The laying of a Priest's hands is financially cheap, and might be just enough to help someone if they believe enough in the action to activate the Placebo Effect.
Doesn't seem like it actually takes much... Here's a previous slashdot article about how the placebo effect works without even deceiving the patient about what they're taking. In short, it may not even be necessary for the patient to "believe" that the placebo is actually an effective treatment.
Placebos are quite cheap compared to actual medicine,depending on what one considers a valid Placebo.
I know what I don't -- anything that costs more than a sugar pill should cost. Especially in light of the above, homeopathic medicine is an offensive screw job.
You don't need to get Asia and Europe, they're connected.
There will always be islands on the far side of the GRB and far enough from the major landmasses that there's little chance the global-scale fires would reach them.
Half the world on fire is still only half the world on fire. This planet is broken up into land masses separated by ocean.
If the earth were oriented favorably such that only some of the landmasses were facing, rather than parts of all of them, that would be helpful, yes.
As for the loss of the ozone layer, the soot would probably make up for that. The ozone layer would recover and animals would modify their behaviour to avoid excessive sun damage in the meantime.
You are grossly underestimating the time it would take for the ozone layer to recover from this kind of depletion, and how devastating the sun's UV would be without it. The ozone layer hasn't fully recovered since the CFC ban in the 90s and that was comparatively tiny. More than half the ozone layer would be gone (because the ozone layer is in the upper atmosphere which would be exposed around the limb of the planet). The soot would be long gone and lethal doses of UV light would be bombarding the planet. Anything that lived even partly in the open, or depended on the sun -- which means all photosynthesizing plants, herbivores that eat them, and predators that eat them -- wouldn't adapt, they would be dead.
There would still be life on earth -- that which lived underground or more than a few meters under the ocean -- but it would be an extinction event unlike any ever seen on earth before.
Well, IIRC from the book, basically everything on the facing side of the earth would be dead and on fire. It would also entirely destroy the ozone layer in that hemisphere. Once the atmosphere had equalized, what would be left wouldn't be enough to protect the survivors from the sun, so they'd all die too, just more slowly and painfully.
I thought a nearby GRB would wipe out all life, all the way down to viruses.
It would. But if it was farther away, it would just create a bunch of radioactive isotopes in the upper atmosphere while leaving life on the ground mostly unmolested.
If only someone had an estimate of how far away this one was, and had presented it in something that would describe this news item in detail. We could call it an "article".
For non-douches who also didn't RTFA, it's estimated at 3000 to 13000 ly away. For comparison, in Phil's book "Death from the Skies" he discusses what would happen as a result of a GRB from 100 ly away, and the result is Very Bad(tm).
Earth's orbit is technically affected by every other object in the solar system (and cosmos), but the affect of Apophis on earth is so vanishingly small that you would never be able to measure it.
indeed, it's not until the 2029 pass whether we'll know if it will hit the earth or not in 2036. the current probabilities are nonsense and mean nothing.
No, the current probabilities are not nonsense. They mean that, based on the currently understood orbit of Aphophis with the given error bars, it has a certain probability of passing through the "keyhole" and hitting earth on the next pass.
The belief that after 2029 we'll know if it will hit earth or not, either 0% or 100% chance, are based on the assumption that the error bars in measurement will at that time be small enough to definitively state if it will hit or not. Which is true, they will be, but is still based on exactly the same reasoning and math as probabilities calculated today.
That probability, by the way, is 0%. The other piece of news unmentioned in the headline is that in addition to new size observations, new orbital observations have decreased the error bars sufficiently that it can be said with confidence that Apophis will not pass through the keyhole and will not hit the earth in 2036.
They don't need any prompting to not improve their infrastructure. Their "solution" is to impose arbitrary limits and offers slow service to stretch their profit margins by not improving their infrastructure.
They are trying to protect their own media services (particularly cable providers). The caps are an artificial way to make Netflix, Hulu, etc look less attractive compared to cable.
Density has a lot to do with surface gravity. You can approximate (or if we assume a perfectly spherical planet of uniform density, exactly represent) the gravity of the planet with a point mass at the center of the planet.
How far away you are from that point mass while standing on the surface says how much surface gravity there will be. Thus volume matters.
But yes, there have been any number of cases where people convicted of being gay all those years ago have been turned down for jobs because of this and didn't realise they could get it struck from their record.
Thanks for the helpful info. And yeah that sucks.:(
Yeah, so I wasn't really trying to claim ID was involved (although I'm amused by how many people thought so -- see below).
Yes I know, which is why I devoted the majority of my post to the fact that the terminology is fine. In your argument of "If A or B if A is absurd then B" your "B" that the new way to describe this is needed is untrue.
The point was that the idea that genes are sitting around waiting to be 'activitated' isn't really what happens.
Except it is. That's exactly what happened. Or at least, the description in the summary -- "the development of hands and feet occurred through the acquisition of new DNA elements capable of activating specific genes" -- is exactly what was demonstrated in this experiment.
It's your assumption that [the summary implied that] the activated gene is.a complete gene for hands that was wrong. There is no gene for hands. However there are genes involved in the development of limbs that were already there, and were activated by the addition of a new gene.
The concept of felony is completely unrelated to the concept of federalism. The term originated in English common law.
Which according to Google still applied in the UK until 1967, but doesn't anymore. So yeah I guess it would be silly to ask that now! But is there any requirement to disclose criminal convictions? Or any circumstances in which criminal record is made available? That's really at the heart of the issue I raised in my post.
So, the hand genes were just sitting around, waiting to be 'activated' by specific DNA?
Kinda maybe but not really? There's no gene for hands. There are genes involved in growing those tissues which comprise limbs, which are in turn controlled by other genes. Control those genes one way, you get fins, another way, you get "hands". The controlled genes were already present in the fish, and being used to make fins. Add a new mouse gene that controls those other genes a different way and you get something more like a hand.
As a ridiculously coarse analogy, it's like saying the standard C library has the code for a chess game because if you take a tic-tac-toe game and then re-arrange a bunch of the code that controls how the stdlib functions are called you get chess instead. Yes there are important pieces being re-used but there's more to it than that.
There's no problem with the terminology, and absolutely no need to resort to ID to explain this. Our bodies re-use the chemical machinery of life forms from billions of years ago. Just in different ways. Evolving new mechanisms for controlling that machinery is still evolution.
When being gay was decriminalised, the existing criminal convictions were not stricken from the record.
So when being gay was decriminalized, but there was still a massive societal stigma against being gay causing many homosexuals to stay "in the closet", they would nevertheless have to answer "yes" to "are you a convicted felon?" questions on job applications and list their homosexuality conviction and thus out themselves to their potential future employer?
Holy fuck!
Does the UK have anti-discrimination in employment laws?
I believe a new law is being passed to unilaterally strick all convictions of such nature, leaving such people with a clean record.
Obviously far too long in coming, but better late than never I guess!
Enlightenment was always best when used with a user-developed theme -- E was the ultimate theme-able WM before themes were really a "thing". The "default" themes were best considered examples of what you could do.
So assuming E17 didn't ditch the #1 best part of E, then the answer is -- as soon as someone makes a theme for it that matches your aesthetic sensibilities.
I used to count on Linksys for exactly three things: 1) it worked 2) it was affordable and 3) it worked with Linux out of the box. I became loyal to Linksys back in `98 when I bought a Linksys Ethernet card that had Linux drivers on the install diskette -- this was prior to those same drivers being incorporated into the Linux kernel distribution.
Fast forward a few years, I wanted to buy a wireless card, and I saw the Linksys model. With the Cisco branding, but I thought, okay, so they bought Linksys, surely they kept the same features that I counted on Linksys for. And the answer was "no" on all three counts. Too expensive -- but hey, it'll work, and with Linux -- only it didn't work on Linux at all, and when I eventually found drivers from the chipset maker the card worked but then took a dump on me after less than a year (whereas I'm still using old Linksys ethernet cards for wired networking).
The joke was premised on "not distinguishing between different things is stupid". Your response is premised on the joke-teller not distinguishing. Nice work.
All that the Einstenian equations tell us is that they don't know how to manage black holes beyond the event horizon (and that they are wrong about them because of that).
Ahh, the old problem of equations versus your imagination of what reality might be.;)
Einstein's equations work just fine inside the event horizon. It's the actual singularity itself which raises some eyebrows. And even then, we don't actually know that such a thing isn't possible in reality. But you are uncomfortable with the idea, therefore they're wrong. Got it.
At the very least it's clear that a black hole must have "density significantly higher than that of a neutron star."
Because?
Because it's required by those pesky equations.
All you can say is that *if* (a big if) black holes behave more or less like all the physics we know about
Everything said about just about anything can be presumed to have an "as long as our understanding is correct" qualifyer. And indeed our theory of gravity may be wrong. It saying something different than what you say is not a good argument for it being wrong.
What's misleading about saying density is defined as mass against volume?
Because the actual definition is mass divided by the minimum volume which fully contains the mass, not some arbitrary larger volume that you happen to find convenient. And since the behavior of a black hole requires exceedingly high density, it's doubly misleading.
Not to mention that even if the pluralization rule of "replace -us with -i" applied, the result would be viri with one "i". The only word that's plural ends with two "i"s is "radius" which becomes "radii" because there's one "i" before the "us" already.
"Virii" is simply retarded, and I was retarded when I used to use it.
Well yes if you use the size of the event horizon and the mass of the black hole to calculate density then you get a low density.
But the mass is not distributed over that volume. inside the black hole the mass is actually contained in an infintesimal point, and the density is infinite. At least according to the math; it's impossible to look inside the event horizon to find out if that's really the case.
At the very least it's clear that a black hole must have density significantly higher than that of a neutron star. Saying it's less dense than the air is misleading in that respect.
You can generally reliably remove rootkits by taking the drive out, putting it into an external drive bay (so its not present on a PC while booting), connect the drive when your PC is started up and then format it with none of its code executing.
Why go through that much trouble?
Just stick a bootable optical disk with formatting tools on it in, boot from it, and then format the infected drive. No code from the drive will be running so any rootkit on the drive will be overwritten.
I don't know how the Windows setup disk works, but I find it hard to believe it'd start running the kernel that's on the disk drive that you want to format. Certainly a Linux install disk would work just fine.
A BIOS rootkit would be a different kettle of fish.
As someone who completely swore off traditional console controllers for FPS games moments after first using the wiimote, I would say that the mouse is still exponentially better than any console controller.
It's just with the wiimote it's a binary order of magnitude instead of decimal.:)
Sure they are! Just not a lot of data. All we need now is for you two to rigorously define the number of friends and their movements, and then get a couple hundred more people randomly sampled from the population to do the same and we'll have the basis for a solid study!
Slashdot Mirror
The laying of a Priest's hands is financially cheap, and might be just enough to help someone if they believe enough in the action to activate the Placebo Effect.
Doesn't seem like it actually takes much... Here's a previous slashdot article about how the placebo effect works without even deceiving the patient about what they're taking. In short, it may not even be necessary for the patient to "believe" that the placebo is actually an effective treatment.
Placebos are quite cheap compared to actual medicine,depending on what one considers a valid Placebo.
I know what I don't -- anything that costs more than a sugar pill should cost. Especially in light of the above, homeopathic medicine is an offensive screw job.
You don't need to get Asia and Europe, they're connected.
There will always be islands on the far side of the GRB and far enough from the major landmasses that there's little chance the global-scale fires would reach them.
That's really a secondary effect to death-by-Sun.
Half the world on fire is still only half the world on fire. This planet is broken up into land masses separated by ocean.
If the earth were oriented favorably such that only some of the landmasses were facing, rather than parts of all of them, that would be helpful, yes.
As for the loss of the ozone layer, the soot would probably make up for that. The ozone layer would recover and animals would modify their behaviour to avoid excessive sun damage in the meantime.
You are grossly underestimating the time it would take for the ozone layer to recover from this kind of depletion, and how devastating the sun's UV would be without it. The ozone layer hasn't fully recovered since the CFC ban in the 90s and that was comparatively tiny. More than half the ozone layer would be gone (because the ozone layer is in the upper atmosphere which would be exposed around the limb of the planet). The soot would be long gone and lethal doses of UV light would be bombarding the planet. Anything that lived even partly in the open, or depended on the sun -- which means all photosynthesizing plants, herbivores that eat them, and predators that eat them -- wouldn't adapt, they would be dead.
There would still be life on earth -- that which lived underground or more than a few meters under the ocean -- but it would be an extinction event unlike any ever seen on earth before.
I would still call it an article if it just contained the word "the".
Definitely.
Well, IIRC from the book, basically everything on the facing side of the earth would be dead and on fire. It would also entirely destroy the ozone layer in that hemisphere. Once the atmosphere had equalized, what would be left wouldn't be enough to protect the survivors from the sun, so they'd all die too, just more slowly and painfully.
I thought a nearby GRB would wipe out all life, all the way down to viruses.
It would. But if it was farther away, it would just create a bunch of radioactive isotopes in the upper atmosphere while leaving life on the ground mostly unmolested.
If only someone had an estimate of how far away this one was, and had presented it in something that would describe this news item in detail. We could call it an "article".
For non-douches who also didn't RTFA, it's estimated at 3000 to 13000 ly away. For comparison, in Phil's book "Death from the Skies" he discusses what would happen as a result of a GRB from 100 ly away, and the result is Very Bad(tm).
Earth's orbit is technically affected by every other object in the solar system (and cosmos), but the affect of Apophis on earth is so vanishingly small that you would never be able to measure it.
indeed, it's not until the 2029 pass whether we'll know if it will hit the earth or not in 2036. the current probabilities are nonsense and mean nothing.
No, the current probabilities are not nonsense. They mean that, based on the currently understood orbit of Aphophis with the given error bars, it has a certain probability of passing through the "keyhole" and hitting earth on the next pass.
The belief that after 2029 we'll know if it will hit earth or not, either 0% or 100% chance, are based on the assumption that the error bars in measurement will at that time be small enough to definitively state if it will hit or not. Which is true, they will be, but is still based on exactly the same reasoning and math as probabilities calculated today.
That probability, by the way, is 0%. The other piece of news unmentioned in the headline is that in addition to new size observations, new orbital observations have decreased the error bars sufficiently that it can be said with confidence that Apophis will not pass through the keyhole and will not hit the earth in 2036.
They don't need any prompting to not improve their infrastructure. Their "solution" is to impose arbitrary limits and offers slow service to stretch their profit margins by not improving their infrastructure.
They are trying to protect their own media services (particularly cable providers). The caps are an artificial way to make Netflix, Hulu, etc look less attractive compared to cable.
Density has a lot to do with surface gravity. You can approximate (or if we assume a perfectly spherical planet of uniform density, exactly represent) the gravity of the planet with a point mass at the center of the planet.
How far away you are from that point mass while standing on the surface says how much surface gravity there will be. Thus volume matters.
But yes, there have been any number of cases where people convicted of being gay all those years ago have been turned down for jobs because of this and didn't realise they could get it struck from their record.
Thanks for the helpful info. And yeah that sucks. :(
Yeah, so I wasn't really trying to claim ID was involved (although I'm amused by how many people thought so -- see below).
Yes I know, which is why I devoted the majority of my post to the fact that the terminology is fine. In your argument of "If A or B if A is absurd then B" your "B" that the new way to describe this is needed is untrue.
The point was that the idea that genes are sitting around waiting to be 'activitated' isn't really what happens.
Except it is. That's exactly what happened. Or at least, the description in the summary -- "the development of hands and feet occurred through the acquisition of new DNA elements capable of activating specific genes" -- is exactly what was demonstrated in this experiment.
It's your assumption that [the summary implied that] the activated gene is.a complete gene for hands that was wrong. There is no gene for hands. However there are genes involved in the development of limbs that were already there, and were activated by the addition of a new gene.
The concept of felony is completely unrelated to the concept of federalism. The term originated in English common law.
Which according to Google still applied in the UK until 1967, but doesn't anymore. So yeah I guess it would be silly to ask that now! But is there any requirement to disclose criminal convictions? Or any circumstances in which criminal record is made available? That's really at the heart of the issue I raised in my post.
So, the hand genes were just sitting around, waiting to be 'activated' by specific DNA?
Kinda maybe but not really? There's no gene for hands. There are genes involved in growing those tissues which comprise limbs, which are in turn controlled by other genes. Control those genes one way, you get fins, another way, you get "hands". The controlled genes were already present in the fish, and being used to make fins. Add a new mouse gene that controls those other genes a different way and you get something more like a hand.
As a ridiculously coarse analogy, it's like saying the standard C library has the code for a chess game because if you take a tic-tac-toe game and then re-arrange a bunch of the code that controls how the stdlib functions are called you get chess instead. Yes there are important pieces being re-used but there's more to it than that.
There's no problem with the terminology, and absolutely no need to resort to ID to explain this. Our bodies re-use the chemical machinery of life forms from billions of years ago. Just in different ways. Evolving new mechanisms for controlling that machinery is still evolution.
When being gay was decriminalised, the existing criminal convictions were not stricken from the record.
So when being gay was decriminalized, but there was still a massive societal stigma against being gay causing many homosexuals to stay "in the closet", they would nevertheless have to answer "yes" to "are you a convicted felon?" questions on job applications and list their homosexuality conviction and thus out themselves to their potential future employer?
Holy fuck!
Does the UK have anti-discrimination in employment laws?
I believe a new law is being passed to unilaterally strick all convictions of such nature, leaving such people with a clean record.
Obviously far too long in coming, but better late than never I guess!
Enlightenment was always best when used with a user-developed theme -- E was the ultimate theme-able WM before themes were really a "thing". The "default" themes were best considered examples of what you could do.
So assuming E17 didn't ditch the #1 best part of E, then the answer is -- as soon as someone makes a theme for it that matches your aesthetic sensibilities.
I used to count on Linksys for exactly three things: 1) it worked 2) it was affordable and 3) it worked with Linux out of the box. I became loyal to Linksys back in `98 when I bought a Linksys Ethernet card that had Linux drivers on the install diskette -- this was prior to those same drivers being incorporated into the Linux kernel distribution.
Fast forward a few years, I wanted to buy a wireless card, and I saw the Linksys model. With the Cisco branding, but I thought, okay, so they bought Linksys, surely they kept the same features that I counted on Linksys for. And the answer was "no" on all three counts. Too expensive -- but hey, it'll work, and with Linux -- only it didn't work on Linux at all, and when I eventually found drivers from the chipset maker the card worked but then took a dump on me after less than a year (whereas I'm still using old Linksys ethernet cards for wired networking).
The joke was premised on "not distinguishing between different things is stupid". Your response is premised on the joke-teller not distinguishing. Nice work.
Ahh! the old problem... equations versus reality!
All that the Einstenian equations tell us is that they don't know how to manage black holes beyond the event horizon (and that they are wrong about them because of that).
Ahh, the old problem of equations versus your imagination of what reality might be. ;)
Einstein's equations work just fine inside the event horizon. It's the actual singularity itself which raises some eyebrows. And even then, we don't actually know that such a thing isn't possible in reality. But you are uncomfortable with the idea, therefore they're wrong. Got it.
At the very least it's clear that a black hole must have "density significantly higher than that of a neutron star."
Because?
Because it's required by those pesky equations.
All you can say is that *if* (a big if) black holes behave more or less like all the physics we know about
Everything said about just about anything can be presumed to have an "as long as our understanding is correct" qualifyer. And indeed our theory of gravity may be wrong. It saying something different than what you say is not a good argument for it being wrong.
What's misleading about saying density is defined as mass against volume?
Because the actual definition is mass divided by the minimum volume which fully contains the mass, not some arbitrary larger volume that you happen to find convenient. And since the behavior of a black hole requires exceedingly high density, it's doubly misleading.
Not to mention that even if the pluralization rule of "replace -us with -i" applied, the result would be viri with one "i". The only word that's plural ends with two "i"s is "radius" which becomes "radii" because there's one "i" before the "us" already.
"Virii" is simply retarded, and I was retarded when I used to use it.
If you think that he intended to say that we have literally seen every object in the universe made of normal matter, then you didn't think enough.
Well yes if you use the size of the event horizon and the mass of the black hole to calculate density then you get a low density.
But the mass is not distributed over that volume. inside the black hole the mass is actually contained in an infintesimal point, and the density is infinite. At least according to the math; it's impossible to look inside the event horizon to find out if that's really the case.
At the very least it's clear that a black hole must have density significantly higher than that of a neutron star. Saying it's less dense than the air is misleading in that respect.
You can generally reliably remove rootkits by taking the drive out, putting it into an external drive bay (so its not present on a PC while booting), connect the drive when your PC is started up and then format it with none of its code executing.
Why go through that much trouble?
Just stick a bootable optical disk with formatting tools on it in, boot from it, and then format the infected drive. No code from the drive will be running so any rootkit on the drive will be overwritten.
I don't know how the Windows setup disk works, but I find it hard to believe it'd start running the kernel that's on the disk drive that you want to format. Certainly a Linux install disk would work just fine.
A BIOS rootkit would be a different kettle of fish.
As someone who completely swore off traditional console controllers for FPS games moments after first using the wiimote, I would say that the mouse is still exponentially better than any console controller.
It's just with the wiimote it's a binary order of magnitude instead of decimal. :)
Anecdotes are not data.
Sure they are! Just not a lot of data. All we need now is for you two to rigorously define the number of friends and their movements, and then get a couple hundred more people randomly sampled from the population to do the same and we'll have the basis for a solid study!