny it is to deny reality. QED.
Seriously: Read. Understand. Please don't try to put the legal system bluntly when you don't know the first thing about it.
You would sue the producer of the 'table' for under the very old, very general _tort_ liability of fraud (probably). You have no standing under, for example*, the _regulation_ against false advertising. All you can do is write the FTC and complain. They'll tell the company to stop, but you still have to sue (again, probably for fraud) to get your money back. Try to sue for for false advertising and NOT fraud and they will tell you to 'GTFO'. (Though since they aren't so rude and ignorant, they'll probably just say "you mean fraud, right?" as that is a type of fraud but has nothing to do with the regulation).
I find it exceedingly ironic that you would ignore my entire message and complain about how I ignored your other message. Well, I ignored your other message because it, like this one, ignored mine. Why should I reply to someone that is clearly showing that they don't want to think or even consider what I wrote? (And if you take exception to that, instead of complaining, how about actually understanding and addressing the points I made before.) The answer is I shouldn't, but I will a little anyways.
From your other post: > What about all these "free marketers" (there is no such thing) saying that companies are obligated to maximize profit/at the expense of everything else/?
When I go to the store and I buy, say, a table I get a table. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just not make a table and give me a rock instead? Yes, it would... until people sued them for not selling the right item and no one bought their crap ever again. The point is that "maximize profit" IS NOT THE SAME AS "rape the land". I already gave you examples that you simply ignored: Organic food. It costs more, but people buy it. The maximized profit here is accomplished by producing a safe and quality product. People buy it (at an increased price) because they want the quality and want to support that. BP works with carbon credits/cap-and-trade to maximize their profit because their cost is less than the good will generated.
I'd say more, and once again point out that I don't support complete deregulation anyways, but you won't read it.
You are way off your base because your post contained nothing but baseless partisan rambling. This post is different. Note how you actually cite things, like "padlock the EPA". That's actually something we can discuss.
Compare and contrast to: You spouting mindless hate with the burning river nonsense. No one (outside a villain on Captain Planet, I guess) actually _wants_ that. The real accusation is that Republicans don't _care_ if a river burns provided it means more profit. In other words, they want money, not burning rivers. That we can discuss. Outright lying like you do only serves to demonstrate you have a completely closed mind about the topic and have already made up your mind with a deep misunderstanding of the actual issues.
Then there's the bizarre logical thread of prayer breakfast -> apocalypse -> rape the planet. Somehow I don't think that someone that actually believes in God and heaven is going to, in your words, "rape the planet" for what really only amounts to material gain. Sounds like a good way to get to hell, but this is so baseless and flawed there's really no point discussing it further.
"That's the truth, and to deny it is to deny reality. QED." I shouldn't even have to point out how off base it is to preemptively say anyone arguing with you is "denying reality". But I guess I just did.
So, moving on, "padlock the EPA". Well, yeah, that sounds bad if you presuppose that the EPA is the only one that can save the environment. Let me ask: if there is not EPA and you're living next to a river that catches fire, what are you going to do? I'm going to guess it'll be something like making a picket sign and walking down to the mayor's office and saying that if he doesn't do something about it NOW you won't rest until he never get elected to anything for as long as he lives.
The point is, the EPA is just a federal agency. Closing them down doesn't destroy the environment any more than shutting down the Dept. of Education destroys education or the Dept. of Energy electricity. There are ways to do things _without_ giant federal bureaucracies you know.
> because the GOP leadership and the GOP at large want him gone... oh, back to this... Oh well
All I can really say to this is is wow. You literally said that the Republicans _want_ burning rivers, spouted a bunch of unsubstantiated BS, then closed with 'if you don't believe me you're just a denier'. And you got modded up. Wow.
> > Has it never occurred to you that there's a middle ground between where we are and no regulation at all? > You assert we are at the extreme end of regulation?
Um... no. How do you even get that? Well, I guess by misunderstanding my point. Regulation is a sliding scale. Just as there's space between our current amount and zero for 'less regulation', there's space between our current amount and 'extreme' for 'more'. I explicitly excluded that side of the scale though because it was irrelevant to my point and figured readers would be smart enough to figure that on their own.
> > Or that one can go about regulation differently? > One can always do things differently, but whether it is still effective is what matters.
Which is exactly my point. Some people thing the current system is poor and that the same (i.e. current) end result could be accomplished with more streamlined regulation and less bureaucracy. Some people think the the current system is poor but it is as good as can be. I don't know many people that think the current system is particularly good. (Some people also think that we need more or less regulation, but that is irrelevant to this point and touched on above.)
> We'd probably end up like China, or at least like we were in the early to middle part of the last century (can you say "superfund"), real quick.
Right, because we'd bring back leaded gas, and I'm sure farmers are just _itching_ to use contaminated effluent to irrigate their crops. Because we like that, which is why there's no such thing as organic food. And companies don't care at all about PR, which is why they never buy carbon credits. Culture had changed, as we realized that safety _is_ more important than a couple cents. Yes, it doesn't always work that way for everything, which is why I _explicitly said_ I wouldn't rely on it, but the notion that we'd just start laying waste to the land without regulations is ignoring an awful lot of cultural changes. The same changes to drove these regulations in the first place, I should add.
> Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away > with, this is how the United States would be as well.
There's no nice way of putting this: You are retarded and whoever modded this nonsense "insightful" should be denied mod points indefinitely.
This comment is nothing but baseless bashing of 'them' without any thought at all. You don't even have a pretense of understanding the Republican or Tea Party (real mature BTW) points. Has it never occurred to you that there's a middle ground between where we are and no regulation at all? Or that one can go about regulation differently? Or, geez, that even if there was _no_ regulation how public outcry from everyone would still provide a good deal of incentive to not do it? Not that I'd rely on that, but still we wouldn't be half as bad as China.
But of course, because you have no clue what you're talking about you don't get that. Did you know, for example, that China only recently phased out leaded gasoline? And that it's still being produced in rural (e.g. farming) areas? Well, yeah, probably, because I bet your point was that the "Tea Baggers" wanted to bring back leaded gas. (and I could go on about why China isn't like the US and how the differences are much more cultural than regulatory, but I made my point.)
> This is a common fallacy -- that the costs of going to doctors for minor discretionary ailments are a significant part of > health care costs. As the economist Paul Krugman has explained, the major expenses in health care aren't $80 visits > to the doctor, but $50,000 and $100,000 cancers...
Sure, whatever, that's obvious and wasn't my point anyways. The point I was making is that it would waste less resources, making those available to other people for less. Not only would they stop spending $80 on the useless visit, but the decreased demand would lead to further reductions in price for people that actually should be seeing the doctor. (Not having to pay the bureaucracy with also reduce prices.) So, while right now uninsured people go to the emergency room only to get turned away until they have a $100k heart thing, they could instead go to a doctor, hand them the posted $50 and chat about their chest pains / fever / etc.
The studies you quote were all performed within the broken system. It's quite hard to extrapolate their results to fundamentally different circumstances. For instance the RAND study had people paying 95%, which would almost certainly be higher than what they would pay with reduced demand and lack of health insurance overhead. Even the 50% is questionable... While it's quite probably a bit less than a no-insurance situation, it's also almost certainly more than they thought they should be paying, making them feel uncomfortable about going. This is, in particular, the case for IBM... They raised deductibles made the perceived and true cost of care increase (because I doubt they bumped salaries accordingly). Of course people are going to cut back.
And yes, I don't expect the average Joe to be able to diagnose themselves. But let's also be realistic: For basically all of human history people have had to diagnose and treat themselves. They shouldn't see the doctor very time they feel ill, they should _think_ and only go when they feel that it's something more than a cold.
> $10,000 doesn't enter into the decision. How much is your life worth?
It's not my life, it's _maybe_ my life. If I was faced with something that had a 10% chance of being dangerous cancer, and a 5% reduced change of survival waiting 6 months to know whether or not is is dangerous for sure, the expected value of my life is $2,000,000. But that's not even accounting for the possibility that I might not be cured and die anyways. So it's a lot more than that, and that's the point. People, when actually faced with situation bill like that get surprisingly good at these maths.
Nationwide, uninsured drivers were at 14.7% in 2004. New Hampshire had about 11% in 2007. Yet the country isn't a third world hell hole. Quite simply, car accidents are either too uninteresting to be reported or so interesting that the insurance is status of a driver is a quickly forgotten footnote. People (or their health/collision insurance) just take the financial hit, life moves on, and you miss just how common it is.
Also, if you think that liability insurance is a penalty on responsible people, then you have no clue what being responsible means. I pay for $300,000 in liability insurance (a bit much) for a meager $300 or so a year (combined with homeowners, collision not included). That's less than one month of real estate taxes. Then, if shit happens, not only am I not losing aforementioned house, but there's enough there to fix whatever damaged I caused. THAT is what responsible is, not just assuming you're too cool to get in an accident.
It's like that here too. Even as a libertarian I _fully_ support this policy. Especially with all the modern safety nets, it's way too easy to live a nice life at the bottom of society with barely a cent in cash, living paycheck to paycheck buying big screen TVs, nice dinners, etc. Lose your job? You don't need savings when there's 2 years of unemployment. Hit someone? Oh well, it's not like they're going to get your TV.
And even with the law in place it's still bad. Not only are the minimum liabilities are pathetic ($5k in my state), but the enforcement and penalties are (appropriately/necessarily) weak, so a lot of such people simply don't have insurance. Moreover, if you sue, you apparently have to waive the insurance payout so if, for example, damages are $10k you'd have to get try all $10k from the person with nothing ever from the insurance company, win or lose.
That said though, health insurance is a completely different situation. First, it's personal: if you don't have insurance and money that's your problem (and probably fault). Second, driving is _much_ more optional that living... The state already requires you to prove you have the _skill_ to operate a car to use a car (licensing), so requiring you to have the _financial backing_ is hardly an unreasonable additional requirement.
Which is why sane people realize that the proper course of action isn't to replace the money grubbing bureaucrats with apathetic ones (note that there is a big difference) and instead attempt to do away with them altogether. We could break apart the back room collective bargaining and price fixing and actually make health care something that people actually pay for, like car insurance and automotive services. That way, at least, we can see some competition for price and maybe people will even understand the resources they waste every time they go to the doctor about a cold. (Well, at least after they paid $80 to hear the doc say "It's a cold, drink some juice and get some rest" they'll think twice before doing it again.) Hell, it might even help with things like smoking and obesity if people see a big old 'your lifestyle is really unhealthy' surcharge.
It would also help the problems with cancer screening: once people see a $10,000+ price tag on treating that maybe-dangerous tumor they'll definitely give waiting and seeing a thought. And, of course, they could buy their own screening if they like.
Anyways, I can't promise it will work, and I'd expect medicare might need expand to cover preexisting condition type cases (e.g. birth defects or similar). But the one _really_ nice thing is that it would be vastly easier to change to single payer if it didn't work out, whereas the other way is basically impossible.
But what's the alternative? Just wait until someone's sick enough to warrant a cancer screening?
Or, to be more direct, the problem isn't the _testing_, it the _reaction_. The view of cancer is too binary... You either don't have cancer or you have ZOMG CANCER. It seems to me that by making a third category of 'mostly harmless' we could really do away with #3 altogether. How could we determine that? Early detection and study. Exactly what abandoning screens would make impossible.
Really, this is just about the money, in a couple directions: First, no doctor is going to volunteer "this is cancer, but it doesn't look dangerous so we'll just monitor the situation" because God help them if that person dies. Second, people usually spend other people's money (government, 'insurance') on the treatments, so to them it's only 'some side effects vs your life' and not also about 10% of their lifetime earnings too. Guess what they'll take? And so the people paying for these tests have come to realize that they're just a money pit: the (usually negative) test, the (potentially) unnecessary treatment, and finally just the cost of treating real cancer a year or so earlier then you would have had to without the screen for someone that may well die anyway (any they get the pleasure of a year of treatment). All this for how many people that earlier treatment would have helped? Well, that is the point of the study.
But the point is, that it's not the data that's bad, it's a system the encourages people to get knee jerk treatment.
No, and really no to everyone else. This is making _obfuscated_ data suddenly because visible.
It characterizes the the motion of the camera from the blur then reverses it: essentially an image stabilization algorithm. It's like making voices audible over loud music by figuring out what the song is and subtracting it from the mix.
It's cool, but not magic. They aren't even pretending to add in missing data like a CSI zoom. Nor does it even seem to take care of simple out of focus situations. So let's not get too excited, well, unless you've got a cheap/slow camera.
bias a particular tendency or inclination, especially one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question; prejudice.
They vetted their results, probably more than they would have had the results been expected. "After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement" -- Press Release. And yet only "Very few (if any) physicists believe there was no mistake". Why? They can't show an error. CERN already tried, even. They just assume an error because the results doesn't agree with the current theory. In other words, they are prejudging the experiment flawed and showing bias toward GR. (Which, I will point out again, has _not_ been rigorously studied in the context of neutrinos.)
You can argue the bias is justified; I'm not saying it isn't. You can argue that the results are flawed; again, I'm not saying they aren't. What I am saying, however, is that the conclusions here are, by definition, biased.
P.S. Don't you think the greater hubris is to assume that general relativity is totally correct? We've not even landed on another planet; it takes some serious balls to say that we understand the (macroscopic) universe so well, IMHO.
I'm quite familiar with how well tested GR is. I'm, not, however, aware of any of those tests involving neutrinos. Besides, we already know we don't know how GR relates to quantum mechanics. Maybe this is just an example of that on a macroscopic scale. The point being is that GR is extremely robust in those areas where it's been heavily verified, but that robustness doesn't automatically translate into robustness in other areas. Before we had high energies / high precision Newtonian mechanics were also extremely well tested. As our knowledge advanced, we came to realize there were situations where it didn't hold up. It's pretty strong hubris to assume that GR won't meet the same fate and the we totally understand the macroscopic universe.
The cold fusion debacle is more or less what I'm lamenting. An experiment (with much less rigor that this, IMO) with an interesting but unexpected result wasn't verified and scientists / reporters made a huge shitstorm instead of it just being 'experiment not replicated, considered proven to not work'. Now no one can use that term without being shunned, even though the field in general is known to have at least some validity (see muon-catalyzed fusion). Basically, I'm not saying that they're being irresponsible, I'm saying that it's unfortunate that this _is_ responsible.
> If relativity is broken, much of modern physics falls apart.
Um... No. If relativity is broken, we need to update it to fit the new results. Or just add a footnote (as we did with Newtonian physics) that says "but not for neutrinos". It's not like GPS suddenly stops working. We just know our understanding was _incomplete_.
> Not only that, but we have measured neutrino velocity before to within one part in a few million and they weren't FTL.
News to me: "the speed of 3 GeV neutrinos to be 1.000051(29) c." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino. There's a caveat there, where the uncertainty allows the velocity to be less than c, but the point is neutrino speed has always been odd. And this puts that in a new light.
Meh... All jokes aside, if neutrino communications could be managed (in particular, efficient and highly directional emitters/detectors) would be worth a lot more regardless of this experiment. First, light only travels about 66% c in fiber, and said fiber needs to wrap around the circumference of the Earth. So not only would neutrinos travel faster than light in a fiber (as they go pretty close to c for sure), but they could also just so straight there through the Earth. You'd probably be looking at roughly halving the travel time. You also wouldn't have to lay fiber at all, which presently dominates the cost of building the link. Without the actual tech, it's hard to say, but neutrino based communications could really change the world.
I somewhat disagree. Their results met the criteria of scientific discovery and they (well, I certainly hope!) reviewed their process for any error. So even though they literally, by scientific standard, discovered FTL particles, they explicitly state that they don't actually think they did because it disagrees with existing theories. This is *biased* experimental physics. Yes, relativity has a good track record, and they likely missed something. OTOH, neutrinos are still a pretty new research topic and maybe relativity doesn't cover all the universe has to offer. I do think that these results should be retested, verified, and studied as much as possible. But I'm also seriously disappointed that an ostensibly legitimate discovery has to be presented as 'we screwed up but we don't know why so look at these' in order to avoid raeg from close minded scientists.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that they never actually bothered to define "hacking". They decided that a vague definition of "unauthorized use of a computer" was sufficient. To a certain degree, I can understand that, but in reality the issue with it is that it requires so much interpretation that it ends of being 'I would rather see 10 innocent users got to jail than one hacker go free'.
I believe what they're saying is that, while Facebook's ToS _is_ a civil contract, it is that contract that authorizes you to access their servers. If you break the terms of that contract you are no longer explicitly authorized to access their servers and thus guilty of hacking. Legally (though IANAL), that seems to be a valid, if horrifying, interpretation of their broken law.
With the law as is, the only saving grace I can see here is that to be guilty of hacking, one first has to be determined to be in violation of the terms of service. Determining if the contract is broken requires certain action (e.g. court, arbitration). Facebook cannot merely claim so and have that be binding. One may be able to argue that one is not accessing the servers in an unauthorized manner until the dispute has been settled. However, as IANAL, I can't say for sure.
Well, I imagine that those states and counties without oversight will put it in place because allowing fracking. Do you think that they just allow it by default? It's a big industrial drilling operation and requires approval due to even basic laws. Why would the feds need to step in?
As far as funding research is concerned, please don't be intentionally ignorant. Did you not see the first words of my post? They pointed out how every state already has their own little "EPA" (usually called DEP). Why would you assume I'm suggesting counties fund it? And even if it came to that, the counties could form a commission to investigate and not repeat work.
And you might say, 'what, like the EPA?' to which I say emphatically no. The EPA has it's accountability spread across the US, much of which isn't subject to fracking. It's a lot easier to buy representatives of places not affected by your activities than those of places that are. Local research is a lot more likely to be thorough because the politicians _will_ be voted out if something bad happens. Cynical? Sure, but really no more so than assuming the corporations are lying to the EPA and all that.
Every state has a Dept. of Environmental Protection (or similar), and I know a few states that have a moratorium on fracking. Presently my state does not, but my county does. Even lower than that, municipalities and property owners have a say in fracking. So regardless of whether of not the EPA is "all but dismantled", there is still quite a bit of oversight for fracking. Oversight (and, indeed, research funding) by the people most closely affected by it, not some massive federal bureaucracy.
The OP right, and seems to understand the issues far better than you. It isn't that the FPU is shared, it that nearly _everything_ is shared: Instruction cache, fetch and decode, FPU, L2 data cache. The only things that aren't shared are L1 data and integer operations (scheduler and ALU).
Instruction issuing and and cache misses are big performance areas, but these are precisely the resources the cores share! You're running two threads off (with the exception of L1 data) the same caches and instruction fetches. So, in reality, the second core in bulldozer is much more like ultra-hyperthreading than it is a second core. I think the fact that they're even listed as cores is a marketing strategy that has backfired pretty hard.
P.S. L3 cache has proven to be quite useless in many workloads... It helps a bit in servers, IIRC, but that's about it. So it's more a race to L2 cache, which, again, is a shared resource. AMD, in fact, has indicated that it may drop the L3 from desktop parts.
That sounds about right. Just because the universe is quite old doesn't make 2 billion years any less time. In reality, 1.7byr is actually a fair mount of time! Mind that the theorized first population of star (III) are theorized to have been super massive and very short lived (~10Myr), so they would mostly be dead and gone (kind of frustrating for trying to study them!) quite early in. So a 'modern' galaxy could easily form very early in the universe's life. And as Quasars are thought to be very young galaxies, I fail to see the inconsistency...
If you'd like a picture check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reionization
No, I'm someone that understands the legal system. But go ahead and assume that your poor understanding of it is better than the pretty good summary on Wikipedia.
Yeah, sure, you did blindly cover everything with "laws AND regulations", but you also said "No regulations, no standing..." which makes it quite clear you had no idea how regulations actually work.
But you know, whatever. Defend your ignorance. Being ignorant and persistent is better than actually learning something (and God forbid, admitting you were wrong). So, yes, you're done. You've completely proven the point I made at the very beginning: You are close minded and have such a shallow understanding of the issues you can only spout ridiculous hate speech.
That's the truth, and to deny it is to deny reality. QED.
ug... I shouldn't but...
Tort: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tort
Regulation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Federal_Regulations
Seriously: Read. Understand. Please don't try to put the legal system bluntly when you don't know the first thing about it.
You would sue the producer of the 'table' for under the very old, very general _tort_ liability of fraud (probably). You have no standing under, for example*, the _regulation_ against false advertising. All you can do is write the FTC and complain. They'll tell the company to stop, but you still have to sue (again, probably for fraud) to get your money back. Try to sue for for false advertising and NOT fraud and they will tell you to 'GTFO'. (Though since they aren't so rude and ignorant, they'll probably just say "you mean fraud, right?" as that is a type of fraud but has nothing to do with the regulation).
* Which doesn't apply to labeling, BTW, but is a well known example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_advertising#Regulation_and_enforcement
I find it exceedingly ironic that you would ignore my entire message and complain about how I ignored your other message. Well, I ignored your other message because it, like this one, ignored mine. Why should I reply to someone that is clearly showing that they don't want to think or even consider what I wrote? (And if you take exception to that, instead of complaining, how about actually understanding and addressing the points I made before.) The answer is I shouldn't, but I will a little anyways.
From your other post: /at the expense of everything else/?
> What about all these "free marketers" (there is no such thing) saying that companies are obligated to maximize profit
When I go to the store and I buy, say, a table I get a table. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just not make a table and give me a rock instead? Yes, it would... until people sued them for not selling the right item and no one bought their crap ever again.
The point is that "maximize profit" IS NOT THE SAME AS "rape the land". I already gave you examples that you simply ignored:
Organic food. It costs more, but people buy it. The maximized profit here is accomplished by producing a safe and quality product. People buy it (at an increased price) because they want the quality and want to support that. BP works with carbon credits/cap-and-trade to maximize their profit because their cost is less than the good will generated.
I'd say more, and once again point out that I don't support complete deregulation anyways, but you won't read it.
You are way off your base because your post contained nothing but baseless partisan rambling. This post is different. Note how you actually cite things, like "padlock the EPA". That's actually something we can discuss.
Compare and contrast to:
You spouting mindless hate with the burning river nonsense. No one (outside a villain on Captain Planet, I guess) actually _wants_ that. The real accusation is that Republicans don't _care_ if a river burns provided it means more profit. In other words, they want money, not burning rivers. That we can discuss. Outright lying like you do only serves to demonstrate you have a completely closed mind about the topic and have already made up your mind with a deep misunderstanding of the actual issues.
Then there's the bizarre logical thread of prayer breakfast -> apocalypse -> rape the planet. Somehow I don't think that someone that actually believes in God and heaven is going to, in your words, "rape the planet" for what really only amounts to material gain. Sounds like a good way to get to hell, but this is so baseless and flawed there's really no point discussing it further.
"That's the truth, and to deny it is to deny reality. QED." I shouldn't even have to point out how off base it is to preemptively say anyone arguing with you is "denying reality". But I guess I just did.
So, moving on, "padlock the EPA". Well, yeah, that sounds bad if you presuppose that the EPA is the only one that can save the environment. Let me ask: if there is not EPA and you're living next to a river that catches fire, what are you going to do? I'm going to guess it'll be something like making a picket sign and walking down to the mayor's office and saying that if he doesn't do something about it NOW you won't rest until he never get elected to anything for as long as he lives.
The point is, the EPA is just a federal agency. Closing them down doesn't destroy the environment any more than shutting down the Dept. of Education destroys education or the Dept. of Energy electricity. There are ways to do things _without_ giant federal bureaucracies you know.
> because the GOP leadership and the GOP at large want him gone ... oh, back to this... Oh well
All I can really say to this is is wow. You literally said that the Republicans _want_ burning rivers, spouted a bunch of unsubstantiated BS, then closed with 'if you don't believe me you're just a denier'. And you got modded up. Wow.
> > Has it never occurred to you that there's a middle ground between where we are and no regulation at all?
> You assert we are at the extreme end of regulation?
Um... no. How do you even get that? Well, I guess by misunderstanding my point. Regulation is a sliding scale. Just as there's space between our current amount and zero for 'less regulation', there's space between our current amount and 'extreme' for 'more'. I explicitly excluded that side of the scale though because it was irrelevant to my point and figured readers would be smart enough to figure that on their own.
> > Or that one can go about regulation differently?
> One can always do things differently, but whether it is still effective is what matters.
Which is exactly my point. Some people thing the current system is poor and that the same (i.e. current) end result could be accomplished with more streamlined regulation and less bureaucracy. Some people think the the current system is poor but it is as good as can be. I don't know many people that think the current system is particularly good. (Some people also think that we need more or less regulation, but that is irrelevant to this point and touched on above.)
> We'd probably end up like China, or at least like we were in the early to middle part of the last century (can you say "superfund"), real quick.
Right, because we'd bring back leaded gas, and I'm sure farmers are just _itching_ to use contaminated effluent to irrigate their crops. Because we like that, which is why there's no such thing as organic food. And companies don't care at all about PR, which is why they never buy carbon credits.
Culture had changed, as we realized that safety _is_ more important than a couple cents. Yes, it doesn't always work that way for everything, which is why I _explicitly said_ I wouldn't rely on it, but the notion that we'd just start laying waste to the land without regulations is ignoring an awful lot of cultural changes. The same changes to drove these regulations in the first place, I should add.
> Without the kind of government regulation that the Republicans and Tea Baggers want to do away
> with, this is how the United States would be as well.
There's no nice way of putting this: You are retarded and whoever modded this nonsense "insightful" should be denied mod points indefinitely.
This comment is nothing but baseless bashing of 'them' without any thought at all. You don't even have a pretense of understanding the Republican or Tea Party (real mature BTW) points. Has it never occurred to you that there's a middle ground between where we are and no regulation at all? Or that one can go about regulation differently? Or, geez, that even if there was _no_ regulation how public outcry from everyone would still provide a good deal of incentive to not do it? Not that I'd rely on that, but still we wouldn't be half as bad as China.
But of course, because you have no clue what you're talking about you don't get that. Did you know, for example, that China only recently phased out leaded gasoline? And that it's still being produced in rural (e.g. farming) areas? Well, yeah, probably, because I bet your point was that the "Tea Baggers" wanted to bring back leaded gas.
(and I could go on about why China isn't like the US and how the differences are much more cultural than regulatory, but I made my point.)
> What a bunch of greedy bastards! Don't they know how those extravagant wages will affect the incomes of the top 1%?
It won't affect the top 1% at all. The rest of us, on the other hand, will find hard drives much less affordable.
> This is a common fallacy -- that the costs of going to doctors for minor discretionary ailments are a significant part of ...
> health care costs. As the economist Paul Krugman has explained, the major expenses in health care aren't $80 visits
> to the doctor, but $50,000 and $100,000 cancers
Sure, whatever, that's obvious and wasn't my point anyways. The point I was making is that it would waste less resources, making those available to other people for less. Not only would they stop spending $80 on the useless visit, but the decreased demand would lead to further reductions in price for people that actually should be seeing the doctor. (Not having to pay the bureaucracy with also reduce prices.) So, while right now uninsured people go to the emergency room only to get turned away until they have a $100k heart thing, they could instead go to a doctor, hand them the posted $50 and chat about their chest pains / fever / etc.
The studies you quote were all performed within the broken system. It's quite hard to extrapolate their results to fundamentally different circumstances. For instance the RAND study had people paying 95%, which would almost certainly be higher than what they would pay with reduced demand and lack of health insurance overhead. Even the 50% is questionable... While it's quite probably a bit less than a no-insurance situation, it's also almost certainly more than they thought they should be paying, making them feel uncomfortable about going. This is, in particular, the case for IBM... They raised deductibles made the perceived and true cost of care increase (because I doubt they bumped salaries accordingly). Of course people are going to cut back.
And yes, I don't expect the average Joe to be able to diagnose themselves. But let's also be realistic: For basically all of human history people have had to diagnose and treat themselves. They shouldn't see the doctor very time they feel ill, they should _think_ and only go when they feel that it's something more than a cold.
> $10,000 doesn't enter into the decision. How much is your life worth?
It's not my life, it's _maybe_ my life. If I was faced with something that had a 10% chance of being dangerous cancer, and a 5% reduced change of survival waiting 6 months to know whether or not is is dangerous for sure, the expected value of my life is $2,000,000. But that's not even accounting for the possibility that I might not be cured and die anyways. So it's a lot more than that, and that's the point. People, when actually faced with situation bill like that get surprisingly good at these maths.
Nationwide, uninsured drivers were at 14.7% in 2004. New Hampshire had about 11% in 2007. Yet the country isn't a third world hell hole. Quite simply, car accidents are either too uninteresting to be reported or so interesting that the insurance is status of a driver is a quickly forgotten footnote. People (or their health/collision insurance) just take the financial hit, life moves on, and you miss just how common it is.
Also, if you think that liability insurance is a penalty on responsible people, then you have no clue what being responsible means. I pay for $300,000 in liability insurance (a bit much) for a meager $300 or so a year (combined with homeowners, collision not included). That's less than one month of real estate taxes. Then, if shit happens, not only am I not losing aforementioned house, but there's enough there to fix whatever damaged I caused. THAT is what responsible is, not just assuming you're too cool to get in an accident.
It's like that here too. Even as a libertarian I _fully_ support this policy. Especially with all the modern safety nets, it's way too easy to live a nice life at the bottom of society with barely a cent in cash, living paycheck to paycheck buying big screen TVs, nice dinners, etc. Lose your job? You don't need savings when there's 2 years of unemployment. Hit someone? Oh well, it's not like they're going to get your TV.
And even with the law in place it's still bad. Not only are the minimum liabilities are pathetic ($5k in my state), but the enforcement and penalties are (appropriately/necessarily) weak, so a lot of such people simply don't have insurance. Moreover, if you sue, you apparently have to waive the insurance payout so if, for example, damages are $10k you'd have to get try all $10k from the person with nothing ever from the insurance company, win or lose.
That said though, health insurance is a completely different situation. First, it's personal: if you don't have insurance and money that's your problem (and probably fault). Second, driving is _much_ more optional that living... The state already requires you to prove you have the _skill_ to operate a car to use a car (licensing), so requiring you to have the _financial backing_ is hardly an unreasonable additional requirement.
Which is why sane people realize that the proper course of action isn't to replace the money grubbing bureaucrats with apathetic ones (note that there is a big difference) and instead attempt to do away with them altogether. We could break apart the back room collective bargaining and price fixing and actually make health care something that people actually pay for, like car insurance and automotive services. That way, at least, we can see some competition for price and maybe people will even understand the resources they waste every time they go to the doctor about a cold. (Well, at least after they paid $80 to hear the doc say "It's a cold, drink some juice and get some rest" they'll think twice before doing it again.) Hell, it might even help with things like smoking and obesity if people see a big old 'your lifestyle is really unhealthy' surcharge.
It would also help the problems with cancer screening: once people see a $10,000+ price tag on treating that maybe-dangerous tumor they'll definitely give waiting and seeing a thought. And, of course, they could buy their own screening if they like.
Anyways, I can't promise it will work, and I'd expect medicare might need expand to cover preexisting condition type cases (e.g. birth defects or similar). But the one _really_ nice thing is that it would be vastly easier to change to single payer if it didn't work out, whereas the other way is basically impossible.
But what's the alternative? Just wait until someone's sick enough to warrant a cancer screening?
Or, to be more direct, the problem isn't the _testing_, it the _reaction_. The view of cancer is too binary... You either don't have cancer or you have ZOMG CANCER. It seems to me that by making a third category of 'mostly harmless' we could really do away with #3 altogether. How could we determine that? Early detection and study. Exactly what abandoning screens would make impossible.
Really, this is just about the money, in a couple directions:
First, no doctor is going to volunteer "this is cancer, but it doesn't look dangerous so we'll just monitor the situation" because God help them if that person dies.
Second, people usually spend other people's money (government, 'insurance') on the treatments, so to them it's only 'some side effects vs your life' and not also about 10% of their lifetime earnings too. Guess what they'll take? And so the people paying for these tests have come to realize that they're just a money pit: the (usually negative) test, the (potentially) unnecessary treatment, and finally just the cost of treating real cancer a year or so earlier then you would have had to without the screen for someone that may well die anyway (any they get the pleasure of a year of treatment). All this for how many people that earlier treatment would have helped? Well, that is the point of the study.
But the point is, that it's not the data that's bad, it's a system the encourages people to get knee jerk treatment.
No, and really no to everyone else. This is making _obfuscated_ data suddenly because visible.
It characterizes the the motion of the camera from the blur then reverses it: essentially an image stabilization algorithm. It's like making voices audible over loud music by figuring out what the song is and subtracting it from the mix.
It's cool, but not magic. They aren't even pretending to add in missing data like a CSI zoom. Nor does it even seem to take care of simple out of focus situations. So let's not get too excited, well, unless you've got a cheap/slow camera.
You're ignoring that other little part to this: Hydrogen.
Reaction: Ni62 + p -> Cu63
Energy: 62.92960u - (61.92835u + 1.00728u) = 0.00603u = ~28MeV
Just because Cu63 has more energy than Ni62 doesn't mean that Cu63 has more energy than Ni62 and H1 combined.
bias
a particular tendency or inclination, especially one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question; prejudice.
They vetted their results, probably more than they would have had the results been expected. "After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement" -- Press Release. And yet only "Very few (if any) physicists believe there was no mistake". Why? They can't show an error. CERN already tried, even. They just assume an error because the results doesn't agree with the current theory. In other words, they are prejudging the experiment flawed and showing bias toward GR. (Which, I will point out again, has _not_ been rigorously studied in the context of neutrinos.)
You can argue the bias is justified; I'm not saying it isn't. You can argue that the results are flawed; again, I'm not saying they aren't. What I am saying, however, is that the conclusions here are, by definition, biased.
P.S. Don't you think the greater hubris is to assume that general relativity is totally correct? We've not even landed on another planet; it takes some serious balls to say that we understand the (macroscopic) universe so well, IMHO.
I'm quite familiar with how well tested GR is. I'm, not, however, aware of any of those tests involving neutrinos. Besides, we already know we don't know how GR relates to quantum mechanics. Maybe this is just an example of that on a macroscopic scale. The point being is that GR is extremely robust in those areas where it's been heavily verified, but that robustness doesn't automatically translate into robustness in other areas. Before we had high energies / high precision Newtonian mechanics were also extremely well tested. As our knowledge advanced, we came to realize there were situations where it didn't hold up. It's pretty strong hubris to assume that GR won't meet the same fate and the we totally understand the macroscopic universe.
The cold fusion debacle is more or less what I'm lamenting. An experiment (with much less rigor that this, IMO) with an interesting but unexpected result wasn't verified and scientists / reporters made a huge shitstorm instead of it just being 'experiment not replicated, considered proven to not work'. Now no one can use that term without being shunned, even though the field in general is known to have at least some validity (see muon-catalyzed fusion). Basically, I'm not saying that they're being irresponsible, I'm saying that it's unfortunate that this _is_ responsible.
> If relativity is broken, much of modern physics falls apart.
Um... No. If relativity is broken, we need to update it to fit the new results. Or just add a footnote (as we did with Newtonian physics) that says "but not for neutrinos". It's not like GPS suddenly stops working. We just know our understanding was _incomplete_.
> Not only that, but we have measured neutrino velocity before to within one part in a few million and they weren't FTL.
News to me: "the speed of 3 GeV neutrinos to be 1.000051(29) c." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino. There's a caveat there, where the uncertainty allows the velocity to be less than c, but the point is neutrino speed has always been odd. And this puts that in a new light.
Meh... All jokes aside, if neutrino communications could be managed (in particular, efficient and highly directional emitters/detectors) would be worth a lot more regardless of this experiment.
First, light only travels about 66% c in fiber, and said fiber needs to wrap around the circumference of the Earth. So not only would neutrinos travel faster than light in a fiber (as they go pretty close to c for sure), but they could also just so straight there through the Earth. You'd probably be looking at roughly halving the travel time. You also wouldn't have to lay fiber at all, which presently dominates the cost of building the link. Without the actual tech, it's hard to say, but neutrino based communications could really change the world.
I somewhat disagree. Their results met the criteria of scientific discovery and they (well, I certainly hope!) reviewed their process for any error. So even though they literally, by scientific standard, discovered FTL particles, they explicitly state that they don't actually think they did because it disagrees with existing theories. This is *biased* experimental physics.
Yes, relativity has a good track record, and they likely missed something. OTOH, neutrinos are still a pretty new research topic and maybe relativity doesn't cover all the universe has to offer. I do think that these results should be retested, verified, and studied as much as possible. But I'm also seriously disappointed that an ostensibly legitimate discovery has to be presented as 'we screwed up but we don't know why so look at these' in order to avoid raeg from close minded scientists.