No, it's just plain broken. I tried to fix it, but they now enforce the character limit even including html, and I'm too lazy to actually come up with a different one. Oh wells.
I'm confused by this. Are you saying we already know everything about physics? Please elaborate.
No, he's probably just saying that any revisions/replacements to Einsten's theory are much more likely to be minor corrections rather than complete reversals. I'll refer to The Relativity of Wrong, and say that revisions to Relativity are most likely going to be like going from the theory that the earth is an Oblate Spheroid to it's actual, more complicated but still extremely Oblate Spheroidal geometry, not finding out that the earth is actually a cube or a torus. The Oblate Spheroid theory was wrong, but it wasn't horribly, horribly wrong. It was extremely close to precisely correct.
It's possible that Einsten's theory is wrong in such a way that FTL travel is possible. However it is highly doubtful that it's wrong in such a way that FTL travel is easy, or even possible via conventional means. For example the Relativistic Kinetic Energy equation is extremely well verified, any post-Relativity theory is likely to only add a couple significant digits to the end of it, so achieving FTL with a rocketship is still going to be out of the question.
Einstein is almost certainly wrong, but it's very very doubtful that he's "horribly, horribly" wrong.
I always thought "dark" was taken to mean "beyond detection with our current instruments"... i.e. a handy compensating factor to fix theoretical equations when those equations don't match observation.
That's literally all it means... dark matter is matter we haven't observed directly, yes. But it isn't really a compensating factor to fix a theoretical equation. It's something that the extremely well tested and verified equations of gravity strongly suggests must exist. We've used the exact same theory to find other things we were unable to see directly, like exoplanets, that were then subsequently imaged directly. The exoplanet wasn't a 'fudge', it was an experimental prediction.
But the kink that is thrown in the "dark matter is just matter we haven't seen yet" definition is that given the amount of dark matter that should be out there (and we even know where a lot of it should be), it seems unlikely that we wouldn't have seen it already if it was 'normal' matter, like clouds of hydrogen gas or what-not. Cus we can see those. So that would suggest that it isn't 'normal' as in Baryonic matter, and this is what gets some people in a huff because now it seems like the physicists are just making things up. There is precedent for this kind of matter, namely neutrinos which are quite real but very hard to detect. Dark matter would have to be similar, but more massive, so it is true that it is speculative. Which isn't the same as 'made up'. Plenty of particles have been inferred from theory, then later verified by experiment. Like neutrinos.
What I find funny is that I've been using Debian-based distros for many years, and I basically never enter the "root password" to install software or perform other maintenance tasks... I enter my own user password. Not that there's much difference between "access to the root password" and "being allowed to run anything in the sudoers file". Installing software is still a privileged operation.
I take it they must mean without entering any password at all, as in unprivileged?
Our sun hasn't died yet, so shouldn't it be the other way around?
The next Final Fantasy game should include a new character(-class): the Reverse Mimic! They mimic what another character is going to do. Which would really mean the Reverse Mimic would do something the character could, and then that character has no choice but to do that when their turn came up.
If they wanted to play it like a joke character, the RM would always use the most useless abilities, or do things like always cast Doom on bosses.
Tsk tsk... You saying a 6" Schmidt would beat a 3.5" Apo? It really depends on what you are looking at.
Well sure, you can't directly compare aperture sizes between reflectors (like a Schmidt) and a refractor (like APO) and assume the bigger one is better. But within those broad classes of scope, "aperture is everything" is a pretty good first order rule of thumb (even if e.g. a Schmidt has disadvantages vs a similar sized Netwon)
But as far as seeing the dimmest objects, then yes I'd take the 6" Schmidt over a 3.5" APO any night, since it has 3 times the light collecting area.
But if you want to look at Jupiter or Saturn, those refractors can be bad-ass.
No, you're not correct. Being able to look up useless information isn't helpful.
I think they are correct, because I think the OP is of sufficient imagination to have instantly seen the potential to look up useful information too based on their initial epiphany of looking up something random on the web.
Actually I claimed that most people are smart and dumb at the same time -- pretty obvious when you realize people have different strong and weak areas. And what exactly is wrong with supporting a claim by giving an example of it? If you don't agree with my examples of smart and dumb, that's fine. I'm just disputing that there is an inherent conflict between someone doing some things that are smart, and doing other things that are stupid. It's not a contradiction or some kind of paradox.
Indeed I did posit a hypothetical*, but like I said I think there's a simpler explanation in an unintentionally shitty archiving system.
The issue of the GPP is that the emails were not deleted, therefore there was no cover up. You are right, _had they deleted emails_ that would have suggested a possible cover up. But, they _had not deleted_ emails. Therefore, your point is moot.
Except my actual point is that implication isn't true -- not deleting emails does not mean there was no coverup. They could have also "lost" them, and this would actually be the smart thing to do since evidence of deletion would be evidence of a cover up. That's what I meant by "Al Capone" gambit: when you can't get them for the crime, get them for the cover-up. So, if you're the conspirator, don't let them get you for the cover up by not actually deleting the emails. By the time they're found, released, and read the emails to find anything relevant, the prosecutor and you are both long gone. NSArchive is full of examples of things past their political statute of limitations, released years later.
That their archive system seems to have legitimately sucked makes that sure seem a lot less likely, though. Al Capone had a hard time arguing he didn't have good accountants. If this was actually a conspiracy, then well played, Bush Administration.
But really in however many years before NSArchive has put up their Bush Jr. documentation, I doubt any of this will be the among the most interesting reading.
* But not a straw man, because at no point did I represent this hypothetical as being someone else's argument.:P
I find it hard to believe you spent more time typing out that post than the amount of time it would have taken to think up the answer on your own. And yet, here we are.
If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.
Not necessarily, because if evidence of that deletion was found, then that in itself would have led to prosecutions. Violating the archiving laws is a serious crime, and letting the special prosecutor get them with an Al Capone gambit would have been foolish. No, much better that the data be "lost", as in present but unavailable for current use. After all, the e-mails would only have to stay missing until the investigation was concluded. Then the emails show up again, and voila -- as far as the official record goes, the Bush administration violated neither intelligence nor data archival laws.
Of course there's a simpler explanation. As TFA states: "Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president's first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems". So odds are that it was simply that their archival system sucked and it really did lose the emails accidentally. Sure one could argue that having a system that accidentally loses emails is convenient if you want to "accidentally" lose some emails without it being obvious, but again according to TFA they did try to get Microsoft's help to fix it before the issue even became public. And evidently failed.
Which is somewhat related to the topic my sibling post pointed out, the always droll "How can Bush be both an evil genius and a complete moron at the same time?" Well the obvious answer is that most people are some combination of smart and stupid at the same time. The Bush Admin being a perfect example. They were collectively extremely smart at getting the nation to think a war of choice was a necessity, yet they were terrible at prosecuting said war. They were great at political manipulations and neutering opponents, yet terrible at leveraging that advantage to achieve results. They were geniuses at filling positions with cronies and yes-men, but morons at hiring people who were actually competent -- including the IT department, apparently.
Anyway, getting back to the topic of these emails and how hiding them for only a short time is sufficient, the National Security Archive who the former White House spokesmen slams as "liberal" and "distorting the facts" demonstrates this clearly. They might be liberal, though they uncover dirt on liberal Presidents like Kennedy, and regardless I don't see how their liberal bias can modify the contents of documents received via FOIA. If you didn't know whether to believe that the U.S. government, and specifically Oliver North, were aware the Contras were smuggling drugs into the U.S. and approved of this, well, here's the U.S. government telling you in black and white. But it doesn't matter anymore, at least as far as North et. al. are concerned, now does it?
I can't even fathom reckless disregard for safety in this context, but willful destruction?
If he had reason to believe that his tests could cause an earthquake, yet proceeded anyway, that's willful. It doesn't matter that causing destruction wasn't actually his goal. You can't get away from the consequences of your actions -- in particular those you were aware of in advance -- by writing them off as "undesirable side-effects" or "collateral damage".
Though in TFA he says those involved in the project had "very little knowledge of seismicity", which could make this fall into the category of willful negligence. I'm no geothermal power expert, but it's for that exact reason that if I were going to be drilling right around a seismically active area that I'd want to make sure I had someone who had "knowledge of seismicity", like say a seismologist, hanging around. Having something unforeseen happen as a result of your actions, because you didn't do the due diligence to foresee it, is negligence.
either their houses are made from eggshells, or this is the scam of the century.
Eh, not really. 3.4 may be a fairly trivial earthquake, but $9 million is a pretty trivial amount for total damages to a decent-sized city from an earthquake. You don't need very many office buildings with broken windows or extremely old (and thus not in any way quake-proof) buildings to be slightly damaged across a city to equal $9mil. If the epicenter was nearby, and it sounds like it was, then that doesn't strike me as unreasonable and certainly not a matter of profiteering.
I think it would have to depend on the device. for example, if I were buying a $5000 TV set, yeah get the extended warranty, for the $150 LCD monitor? Not a chance in hell.
For me it's not so much about price as it is about the type of device. TVs/monitors are the kind of device I wouldn't get an extended warranty for because the general trend in these devices is that they're getting better and cheaper at a rapid rate. Now I don't spend $5k on a TV, but I did just buy a 46" LED-backlit LCD for the same price as the 20" LCD monitor I bought five years ago. It's quite probable that by the time my TV gives up the ghost during what would have been the extended warranty period, I'll actually be looking forward to the chance to buy a better device for less (I do want my washing machine to last 6 or 10 years, and it'd be nice if any problems that came up were covered.
In context of your parent and grand parent and seeing how you still feel there is something to be told, I still don't really get your point.
It is subtle I grant you. And I've only stated it repeatedly. But hey, here we go again: To be qualified to criticize the theories of advanced sciences, you must be well educated/studied in the relevant field. When you aren't, and you spout off about those who are being wrong, those people can and should call you on it, and it isn't "ivory tower elitism".
Did you even read, what your parent and grand parent were arguing about when you dropped in? The whole point was revolving around a guy with a PhD telling the guy without one to STFU. So which point still stands? That no-PhD can tell to a PhD, that (s)he's wrong? Well, that was kind of your parents point.
Did you? The GP of my first post was comparing himself, a person with admittedly no knowledge of the field of climatology, telling a person with a PhD in the field that they were wrong, and the person with the PhD being appropriately amused. The comparison is quite obviously between a person with no education and a person with extensive education in the relevant field. And they only mentioned PhD once, as an example of someone "proficient in their field", not as the definition. That was your baseless assumption. Dividing the universe into "PhD" and "no-PhD" is your logical fallacy. One you still won't let go of!
The parent to my post then tried to refute this broader point by using Einstein as an example. Which is a horrible example, because Einstein was well educated in his field. Again, the comparison the GP made was not between a PhD and a PhD-minus-one-credit-hour. It was between someone with an advanced education in the field, and someone with no education in the field.
That's the context that you keep failing to wrap your head around. World not simple. More to education than PhD or no-PhD. Assuming everyone else thinks in binary leads to failure of reading comprehension.
As for the rest, thanks for the warm words, wild guesses and attempts at making my point for me. It was amusing.
Thanks for continuing to not have a point. Or at least one worth saying.
Maybe they meant "and will soon begin bathing in the infrared light of the cosmos"
Impossible! Nobody ever mistypes, and nobody ever means things in a non-literal fashion. Your explanation, while seemingly reasonable, fails to account for this!
Clearly what they were referring to is the fact that the WISE observatory is neither at absolute zero, nor a perfect absorber of infrared. Ergo, WISE will both emit and reflect infrared light, which will subsequently bathe the cosmos. Obviously that's useless for the telescope's observations, but it's still true.
Though "bathe" probably isn't the right choice of words either. Infrared light is not sufficient to get you clean. Just an FYI to my fellow slashdotters prior to any family gatherings they may be attending this holiday season.;)
I am not an American, I'm actually from Zimbabwe. I promise you that Zimbabweans are as nasty and arrogant and superior as Americans in spite of all the s*** they are in at the moment.:-)
Nonsense! Any American is way more arrogant than any dozen Zimbabweans put together!
USA! USA! USA!
P.S. I've often thought that the 'rivalry' between the U.S. and France was never about policy, beliefs, or even military/economic success. It's about daring to try to be more arrogant and self-centered than the other.
How the hell should I know, that you didn't try to deceive on purpose? Because you claim you didn't? Yeah, that'll do it. You either don't check your facts beforehand, or you lie. For me, as a reader of your comment, it doesn't really matter.
Your first clue should have been how it ultimately didn't matter to the point I was making. Your second clue would have been how I corrected myself in a later post.
I love that wording "you don't check facts". Yeah, I never check facts, and that/. post was proof. That is a solid argument that definitely passes the most minimum of intellectual muster.
Do you think making such ridiculous and obviously fallacious hyperbolic statements on purpose is actually different than lying? Do you act this way around everyone when they misspeak? Or just those saying things you don't like?
And no, I won't discuss your point (which you've taken to an extreme) with you.
Yeah I suspected you didn't have anything meaningful to say.
At least, from your comment I conclude, that there are only people with a PhD (or students) and crackpots. Since I don't have a PhD (yet) I must be a crackpot.
You mean from your extremely poor reading comprehension and apparent ability to see only in binary. First, while I mentioned the PhD because Einstein did have one while continuing to up-end physics even more (everything he wrote after 2005 including GR), I repeatedly referred more generally to "education" and "study". I never equated them, you did that yourself. Second, the other class of people I mentioned were those who act as though their lack of study and understanding makes them qualified to revolutionize science. It doesn't. They are crackpots. Then there is the rather large swath of people who are not well-studied in a subject, know it, and thus don't try to act like they are. I didn't expressly mention them, but the way I defined the other groups made their existence clearly implied to those not stuck in binary thinking.
You sure sound like a crackpot, though, given how offended you sound by my statement that only those with qualifications are qualified. Like you have some pet theory that everyone dismisses out of hand, merely because anyone with the appropriate education can see it's nonsense. I admit I'm just making a wild guess here, but this "I'm going to nitpick your argument without revealing my own position until you pass my tests" rhetorical framework is uncannily similar to those I've had with Intelligent Design and Electric Universe crackpots.
But if I would try to debate it with you, I would like to see some proof that you aren't a crackpot.
I would like to have some hint that a "debate" would be in any way productive. If you could have made a substantive point, you would have by now, but instead are much happier engaging in rhetorical nonsense. So it isn't really a question anymore -- "debating" you would be pointless. As if you can actually argue against my underlying point, anyway.
Yeah, as I pointed out in another post, he was really just a PHD student when he wrote SR.
Like that really changes the point. He had an advanced education in physics, and thus knew what he was talking about (this being my point). Grad students frequently make significant contributions to their field, in the course of working on their PHD.
This does not in any way validate the idea that an uneducated 'outsider' should be considered an equally plausible source of status-quo-upending insight, because they still don't know what they are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's just plain broken. I tried to fix it, but they now enforce the character limit even including html, and I'm too lazy to actually come up with a different one. Oh wells.
I'm confused by this. Are you saying we already know everything about physics? Please elaborate.
No, he's probably just saying that any revisions/replacements to Einsten's theory are much more likely to be minor corrections rather than complete reversals. I'll refer to The Relativity of Wrong, and say that revisions to Relativity are most likely going to be like going from the theory that the earth is an Oblate Spheroid to it's actual, more complicated but still extremely Oblate Spheroidal geometry, not finding out that the earth is actually a cube or a torus. The Oblate Spheroid theory was wrong, but it wasn't horribly, horribly wrong. It was extremely close to precisely correct.
It's possible that Einsten's theory is wrong in such a way that FTL travel is possible. However it is highly doubtful that it's wrong in such a way that FTL travel is easy, or even possible via conventional means. For example the Relativistic Kinetic Energy equation is extremely well verified, any post-Relativity theory is likely to only add a couple significant digits to the end of it, so achieving FTL with a rocketship is still going to be out of the question.
Einstein is almost certainly wrong, but it's very very doubtful that he's "horribly, horribly" wrong.
But I'm still hoping for FTL travel. :)
I always thought "dark" was taken to mean "beyond detection with our current instruments" ... i.e. a handy compensating factor to fix theoretical equations when those equations don't match observation.
That's literally all it means... dark matter is matter we haven't observed directly, yes. But it isn't really a compensating factor to fix a theoretical equation. It's something that the extremely well tested and verified equations of gravity strongly suggests must exist. We've used the exact same theory to find other things we were unable to see directly, like exoplanets, that were then subsequently imaged directly. The exoplanet wasn't a 'fudge', it was an experimental prediction.
But the kink that is thrown in the "dark matter is just matter we haven't seen yet" definition is that given the amount of dark matter that should be out there (and we even know where a lot of it should be), it seems unlikely that we wouldn't have seen it already if it was 'normal' matter, like clouds of hydrogen gas or what-not. Cus we can see those. So that would suggest that it isn't 'normal' as in Baryonic matter, and this is what gets some people in a huff because now it seems like the physicists are just making things up. There is precedent for this kind of matter, namely neutrinos which are quite real but very hard to detect. Dark matter would have to be similar, but more massive, so it is true that it is speculative. Which isn't the same as 'made up'. Plenty of particles have been inferred from theory, then later verified by experiment. Like neutrinos.
What I find funny is that I've been using Debian-based distros for many years, and I basically never enter the "root password" to install software or perform other maintenance tasks... I enter my own user password. Not that there's much difference between "access to the root password" and "being allowed to run anything in the sudoers file". Installing software is still a privileged operation.
I take it they must mean without entering any password at all, as in unprivileged?
Seems kinda dumb.
Our sun hasn't died yet, so shouldn't it be the other way around?
The next Final Fantasy game should include a new character(-class): the Reverse Mimic! They mimic what another character is going to do. Which would really mean the Reverse Mimic would do something the character could, and then that character has no choice but to do that when their turn came up.
If they wanted to play it like a joke character, the RM would always use the most useless abilities, or do things like always cast Doom on bosses.
Tsk tsk... You saying a 6" Schmidt would beat a 3.5" Apo? It really depends on what you are looking at.
Well sure, you can't directly compare aperture sizes between reflectors (like a Schmidt) and a refractor (like APO) and assume the bigger one is better. But within those broad classes of scope, "aperture is everything" is a pretty good first order rule of thumb (even if e.g. a Schmidt has disadvantages vs a similar sized Netwon)
But as far as seeing the dimmest objects, then yes I'd take the 6" Schmidt over a 3.5" APO any night, since it has 3 times the light collecting area.
But if you want to look at Jupiter or Saturn, those refractors can be bad-ass.
No, you're not correct. Being able to look up useless information isn't helpful.
I think they are correct, because I think the OP is of sufficient imagination to have instantly seen the potential to look up useful information too based on their initial epiphany of looking up something random on the web.
Actually I claimed that most people are smart and dumb at the same time -- pretty obvious when you realize people have different strong and weak areas. And what exactly is wrong with supporting a claim by giving an example of it? If you don't agree with my examples of smart and dumb, that's fine. I'm just disputing that there is an inherent conflict between someone doing some things that are smart, and doing other things that are stupid. It's not a contradiction or some kind of paradox.
So, you created a nice straw man hypothetical.
Indeed I did posit a hypothetical*, but like I said I think there's a simpler explanation in an unintentionally shitty archiving system.
The issue of the GPP is that the emails were not deleted, therefore there was no cover up. You are right, _had they deleted emails_ that would have suggested a possible cover up. But, they _had not deleted_ emails. Therefore, your point is moot.
Except my actual point is that implication isn't true -- not deleting emails does not mean there was no coverup. They could have also "lost" them, and this would actually be the smart thing to do since evidence of deletion would be evidence of a cover up. That's what I meant by "Al Capone" gambit: when you can't get them for the crime, get them for the cover-up. So, if you're the conspirator, don't let them get you for the cover up by not actually deleting the emails. By the time they're found, released, and read the emails to find anything relevant, the prosecutor and you are both long gone. NSArchive is full of examples of things past their political statute of limitations, released years later.
That their archive system seems to have legitimately sucked makes that sure seem a lot less likely, though. Al Capone had a hard time arguing he didn't have good accountants. If this was actually a conspiracy, then well played, Bush Administration.
But really in however many years before NSArchive has put up their Bush Jr. documentation, I doubt any of this will be the among the most interesting reading.
* But not a straw man, because at no point did I represent this hypothetical as being someone else's argument. :P
I find it hard to believe you spent more time typing out that post than the amount of time it would have taken to think up the answer on your own. And yet, here we are.
If it really was a coverup, then they would have been deleted completely.
Not necessarily, because if evidence of that deletion was found, then that in itself would have led to prosecutions. Violating the archiving laws is a serious crime, and letting the special prosecutor get them with an Al Capone gambit would have been foolish. No, much better that the data be "lost", as in present but unavailable for current use. After all, the e-mails would only have to stay missing until the investigation was concluded. Then the emails show up again, and voila -- as far as the official record goes, the Bush administration violated neither intelligence nor data archival laws.
Of course there's a simpler explanation. As TFA states: "Records released as a result of the lawsuits reveal that the Bush White House was aware during the president's first term in office that the e-mail system had serious archiving problems". So odds are that it was simply that their archival system sucked and it really did lose the emails accidentally. Sure one could argue that having a system that accidentally loses emails is convenient if you want to "accidentally" lose some emails without it being obvious, but again according to TFA they did try to get Microsoft's help to fix it before the issue even became public. And evidently failed.
Which is somewhat related to the topic my sibling post pointed out, the always droll "How can Bush be both an evil genius and a complete moron at the same time?" Well the obvious answer is that most people are some combination of smart and stupid at the same time. The Bush Admin being a perfect example. They were collectively extremely smart at getting the nation to think a war of choice was a necessity, yet they were terrible at prosecuting said war. They were great at political manipulations and neutering opponents, yet terrible at leveraging that advantage to achieve results. They were geniuses at filling positions with cronies and yes-men, but morons at hiring people who were actually competent -- including the IT department, apparently.
Anyway, getting back to the topic of these emails and how hiding them for only a short time is sufficient, the National Security Archive who the former White House spokesmen slams as "liberal" and "distorting the facts" demonstrates this clearly. They might be liberal, though they uncover dirt on liberal Presidents like Kennedy, and regardless I don't see how their liberal bias can modify the contents of documents received via FOIA. If you didn't know whether to believe that the U.S. government, and specifically Oliver North, were aware the Contras were smuggling drugs into the U.S. and approved of this, well, here's the U.S. government telling you in black and white. But it doesn't matter anymore, at least as far as North et. al. are concerned, now does it?
Hydrogen bombs aren't used any more, most remaining nuclear warheads are over a megaton.
How exactly do you think they're getting yields over 1 MT without a thermonuclear device? Even boosted fission devices have yields under 1 MT.
Which happens to be the country in question. Well I'll be.
I can't even fathom reckless disregard for safety in this context, but willful destruction?
If he had reason to believe that his tests could cause an earthquake, yet proceeded anyway, that's willful. It doesn't matter that causing destruction wasn't actually his goal. You can't get away from the consequences of your actions -- in particular those you were aware of in advance -- by writing them off as "undesirable side-effects" or "collateral damage".
Though in TFA he says those involved in the project had "very little knowledge of seismicity", which could make this fall into the category of willful negligence. I'm no geothermal power expert, but it's for that exact reason that if I were going to be drilling right around a seismically active area that I'd want to make sure I had someone who had "knowledge of seismicity", like say a seismologist, hanging around. Having something unforeseen happen as a result of your actions, because you didn't do the due diligence to foresee it, is negligence.
The GGP wrote "170'000", not "170.000" or "170,000" though. I'm not aware of anyplace that uses apostrophes for delimiters. :)
either their houses are made from eggshells, or this is the scam of the century.
Eh, not really. 3.4 may be a fairly trivial earthquake, but $9 million is a pretty trivial amount for total damages to a decent-sized city from an earthquake. You don't need very many office buildings with broken windows or extremely old (and thus not in any way quake-proof) buildings to be slightly damaged across a city to equal $9mil. If the epicenter was nearby, and it sounds like it was, then that doesn't strike me as unreasonable and certainly not a matter of profiteering.
Despite our best efforts, man-made disasters are pitiful compared to what nature has managed to do.
We can do better! I know we can! We just need the drive and the will.
So, would you say that the Supervolcano Eruption Threat Level is... Yellow?
I think it would have to depend on the device. for example, if I were buying a $5000 TV set, yeah get the extended warranty, for the $150 LCD monitor? Not a chance in hell.
For me it's not so much about price as it is about the type of device. TVs/monitors are the kind of device I wouldn't get an extended warranty for because the general trend in these devices is that they're getting better and cheaper at a rapid rate. Now I don't spend $5k on a TV, but I did just buy a 46" LED-backlit LCD for the same price as the 20" LCD monitor I bought five years ago. It's quite probable that by the time my TV gives up the ghost during what would have been the extended warranty period, I'll actually be looking forward to the chance to buy a better device for less (I do want my washing machine to last 6 or 10 years, and it'd be nice if any problems that came up were covered.
In context of your parent and grand parent and seeing how you still feel there is something to be told, I still don't really get your point.
It is subtle I grant you. And I've only stated it repeatedly. But hey, here we go again: To be qualified to criticize the theories of advanced sciences, you must be well educated/studied in the relevant field. When you aren't, and you spout off about those who are being wrong, those people can and should call you on it, and it isn't "ivory tower elitism".
Did you even read, what your parent and grand parent were arguing about when you dropped in? The whole point was revolving around a guy with a PhD telling the guy without one to STFU. So which point still stands? That no-PhD can tell to a PhD, that (s)he's wrong? Well, that was kind of your parents point.
Did you? The GP of my first post was comparing himself, a person with admittedly no knowledge of the field of climatology, telling a person with a PhD in the field that they were wrong, and the person with the PhD being appropriately amused. The comparison is quite obviously between a person with no education and a person with extensive education in the relevant field. And they only mentioned PhD once, as an example of someone "proficient in their field", not as the definition. That was your baseless assumption. Dividing the universe into "PhD" and "no-PhD" is your logical fallacy. One you still won't let go of!
The parent to my post then tried to refute this broader point by using Einstein as an example. Which is a horrible example, because Einstein was well educated in his field. Again, the comparison the GP made was not between a PhD and a PhD-minus-one-credit-hour. It was between someone with an advanced education in the field, and someone with no education in the field.
That's the context that you keep failing to wrap your head around. World not simple. More to education than PhD or no-PhD. Assuming everyone else thinks in binary leads to failure of reading comprehension.
As for the rest, thanks for the warm words, wild guesses and attempts at making my point for me. It was amusing.
Thanks for continuing to not have a point. Or at least one worth saying.
Maybe they meant "and will soon begin bathing in the infrared light of the cosmos"
Impossible! Nobody ever mistypes, and nobody ever means things in a non-literal fashion. Your explanation, while seemingly reasonable, fails to account for this!
Clearly what they were referring to is the fact that the WISE observatory is neither at absolute zero, nor a perfect absorber of infrared. Ergo, WISE will both emit and reflect infrared light, which will subsequently bathe the cosmos. Obviously that's useless for the telescope's observations, but it's still true.
Though "bathe" probably isn't the right choice of words either. Infrared light is not sufficient to get you clean. Just an FYI to my fellow slashdotters prior to any family gatherings they may be attending this holiday season. ;)
I am not an American, I'm actually from Zimbabwe. I promise you that Zimbabweans are as nasty and arrogant and superior as Americans in spite of all the s*** they are in at the moment. :-)
Nonsense! Any American is way more arrogant than any dozen Zimbabweans put together!
USA! USA! USA!
P.S. I've often thought that the 'rivalry' between the U.S. and France was never about policy, beliefs, or even military/economic success. It's about daring to try to be more arrogant and self-centered than the other.
How the hell should I know, that you didn't try to deceive on purpose? Because you claim you didn't? Yeah, that'll do it. You either don't check your facts beforehand, or you lie. For me, as a reader of your comment, it doesn't really matter.
Your first clue should have been how it ultimately didn't matter to the point I was making. Your second clue would have been how I corrected myself in a later post.
I love that wording "you don't check facts". Yeah, I never check facts, and that /. post was proof. That is a solid argument that definitely passes the most minimum of intellectual muster.
Do you think making such ridiculous and obviously fallacious hyperbolic statements on purpose is actually different than lying? Do you act this way around everyone when they misspeak? Or just those saying things you don't like?
And no, I won't discuss your point (which you've taken to an extreme) with you.
Yeah I suspected you didn't have anything meaningful to say.
At least, from your comment I conclude, that there are only people with a PhD (or students) and crackpots. Since I don't have a PhD (yet) I must be a crackpot.
You mean from your extremely poor reading comprehension and apparent ability to see only in binary. First, while I mentioned the PhD because Einstein did have one while continuing to up-end physics even more (everything he wrote after 2005 including GR), I repeatedly referred more generally to "education" and "study". I never equated them, you did that yourself. Second, the other class of people I mentioned were those who act as though their lack of study and understanding makes them qualified to revolutionize science. It doesn't. They are crackpots. Then there is the rather large swath of people who are not well-studied in a subject, know it, and thus don't try to act like they are. I didn't expressly mention them, but the way I defined the other groups made their existence clearly implied to those not stuck in binary thinking.
You sure sound like a crackpot, though, given how offended you sound by my statement that only those with qualifications are qualified. Like you have some pet theory that everyone dismisses out of hand, merely because anyone with the appropriate education can see it's nonsense. I admit I'm just making a wild guess here, but this "I'm going to nitpick your argument without revealing my own position until you pass my tests" rhetorical framework is uncannily similar to those I've had with Intelligent Design and Electric Universe crackpots.
But if I would try to debate it with you, I would like to see some proof that you aren't a crackpot.
I would like to have some hint that a "debate" would be in any way productive. If you could have made a substantive point, you would have by now, but instead are much happier engaging in rhetorical nonsense. So it isn't really a question anymore -- "debating" you would be pointless. As if you can actually argue against my underlying point, anyway.
It wasn't a lie, it was a mistake, and you know it, so stop lying and get a point.
Yeah, as I pointed out in another post, he was really just a PHD student when he wrote SR.
Like that really changes the point. He had an advanced education in physics, and thus knew what he was talking about (this being my point). Grad students frequently make significant contributions to their field, in the course of working on their PHD.
This does not in any way validate the idea that an uneducated 'outsider' should be considered an equally plausible source of status-quo-upending insight, because they still don't know what they are talking about.