Hey professor, did you know that for any curve you can always find a section short enough to approximate a straight line? In the 1600's some maths geniuses built a whole branch of maths from that 'trick' and called it calculus.
Also did you know the best estimates for sea level rise come with rather large error bars which IIRC range from about 20cm to 800cm by the year 2100. The reason for the large error bars is that people who have spent their lives studying this have much less certainty about the shape of the curve than you do. That cautious approach by the "experts" is genuine skeptcisim, fought out in the journals as it should be. Picking a figure at either end of the range and representing it as the "most likely scenario" is simply dishonest.
Oh, come on, this is nothing more that budget bartering via press release, to which NASA is not immune. Given the spectacular nature of some recent meteors in the mass media, the general will get his new space fence. He's just trying to panic the politicians into action by setting a hard date.
Been on the road for 40yrs, talking to passengers doesn't distract me, talking on a phone is downright suicidal. I have a tendency to turn my eyeballs up when thinking about what someone says on the phone. I was unaware of this habit until one day in the early 90's I found myself doing it when driving and I haven't used a phone while driving since.
The fact that gold and can be traded for goods and services has nothing to do with it's intrinsic value, it's intrinsic value is virtually zero to everyone outside the electronics industry. Intrinsic value is a measure of usefulness, eg: Compared to gold, trees are abundant, they provide wood, food, and suck up CO2, thus they have a much higher intrinsic value than gold.
A one to one exchange of goods/services with intrinsic value is called bartering. Currency is anything used as a token to simplify trading where more than one exchange would be required to get the goods what you want. Something durable and hard to obtain such as gold is ideal for those tokens. Problem with that scheme is the economy now has an artificial growth boundary defined by the supply of gold. Of course when politicians start firing missiles at each other people will be drawn to the "safe haven" of gold, but the fact is currently "the market" sees US treasury bonds as "safer than gold".
if we neglect air resistance (which would probably be negligible), then the phone will measure *no* acceleration at all at any point during its rise and fall.
When anything falls to Earth under gravity it is accelerating at ~9.8m/s downwards. The reason why you are weightless during free fall is because you are not resisting the acceleration.
Ditto. Hovever installing a ramp does not mean you are not allowed to have a staircase. I seriously doubt introducing a law that technically handicaps web site owners is the best way to help blind people access the web.
"They" are humans, "they" already have the power to implement the obvious solution you offer. The social problem part is that "they" won't do that. Now if we attempt to solve that by exchanging all of "they" with people like "us", there will be a lot of dead bodies and the "people like us" will do exactly the same thing as "they" did.
Now, the interesting question is what is the relationship between Random Joe and Random Bob?
You've nailed it. The secret service does not exist to crush dissent, it exists to crush organised dissent before it takes root..
They collect "meta data" not because of the fig-leaf of privacy it affords but because it holds the information they want - relationships between "subversives" (real or imagined). Trawling a gazzillion emails for key phrases is inefficient and error prone, the network of relationships tell you exatly which individuals to remove to most effectively dismantle the entire organisation.
Trivia: Biologists use the same network analysis methods to identify key species in different habitats.
Oracs are not whales, they normally hunt whales and ignore humans. Orcas will even work with humans to catch whales. No, not just scavanging around during a hunt like a shark does, but actively herding the whales into twofold bay, alerting and directing whalers to the prey, assisting with the kill, and fending of sharks should one of boats be capsised.
The Orcas only ate the tounge of the humpbacks, the rest they left for the humans. I've been to the small museam in Eden several times over the years, it's fantastic, one of the best in Australia IMHO. It's main drawcard is the skeleton of "Old Tom" on display, several of his front teeth are missing due to being worn through by the harpoon rope, one tooth still in place has a large grove in it from gripping the rope.
GHCQ - Nobody but a Brit or a spy would be acquainted with that acronym.
Hey McGrew, ever watch James Bond?:)
Seriously though, I agree with what your saying, we have the same problem in Oz on some issues (dope is a great example), right now we heading into a federal election, both major parties are competing with each other to see who can capture the xenophobe vote. Contrary to what some people think, the parties are not conspiring with each other. They are responding to what is (shamefully) a popular sentiment amoungst Aussie voters, that ugly sentiment is reflected by the system because political parties tend to shift their policies toward the "middle". In otherwords bipatisan inhumanity is the democratic reflection of an ignorant public, not a corruption of the system by people in black helicopters.
Two points.
1, Science is a matter of evidence, not a matter of belief.
2. To have an opposing view, one must first agree there is such a thing as 'reality'.
A tax write off benifits the charity not the donor. Say my company has $1,000. If I give it all away to charity the taxman asks for nothing, if I keep the $1,000 in my own pocket then the taxman will demands his cut (around $300 in the US). What that does is ensure that charitable donations go to the charity in full and is not counted as income by the taxman. From the company's POV, it makes no difference to the what the taxman does, they are still down $1,000.
Businesses, at least corporations, are required by law to maximize profits
I hear this often but have never seen such a law. In simplistic terms the board of publicly traded companies are required to do what the shareholders (ie: the owners) tell them to do, normally they say "maximise profits" but not because it's required by law.
Punishment for breaking a formal oath is usually much harsher for the same act performed while not under an oath. A person's "word" should be taken seriously and should be punished if broken. Of course blind trust is pure stupidity, but the expectation that an individual should "keep his word" is not. It's called "having principles", but be warned, these so called "principles" are expensive. Snowden and Manning took an oath that (at the time) they believed did not conflict with other strong principles they already held. Ironically the conflicting principles can both be described as patriotic.
Outside of a court, an oath means nothing
If there's an independent witness then it's a solid verbal contract in most legal systems around the world. In this case we're talking about the military who have their own oaths, laws, courts, police, judges, and jails. A soldiers "pinky swear" is taken very seriously by that system, especially when it's broken. I've never been a soldier but the fact that you appear to believe a (wo)man's word means nothing outside a court of law indicates the principle of "integrity" is too expensive for your particular personality.
The reason freedom of the press exists is so that you don't have to rely on the goodwill of the government to "do the right thing" when you tell them you have found out what they are doing. WL is a legitimate press organization, they released the manning stuff at the same time as three well established and respected newspapers they partnered with, Guardian, NYT and Der Speigel. The news people did what WL did not have the resources and expertise to do, redacted the names of informants. The result - WL cops all the flack from the spooks, while the release and the role of the established newspapers is ignored.
Freedom of the press does not mean individual publishers have to apply for a license to publish.
Disclaimer: I don't like either Rupert Murdoch or Julian Assange steering the views of the public, they both have lousy personalities that I wouldn't associate with unless absolutely necessary, but they most certainly have a right to their freedoms, and not the least of those is the freedom of the press.
Young women are attracted to young men who take unnecessary risks in extreme displays of their adult skills. Today it's smoking the wheels of cars, not so long ago it was jumping out of trees onto wild buffalo. Every hero in every action movie does the same thing, no matter what is thrown at the hero he gets up and keeps going, no matter what the hero blows up or how many bullets he shoots no innocent bystander is ever hurt.
Young women are not attracted to 'idiots' that crash and burn, they are attracted to 'heros' who's skills and strength keep them alive and healthy despite the odds. It's not a conscious thing in either sex, "cheating death" is an integral part of the human ritual of finding a suitable mate, it's so deeply ingrained in humans that a males brain chemistry will reward "cheating death" with feelings of elation, pride, and self-satisfaction.
Looking back as an old man who had the luck to survive the motorbike ritual (among others), young men really do behave like peacocks, the things they unconsciously do to attract a mate are even more dangerous to the individual than that ridiculous tail is to the peacock. At the end of the day it does make our societies (if not our species) better suited to the civilizations we invented. We are continually evolving and are in a feedback loop with the environment we have created for ourselves, not unlike the termite and it's air-conditioned fungus farm.
I can think of a situation where an SSD might help with faster 3D rendering.
Yep, an SSD on my i5 makes WoT play at "highest detail" just as good as it does on my i7 using a conventional HDD, they both have the same video card and ram but without the SSD the i5 is practically unplayable (especially if you want all the eye-candy). It also loads the O/S and game faster than the i7. However durability is a bit of a concern, my first SSD shit itself without warning after 3 months, it was replaced under warranty and has been running for about a year now without problems. "Windoze" gets a lot of bad press but I have to say the is a remarkably simple and useful tool for determining the best way to spend your hardware upgrade money.
I was raided by the drug squad in 1980, they found nothing because I had nothing. They were surprisingly friendly and somewhat sheepish about searching after initially surrounding the house and jamming a jackboot in the doorway, maybe it was my calm (bewildered) demeanor or perhaps it was the wife and baby in the background that helped chill them out. Whatever it was they basically gave up after looking in a couple of cupboards and the greenhouse out back, when they left they said it was an "anonymous tip off" and hinted that the old woman next door didn't approve of young men with long hair.
I have no ill feeling toward the drug squad because of the raid, they behaved like people put into an awkward position by social circumstance, apologized profusely for the commando crap, and did not trash the place - but I know for a fact that it doesn't always turn out like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey professor, did you know that for any curve you can always find a section short enough to approximate a straight line? In the 1600's some maths geniuses built a whole branch of maths from that 'trick' and called it calculus.
Also did you know the best estimates for sea level rise come with rather large error bars which IIRC range from about 20cm to 800cm by the year 2100. The reason for the large error bars is that people who have spent their lives studying this have much less certainty about the shape of the curve than you do. That cautious approach by the "experts" is genuine skeptcisim, fought out in the journals as it should be. Picking a figure at either end of the range and representing it as the "most likely scenario" is simply dishonest.
What? Jesus built the pyramids, he WAS an alien
Oh, come on, this is nothing more that budget bartering via press release, to which NASA is not immune. Given the spectacular nature of some recent meteors in the mass media, the general will get his new space fence. He's just trying to panic the politicians into action by setting a hard date.
The purpose of "in-housing" the email is so it's easier for their own agencies to access.
Soooo.....why did they enable ssl? - Hardware sales for a relative in the business?
Been on the road for 40yrs, talking to passengers doesn't distract me, talking on a phone is downright suicidal. I have a tendency to turn my eyeballs up when thinking about what someone says on the phone. I was unaware of this habit until one day in the early 90's I found myself doing it when driving and I haven't used a phone while driving since.
The fact that gold and can be traded for goods and services has nothing to do with it's intrinsic value, it's intrinsic value is virtually zero to everyone outside the electronics industry. Intrinsic value is a measure of usefulness, eg: Compared to gold, trees are abundant, they provide wood, food, and suck up CO2, thus they have a much higher intrinsic value than gold.
A one to one exchange of goods/services with intrinsic value is called bartering. Currency is anything used as a token to simplify trading where more than one exchange would be required to get the goods what you want. Something durable and hard to obtain such as gold is ideal for those tokens. Problem with that scheme is the economy now has an artificial growth boundary defined by the supply of gold. Of course when politicians start firing missiles at each other people will be drawn to the "safe haven" of gold, but the fact is currently "the market" sees US treasury bonds as "safer than gold".
if we neglect air resistance (which would probably be negligible), then the phone will measure *no* acceleration at all at any point during its rise and fall.
When anything falls to Earth under gravity it is accelerating at ~9.8m/s downwards. The reason why you are weightless during free fall is because you are not resisting the acceleration.
Sorry, you fail physics
Ironic, no?
I support those laws.
Ditto. Hovever installing a ramp does not mean you are not allowed to have a staircase. I seriously doubt introducing a law that technically handicaps web site owners is the best way to help blind people access the web.
"They" are humans, "they" already have the power to implement the obvious solution you offer. The social problem part is that "they" won't do that. Now if we attempt to solve that by exchanging all of "they" with people like "us", there will be a lot of dead bodies and the "people like us" will do exactly the same thing as "they" did.
Now, the interesting question is what is the relationship between Random Joe and Random Bob?
You've nailed it. The secret service does not exist to crush dissent, it exists to crush organised dissent before it takes root.. They collect "meta data" not because of the fig-leaf of privacy it affords but because it holds the information they want - relationships between "subversives" (real or imagined). Trawling a gazzillion emails for key phrases is inefficient and error prone, the network of relationships tell you exatly which individuals to remove to most effectively dismantle the entire organisation.
Trivia: Biologists use the same network analysis methods to identify key species in different habitats.
Oracs are not whales, they normally hunt whales and ignore humans. Orcas will even work with humans to catch whales. No, not just scavanging around during a hunt like a shark does, but actively herding the whales into twofold bay, alerting and directing whalers to the prey, assisting with the kill, and fending of sharks should one of boats be capsised.
The Orcas only ate the tounge of the humpbacks, the rest they left for the humans. I've been to the small museam in Eden several times over the years, it's fantastic, one of the best in Australia IMHO. It's main drawcard is the skeleton of "Old Tom" on display, several of his front teeth are missing due to being worn through by the harpoon rope, one tooth still in place has a large grove in it from gripping the rope.
GHCQ - Nobody but a Brit or a spy would be acquainted with that acronym.
Hey McGrew, ever watch James Bond? :)
Seriously though, I agree with what your saying, we have the same problem in Oz on some issues (dope is a great example), right now we heading into a federal election, both major parties are competing with each other to see who can capture the xenophobe vote. Contrary to what some people think, the parties are not conspiring with each other. They are responding to what is (shamefully) a popular sentiment amoungst Aussie voters, that ugly sentiment is reflected by the system because political parties tend to shift their policies toward the "middle". In otherwords bipatisan inhumanity is the democratic reflection of an ignorant public, not a corruption of the system by people in black helicopters.
especially at such high consumption
Why would you want to reward energy consumption, particular when the social benifits of the infrastructure in question is widely disputed?
Two points.
1, Science is a matter of evidence, not a matter of belief.
2. To have an opposing view, one must first agree there is such a thing as 'reality'.
tax write off
A tax write off benifits the charity not the donor. Say my company has $1,000. If I give it all away to charity the taxman asks for nothing, if I keep the $1,000 in my own pocket then the taxman will demands his cut (around $300 in the US). What that does is ensure that charitable donations go to the charity in full and is not counted as income by the taxman. From the company's POV, it makes no difference to the what the taxman does, they are still down $1,000.
Businesses, at least corporations, are required by law to maximize profits
I hear this often but have never seen such a law. In simplistic terms the board of publicly traded companies are required to do what the shareholders (ie: the owners) tell them to do, normally they say "maximise profits" but not because it's required by law.
Outside of a court, an oath means nothing
If there's an independent witness then it's a solid verbal contract in most legal systems around the world. In this case we're talking about the military who have their own oaths, laws, courts, police, judges, and jails. A soldiers "pinky swear" is taken very seriously by that system, especially when it's broken. I've never been a soldier but the fact that you appear to believe a (wo)man's word means nothing outside a court of law indicates the principle of "integrity" is too expensive for your particular personality.
The reason freedom of the press exists is so that you don't have to rely on the goodwill of the government to "do the right thing" when you tell them you have found out what they are doing. WL is a legitimate press organization, they released the manning stuff at the same time as three well established and respected newspapers they partnered with, Guardian, NYT and Der Speigel. The news people did what WL did not have the resources and expertise to do, redacted the names of informants. The result - WL cops all the flack from the spooks, while the release and the role of the established newspapers is ignored.
Freedom of the press does not mean individual publishers have to apply for a license to publish.
Disclaimer: I don't like either Rupert Murdoch or Julian Assange steering the views of the public, they both have lousy personalities that I wouldn't associate with unless absolutely necessary, but they most certainly have a right to their freedoms, and not the least of those is the freedom of the press.
"The first casualty of war is truth" because people like you are more than eager to drown it in a bathtub.
Young women are attracted to young men who take unnecessary risks in extreme displays of their adult skills. Today it's smoking the wheels of cars, not so long ago it was jumping out of trees onto wild buffalo. Every hero in every action movie does the same thing, no matter what is thrown at the hero he gets up and keeps going, no matter what the hero blows up or how many bullets he shoots no innocent bystander is ever hurt.
Young women are not attracted to 'idiots' that crash and burn, they are attracted to 'heros' who's skills and strength keep them alive and healthy despite the odds. It's not a conscious thing in either sex, "cheating death" is an integral part of the human ritual of finding a suitable mate, it's so deeply ingrained in humans that a males brain chemistry will reward "cheating death" with feelings of elation, pride, and self-satisfaction.
Looking back as an old man who had the luck to survive the motorbike ritual (among others), young men really do behave like peacocks, the things they unconsciously do to attract a mate are even more dangerous to the individual than that ridiculous tail is to the peacock. At the end of the day it does make our societies (if not our species) better suited to the civilizations we invented. We are continually evolving and are in a feedback loop with the environment we have created for ourselves, not unlike the termite and it's air-conditioned fungus farm.
Who pissed in your cornflakes? The underlying reason it speeds up both games and rendering is identical, ie: swap space.
I can think of a situation where an SSD might help with faster 3D rendering.
Yep, an SSD on my i5 makes WoT play at "highest detail" just as good as it does on my i7 using a conventional HDD, they both have the same video card and ram but without the SSD the i5 is practically unplayable (especially if you want all the eye-candy). It also loads the O/S and game faster than the i7. However durability is a bit of a concern, my first SSD shit itself without warning after 3 months, it was replaced under warranty and has been running for about a year now without problems. "Windoze" gets a lot of bad press but I have to say the is a remarkably simple and useful tool for determining the best way to spend your hardware upgrade money.
Quick, someone hand Tom a shotgun and a sturdy walking frame.
I was raided by the drug squad in 1980, they found nothing because I had nothing. They were surprisingly friendly and somewhat sheepish about searching after initially surrounding the house and jamming a jackboot in the doorway, maybe it was my calm (bewildered) demeanor or perhaps it was the wife and baby in the background that helped chill them out. Whatever it was they basically gave up after looking in a couple of cupboards and the greenhouse out back, when they left they said it was an "anonymous tip off" and hinted that the old woman next door didn't approve of young men with long hair.
I have no ill feeling toward the drug squad because of the raid, they behaved like people put into an awkward position by social circumstance, apologized profusely for the commando crap, and did not trash the place - but I know for a fact that it doesn't always turn out like that.
Edithvale, best beach in Melbourne. :)