When you are in a position of authority over other people, you must be held to a higher standard. With your greater authority comes greater responsibility. Responsibility requires transparency. Therefore, the more power you have, the less secrecy you should be allowed to have, because secrecy allows you to abuse your power.
All of the above applies to groups as well as individuals. Churches and their clergy, goverments and their bureaucrats, corporations and their executives, military and their officers, ALL have great power over people and therefore must be held accountable for their use of that power.
However, private individuals who do not exercise power over others should have no requirement for higher transparency. If you aren't in a position to harm others, any exposition of your private affairs won't do anything to help anyone else. It can only be used to harm you, and is an abuse of power. Therefore, you in fact should have a right to privacy.
Consider the issue of gun ownership. If you choose to own a gun, you are taking some power. With that power comes responsibility. That gun's characteristics should be on file with law enforcement, so they can potentially match crime scene bullets fired from your gun. Make sense? More power = more transparency.
Going out on a limb... I would expect dark matter to form "dark black holes" if you brought enough mass of it together in a small enough space.
I'm no expert, but here's what I think I know:
Dark matter only interacts gravitationally. Dark matter does not collide with matter, nor does it collide with other dark matter. This means it can't form clumps. No dark matter clumps means no dark matter gravity wells, meaning no dark matter black holes.
A galaxy's dark matter, then, is a diffuse cloud of invisible non-interacting particles in orbit around and through the galaxy itself. These particles have gravity of their own, and collectively they have a huge influence on the galaxy's field of gravity.
Now, obviously dark matter particles would be unable to escape a black hole just like anything else. However, the vast majority of dark matter will never interact with a black hole -- it will just orbit forever.
Anyways, we are a startup with almost a year live. None of the employees have ownership/stock and all are salary. Salaries are at normal industry rates. What should I say to him when we talk about this again?
In most times, places, and industries over the past century, managers who worked their employees this way would have been tagged as incompetent -- not just because of the threat they pose to good worker relations, but also because of the risk their mismanagement poses to the company's productivity and assets. A hundred years of industrial research has proven beyond question that exhausted workers create errors that blow schedules, destroy equipment, create cost overruns, erode product quality, and threaten the bottom line.
I have been sick to death of advertising for pretty much all my adult life. I think it's a horrible shame to name so many of our modern points of interest after corporations. I hate how everything must be branded, and I especially hate how tasteless it all is. Product placement sucks. Most of all I'm just blown away at how I have to pay for the carrier to bring the advertisements to me.
I pay about $80 per month for cable TV, and all the channels are ad-laden; it is standard for each hour of programming to contain 20 minutes of advertisements. Now, DVR technology has allowed us to skip those commercials if you're willing to watch the program on a time delay. But doing that costs extra. A few years ago I used an old PC as a homebrew DVR and it didn't cost anything above a small investment in hardware and software, but nowadays things are so locked down the only realistic option is to rent the box and pay for the "service" from the provider. So, as I see it, I'm getting screwed from every direction.
The content itself is laden with product placement, it's subsidized further by being 33% pure commercial advertisements, I have to pay to bring the crap-laden content to my TV, and I have to pay more to filter out some of the noise.
The internet is rapidly heading in the same direction. You can't view a lot of content without turning on scripting and flash, and the scripting and flash bring advertisements that cannot be blocked. I'm paying an ISP to bring the crap in for me, and the services that offer to sell me access to the content still won't promise to remove all the advertising if I do so.
So, with my iPhone, at least it's not loaded with advertisements. Of course it brings in the Internet ads for me, but it blocks the invasive ones and I bless the iPhone for the lack of flash. But at least for the most part I'm getting fair value for the service I pay for: I make and receive phone calls and text messages, and neither are subsidized by advertisement.
So, to me, the iPhone wins. I don't care about the openness and inexpensiveness of Android if it means everything I do with my phone is partially paid for by advertisement. I'm not going to pay a carrier for voice and data service so that they can use that pipe to shove ads in my face every time I pick up my phone. It's just ridiculous.
I'm starting to believe that our society will end not in natural disaster or nuclear armageddon. Instead, the signal-to-noise ratio of all our communications will drop so low that our culture and our future just disintegrate.
And for that matter, why doesn't Klingon Bob or Ebenezer's nephew simply challenge Ebenezer to bat'leth deul, cut his head off, and take over the company? Just sayin'....
Because not all Klingons are in the warrior caste, much like how not all Asians live a Martial Arts lifestyle.
Not until the 32 bit era (68000 Amiga, 80486 +SoundBlaster) did they have enough power to convert text to speech.
I ran a program called "SAM" (short for "Software Automated Mouth" on my Atari 800 XL. That was an 1.8 MHz 8-bit 6502-based machine. It had 48K of ram, and shadowed part of its ROM. SAM would convert text to speech, and it also supported a markup language allowing you to specify intonation. For example, if you fed it "hello" you got Stephen Hawking saying "hello", but if you typed HE3HLOW4W you got something that sounded a little less robotic.
So is there a word or short phrase that describes someone who has the cognitive capacity to recognize a troll but lacks the willpower to refuse to feed it?
I'm personally a fan of.NET, mainly because the toolset goes a long way towards making development easy. Consider: You start the Visual Studio C# IDE, create a new Windows Forms application, then use a simple menu selection to create a new User Control class. You are given a canvas and can immediately begin adding existing controls to it, and if you want to custom-draw the whole thing then you just use the Events tab of the Properties window to create a handler for the Paint event. The paint event handler's args give you access to the control's canvas, and you're off and running. The IDE adds your custom control to the Toolbox, so you can just drag it onto a form to create an instance, and a good portion of it functions in design mode so you can check it out before you ever actually run your project.
It doesn't get any easier, I think.
I've begun learning Mono. I don't know enough about the differences between MONO and.NET, and Visual Studio and MonoDevelop, to speak to how easy or difficult it really is to do Windows/Linux cross-platform development with it. Yet.
Yeah, and we could rename the planet to Marstralia.
Ok, kidding aside, here's why not: people on death row have been condemned for very good reasons. If you're assuming the mission will kill the volunteers, how could you trust the worst kind of psychopaths and sociopaths humanity can offer up to complete what they're supposed to do?
If they're expected to survive and start a colony, why would you want to start an offplanet colony with the worst kind of psychopaths and sociopaths humanity can offer up? How could you trust them? How could you consider sending normal non-criminals to join them later? And finally, why the hell should a death row inmate be able to volunteer for something that plenty of professional non-criminal astronauts would gladly do?
Our starting supposition should be that humanity has an intrinsic right to enforce transparency upon power wielders, particularly governments and militaries, so that they may be held to account for the efficacy and morality of their actions.
I'm quoting the above block of text simply because it bears repeating. This, so eloquently put, is absolutely 100% correct and needs to be echoed everywhere across the world, for all time. This is the kind of wisdom that could have been written by one of America's founding fathers, had they instead lived in the present. Well stated, sir!
In order to go FTL you have to warp spacetime, effectively decreasing the distance between you and your destination. So if such technology actually existed and could be applied to a motor vehicle, then it could be true that your car could do the cross-country trip in 200 miles while mine might take 250...
Look, at work places everywhere the recycling bins are next to the trash bins and all you have to do is select the correct one. There is no extra time being taken up there. It's pretty much the same thing at home. There's one bin for the recyclables and one for the garbage. All you have to do is toss the trash into the correct one, and take the extra bin down to the curb with your garbage on trash day. I think allowing five minutes a week for this is generous.
So I'd say your estimate of the time is off by at least an order of magnitude...keep in mind that these things are relative.
Most people are not capable of producing much of value with their time. The kids' macaroni pictures just won't sell. No matter how precious the parents think they are, their actual worth is less than that of the materials used to create them. For older people who can work, most of them can't find a job at all, and the Wal-Mart greeters are lucky to have that. Also, most people are too poor to afford servants, even at minimum wage. So when you average out everyone's ability to generate value, including the children, the elderly, the infirm, the shiftless, the amount is very very tiny.
Household labor does not increase your net worth. It's like the calories your body burns digesting your food. It's a value sink created simply by being alive. If a maid makes minimum wage cleaning someone's house, it's only because the employer has the luxury of assigning a disproportionately high value to that work. Most people can't afford to pay someone else to do their menial chores. Not only that, maid services are the first things that middle class families will cut when economic times get tough. The real value of that time is miniscule.
Your assertion that requiring people to tote a recycling bin to the curb along with their regular trash is stealing value from the populace at a rate of two full-time jobs' worth per 1000 people is a very big overestimation.
we still are losing the labor of something like two people per thousand just from the "not much effort" of sorting garbage
Keep in mind that I overall agree with what you are saying, but I have to take issue with the above statement.
Five minutes per week from each of 1,000 people is not the same as two full-time jobs, because you cannot actually hire two people to do the same work. Also, those five minutes are not five minutes that everyone would otherwise spend doing productive labor.
What is the value of an hour of an average person's time? I don't know how to put a dollar value on it. Right now I'm sitting here wasting time writing this post, using time unproductively. Is there an opportunity cost here? Could I be earning money, or adding value to my net worth in some indirect way, if I were not using my time selfishly? I make a good income but I can't increase my income by working more. I could maybe do work on the side if I could find it, but I would probably make less per hour at that than I do at my regular job. I could maybe build bird houses and sell then on eBay, but that certainly isn't a way to make a lot of money. There may be a way to estimate the value I'm losing by wasting my time on Slashot, or sorting my trash, but I'd bet that the average value of an hour of an average person's time is an order of magnitude or more smaller than the minimum wage.
If I'm right about that, then the two full-time jobs per thousand people is more like per 10,000 people. You're talking about a couple pennies a day per person.
One day I got a really nice-looking mailer with the MYTHBUSTERS logo emblazoned on it. Normally I chuck spam mail right into the bin, but since I like the Mythbusters show I decided to give that one a look-see. Turns out it was from a local Protestant church. They were running a "Mythbusters" themed series of sermons that had zero to do with the Discovery Channel or the actual Mythbusters.
The logo was such a straight-up ripoff that it passed more than casual inspection!
I'm reminded of the church summer camp I went to one year. It was very very hot that summer. But the thermometer on the pole outside the cafeteria never got up above 80 degrees. So one day I gave it a close inspection and discovered they had put a small nail at the 80 degree mark so the arm couldn't rise further.
So answer me this: why is it ok for Protestant churches to lie and steal, when half their sermons are on how that's the kind of thing Satan does and that doing it will land you in hellfire for all eternity?
Now those are just two personal anecdotes that come readily to mind, but they aren't isolated incidents. It seems that for U.S. protestant churches, there are no rules when it comes to prosthelytizing. They'll deceive you, they'll bribe you, they'll harrass you, they'll do whatever it takes to gain just a little bit of your attention. In my opinion, it is the utmost hypocrisy to cast aside those basic tenets of morality when it comes to "spreading the word". How can a person have respect for a member of a church who will lie to you one day and preach that you should not tell lies the next?
She made no opinion over whether risk for a higher reward is better or worse.
QFT.
"A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." When we have a thing of value, we are not inclined to risk it.
On the other hand, "in for a penny, in for a pound." When we perceive we are losing something of value, we are much more inclined to take risk to keep it. An investor may choose to hold on too long to taking stock on the hope that its value will return.
When playing poker, amateur players will often chase large pots with losing hands. The more money they put in the pot, the more they want to get that money back, so the tougher the decision is to let the hand go. Professional poker players, however, make it a point to realize that money they already placed in the pot is no longer theirs, and look at each subsequent play from the standpoint of gaining from risk versus reward.
But so what? That's not time inverting itself, that's a lag in transmission.
All observers in your example are stationary relative to each other. Relativity doesn't even enter into it
Suppose you have two highly accelerated observers moving towards each other at a high speed, say half the speed of light. Each one has a clock, and a yardstick pointed in the direction he is traveling. Each observer watches the other over as they travel through space. Each one will see the other's clock running more slowly than normal, while his own clock is running normally. Each observer will also see the other's yardstick appears to be shorter than a yard, while his own yardstick is normal length.
How could both of them see each other squashed and in slow motion at the same time? It must be a paradox, right?
Hint: the speed of light is constant. Light always moves at the same speed to any observer, no matter the direction or source of the light, no matter how much the observer or the source of light has accelerated. For the speed of light to be constant, then time and space cannot be. When you accelerate, time and distance in your own frame of reference are not changed, but time and distance for other frames you observe become skewed.
As far as wrapping your head around it, that's just something you're gonna have to do on your own. It's like acceleration changes what "cross section" of the rest of the universe's spacetime that you observe. Two observers heading towards each other at high speed and observing a third frame of reference can see things happen in a different order, even after canceling out the speed-of-light delay in observation, because each observer has a different view of distance and time in that third frame.
I've been a smoker of cigarettes and herb since my late teens. The weed I can take or leave. I've gone through times when I would wake-and-bake and stay high all day for months on end, times when I would get high once or twice a month, and times when I haven't smoked any at all for years on end.
While it is true that you build up a bit of a tolerance after you've been smoking hard and long, there are absolutely no withdrawal symptoms when you stop. Even when you go from being constantly stoned to completely dry, you can quit and not have cravings.
Tobacco is completely the opposite. If I go more than a few hours without a smoke, I'm already hating life. I have quit three times, all of them for several months, but the craving for the nicotine rush just never seemed to go away. It really does suck.
Nicotine is highly toxic, and just a small drop of the pure stuff on the tongue can easily be fatal. With THC, however, you can consume an entire gram of the pure shit and you'll just get really, REALLY stoned. (That's hard to do by smoking, but not so hard to do if you're eating it...)
I remember a very vivid dream from my youth, in which I went into a gas station and bought a pack of Marlboro joints. They looked like cigarettes, and even had filters, and the box looked like a pack of Marlboro 100s except in deep green instead of red.
I think it's time we quit being stupid about the whole thing and flat-out make MJ be equally as legal and equally as commoditized as tobacco. But I'm happy for the baby steps. If it has to be "medicine" for "sick people" then so be it; eventually it'll be legal and commercialized. I guess when it comes right down to it we are ALL terminally ill and in chronic pain. It's just some of us are more immediately terminal and in more pain than others. But we all have pain and we are all gonna die.
It needs to be run by scientists, and with independence.
What, scientists don't have politics and all the bullshit that comes with it? How would scientists decide what projects to fund, towards what ends? You think just because someone is a professional in sciences that he or she is automatically altruistic? Good lord, some of these science peeps are the most condescending, lost-in-their-own-world, self-centered bastards imaginable!
Yeah, professional politicians suck. But I say, better the devil you know.
120 half-frames per second versus 144 half-frames per second does make the difference for me. Shutter glasses give me headaches. I am sensitive to flicker in progressive-scan CRT displays running at 60Hz but not at 72 Hz, but interlaced displays at 60 Hz (or 30 for each half-frame) don't give me trouble. Standard movie theater framerate isn't an issue -- yes, the low framerate makes the picutre "jumpy", but the transition between frames is fast enough that I'm not sensitive to it. None of the 3D movies I've seen using the polarized glasses has caused me trouble.
I don't exactly "see" the flicker, but after looking at a low refresh rate display for a short time I see migraine-like auras. It's kind of like what diffuse electricity might look like, sort of like a deep violet fog floating in front of the display, -- it's what I think of when I hear the phrase "purple haze". I think it's a result of a large portion of my field of vision flickering just below the threshold of perception. I may not see it but it does cause issues.
The best 3D to date is with active shutter glasses.
No, the best 3D is with circularly polarized light (which works even if you tilt the glasses off vertical, unlike linearly polarized systems). The glasses are super cheap plastic. There is no need to blank each eye in turn for half of each frame, so there is a lot less flicker. (And flicker sensitivity isn't so much a matter of framerate but of how much of each frame is black; stereoscopic systems require 50% blankness.)
I know LCD displays are all linearly polarized. Can they be made circularly polarized instead, with rows or columns alternating polarity?
I know movie theatre screens can reflect circularly polarized light without changing the polarization, so it can work with projection home theater. But, what about DLP displays? Can the screens pass circularly polarized light with polarization intact?
I for one am not interested in home 3D that uses shutter glasses, but I'd definitely be interested in one that uses polarization.
'People should be free to give away or sell their tickets to whomever they want, whenever they want,' says Gary Adler, a Washington attorney who represents the National Association of Ticket Brokers. 'An open market is really best for consumers.'
This is such a huge conundrum.
An open market is a great idea when built around the basic assumption that all the traders in it are potential consumers of the things being traded. But when entities whose sole motivation is profit enter the market, the game changes. The small consumers get screwed because the huge profiteers buy up enormous quantities of commodities and proceed to engage in arbitrage for the sole purpose of turning a profit.
Money goes to money. Wealthy 'investors' buy something up, creating scarcity, driving up the prices, then re-sell for a profit. Profiteering is the problem.
What needs to happen is the venues need to sell their tickets at auction, instead of setting a price based on what they think the tickets are worth. This would let them make most of the money, because the first-sale price would more closely match the actual value of the tickets, and such a system would be much more fair for everyone from the big resellers to the individual consumer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not ironic or hypocritical at all!
When you are in a position of authority over other people, you must be held to a higher standard. With your greater authority comes greater responsibility. Responsibility requires transparency. Therefore, the more power you have, the less secrecy you should be allowed to have, because secrecy allows you to abuse your power.
All of the above applies to groups as well as individuals. Churches and their clergy, goverments and their bureaucrats, corporations and their executives, military and their officers, ALL have great power over people and therefore must be held accountable for their use of that power. However, private individuals who do not exercise power over others should have no requirement for higher transparency. If you aren't in a position to harm others, any exposition of your private affairs won't do anything to help anyone else. It can only be used to harm you, and is an abuse of power. Therefore, you in fact should have a right to privacy.
Consider the issue of gun ownership. If you choose to own a gun, you are taking some power. With that power comes responsibility. That gun's characteristics should be on file with law enforcement, so they can potentially match crime scene bullets fired from your gun. Make sense? More power = more transparency.
I'm no expert, but here's what I think I know:
Dark matter only interacts gravitationally. Dark matter does not collide with matter, nor does it collide with other dark matter. This means it can't form clumps. No dark matter clumps means no dark matter gravity wells, meaning no dark matter black holes.
A galaxy's dark matter, then, is a diffuse cloud of invisible non-interacting particles in orbit around and through the galaxy itself. These particles have gravity of their own, and collectively they have a huge influence on the galaxy's field of gravity.
Now, obviously dark matter particles would be unable to escape a black hole just like anything else. However, the vast majority of dark matter will never interact with a black hole -- it will just orbit forever.
Here, this link is all you need to know: http://archives.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php. It's a bit of a wall of text, but you can read the first part and then skip to the end, which contains this nugget:
I have been sick to death of advertising for pretty much all my adult life. I think it's a horrible shame to name so many of our modern points of interest after corporations. I hate how everything must be branded, and I especially hate how tasteless it all is. Product placement sucks. Most of all I'm just blown away at how I have to pay for the carrier to bring the advertisements to me.
I pay about $80 per month for cable TV, and all the channels are ad-laden; it is standard for each hour of programming to contain 20 minutes of advertisements. Now, DVR technology has allowed us to skip those commercials if you're willing to watch the program on a time delay. But doing that costs extra. A few years ago I used an old PC as a homebrew DVR and it didn't cost anything above a small investment in hardware and software, but nowadays things are so locked down the only realistic option is to rent the box and pay for the "service" from the provider. So, as I see it, I'm getting screwed from every direction.
The content itself is laden with product placement, it's subsidized further by being 33% pure commercial advertisements, I have to pay to bring the crap-laden content to my TV, and I have to pay more to filter out some of the noise.
The internet is rapidly heading in the same direction. You can't view a lot of content without turning on scripting and flash, and the scripting and flash bring advertisements that cannot be blocked. I'm paying an ISP to bring the crap in for me, and the services that offer to sell me access to the content still won't promise to remove all the advertising if I do so.
So, with my iPhone, at least it's not loaded with advertisements. Of course it brings in the Internet ads for me, but it blocks the invasive ones and I bless the iPhone for the lack of flash. But at least for the most part I'm getting fair value for the service I pay for: I make and receive phone calls and text messages, and neither are subsidized by advertisement.
So, to me, the iPhone wins. I don't care about the openness and inexpensiveness of Android if it means everything I do with my phone is partially paid for by advertisement. I'm not going to pay a carrier for voice and data service so that they can use that pipe to shove ads in my face every time I pick up my phone. It's just ridiculous.
I'm starting to believe that our society will end not in natural disaster or nuclear armageddon. Instead, the signal-to-noise ratio of all our communications will drop so low that our culture and our future just disintegrate.
Because not all Klingons are in the warrior caste, much like how not all Asians live a Martial Arts lifestyle.
I ran a program called "SAM" (short for "Software Automated Mouth" on my Atari 800 XL. That was an 1.8 MHz 8-bit 6502-based machine. It had 48K of ram, and shadowed part of its ROM. SAM would convert text to speech, and it also supported a markup language allowing you to specify intonation. For example, if you fed it "hello" you got Stephen Hawking saying "hello", but if you typed HE3HLOW4W you got something that sounded a little less robotic.
:)
Um, so there.
Saying that is like saying you won't support the 1st Amendment because Larry Flynt is a douchebag.
So is there a word or short phrase that describes someone who has the cognitive capacity to recognize a troll but lacks the willpower to refuse to feed it?
I'm personally a fan of .NET, mainly because the toolset goes a long way towards making development easy. Consider: You start the Visual Studio C# IDE, create a new Windows Forms application, then use a simple menu selection to create a new User Control class. You are given a canvas and can immediately begin adding existing controls to it, and if you want to custom-draw the whole thing then you just use the Events tab of the Properties window to create a handler for the Paint event. The paint event handler's args give you access to the control's canvas, and you're off and running. The IDE adds your custom control to the Toolbox, so you can just drag it onto a form to create an instance, and a good portion of it functions in design mode so you can check it out before you ever actually run your project.
.NET, and Visual Studio and MonoDevelop, to speak to how easy or difficult it really is to do Windows/Linux cross-platform development with it. Yet.
It doesn't get any easier, I think.
I've begun learning Mono. I don't know enough about the differences between MONO and
Yeah, and we could rename the planet to Marstralia.
Ok, kidding aside, here's why not: people on death row have been condemned for very good reasons. If you're assuming the mission will kill the volunteers, how could you trust the worst kind of psychopaths and sociopaths humanity can offer up to complete what they're supposed to do?
If they're expected to survive and start a colony, why would you want to start an offplanet colony with the worst kind of psychopaths and sociopaths humanity can offer up? How could you trust them? How could you consider sending normal non-criminals to join them later? And finally, why the hell should a death row inmate be able to volunteer for something that plenty of professional non-criminal astronauts would gladly do?
I'm sorry, but this is Wikipedia's issue to deal with, not Verizon's. And, to imply otherwise is just trolling.
I'm quoting the above block of text simply because it bears repeating. This, so eloquently put, is absolutely 100% correct and needs to be echoed everywhere across the world, for all time. This is the kind of wisdom that could have been written by one of America's founding fathers, had they instead lived in the present. Well stated, sir!
Facebook advocating privacy would be like the Pork Council advocating vegetarianism.
In order to go FTL you have to warp spacetime, effectively decreasing the distance between you and your destination. So if such technology actually existed and could be applied to a motor vehicle, then it could be true that your car could do the cross-country trip in 200 miles while mine might take 250...
Look, at work places everywhere the recycling bins are next to the trash bins and all you have to do is select the correct one. There is no extra time being taken up there. It's pretty much the same thing at home. There's one bin for the recyclables and one for the garbage. All you have to do is toss the trash into the correct one, and take the extra bin down to the curb with your garbage on trash day. I think allowing five minutes a week for this is generous.
Most people are not capable of producing much of value with their time. The kids' macaroni pictures just won't sell. No matter how precious the parents think they are, their actual worth is less than that of the materials used to create them. For older people who can work, most of them can't find a job at all, and the Wal-Mart greeters are lucky to have that. Also, most people are too poor to afford servants, even at minimum wage. So when you average out everyone's ability to generate value, including the children, the elderly, the infirm, the shiftless, the amount is very very tiny.
Household labor does not increase your net worth. It's like the calories your body burns digesting your food. It's a value sink created simply by being alive. If a maid makes minimum wage cleaning someone's house, it's only because the employer has the luxury of assigning a disproportionately high value to that work. Most people can't afford to pay someone else to do their menial chores. Not only that, maid services are the first things that middle class families will cut when economic times get tough. The real value of that time is miniscule.
Your assertion that requiring people to tote a recycling bin to the curb along with their regular trash is stealing value from the populace at a rate of two full-time jobs' worth per 1000 people is a very big overestimation.
Keep in mind that I overall agree with what you are saying, but I have to take issue with the above statement.
Five minutes per week from each of 1,000 people is not the same as two full-time jobs, because you cannot actually hire two people to do the same work. Also, those five minutes are not five minutes that everyone would otherwise spend doing productive labor.
What is the value of an hour of an average person's time? I don't know how to put a dollar value on it. Right now I'm sitting here wasting time writing this post, using time unproductively. Is there an opportunity cost here? Could I be earning money, or adding value to my net worth in some indirect way, if I were not using my time selfishly? I make a good income but I can't increase my income by working more. I could maybe do work on the side if I could find it, but I would probably make less per hour at that than I do at my regular job. I could maybe build bird houses and sell then on eBay, but that certainly isn't a way to make a lot of money. There may be a way to estimate the value I'm losing by wasting my time on Slashot, or sorting my trash, but I'd bet that the average value of an hour of an average person's time is an order of magnitude or more smaller than the minimum wage.
If I'm right about that, then the two full-time jobs per thousand people is more like per 10,000 people. You're talking about a couple pennies a day per person.
One day I got a really nice-looking mailer with the MYTHBUSTERS logo emblazoned on it. Normally I chuck spam mail right into the bin, but since I like the Mythbusters show I decided to give that one a look-see. Turns out it was from a local Protestant church. They were running a "Mythbusters" themed series of sermons that had zero to do with the Discovery Channel or the actual Mythbusters.
The logo was such a straight-up ripoff that it passed more than casual inspection!
I'm reminded of the church summer camp I went to one year. It was very very hot that summer. But the thermometer on the pole outside the cafeteria never got up above 80 degrees. So one day I gave it a close inspection and discovered they had put a small nail at the 80 degree mark so the arm couldn't rise further.
So answer me this: why is it ok for Protestant churches to lie and steal, when half their sermons are on how that's the kind of thing Satan does and that doing it will land you in hellfire for all eternity?
Now those are just two personal anecdotes that come readily to mind, but they aren't isolated incidents. It seems that for U.S. protestant churches, there are no rules when it comes to prosthelytizing. They'll deceive you, they'll bribe you, they'll harrass you, they'll do whatever it takes to gain just a little bit of your attention. In my opinion, it is the utmost hypocrisy to cast aside those basic tenets of morality when it comes to "spreading the word". How can a person have respect for a member of a church who will lie to you one day and preach that you should not tell lies the next?
QFT.
"A bird in hand is worth two in the bush." When we have a thing of value, we are not inclined to risk it.
On the other hand, "in for a penny, in for a pound." When we perceive we are losing something of value, we are much more inclined to take risk to keep it. An investor may choose to hold on too long to taking stock on the hope that its value will return.
When playing poker, amateur players will often chase large pots with losing hands. The more money they put in the pot, the more they want to get that money back, so the tougher the decision is to let the hand go. Professional poker players, however, make it a point to realize that money they already placed in the pot is no longer theirs, and look at each subsequent play from the standpoint of gaining from risk versus reward.
We clearly need a new symbol to indicate irony as well.
All observers in your example are stationary relative to each other. Relativity doesn't even enter into it
Suppose you have two highly accelerated observers moving towards each other at a high speed, say half the speed of light. Each one has a clock, and a yardstick pointed in the direction he is traveling. Each observer watches the other over as they travel through space. Each one will see the other's clock running more slowly than normal, while his own clock is running normally. Each observer will also see the other's yardstick appears to be shorter than a yard, while his own yardstick is normal length.
How could both of them see each other squashed and in slow motion at the same time? It must be a paradox, right?
Hint: the speed of light is constant. Light always moves at the same speed to any observer, no matter the direction or source of the light, no matter how much the observer or the source of light has accelerated. For the speed of light to be constant, then time and space cannot be. When you accelerate, time and distance in your own frame of reference are not changed, but time and distance for other frames you observe become skewed.
As far as wrapping your head around it, that's just something you're gonna have to do on your own. It's like acceleration changes what "cross section" of the rest of the universe's spacetime that you observe. Two observers heading towards each other at high speed and observing a third frame of reference can see things happen in a different order, even after canceling out the speed-of-light delay in observation, because each observer has a different view of distance and time in that third frame.
I've been a smoker of cigarettes and herb since my late teens. The weed I can take or leave. I've gone through times when I would wake-and-bake and stay high all day for months on end, times when I would get high once or twice a month, and times when I haven't smoked any at all for years on end.
While it is true that you build up a bit of a tolerance after you've been smoking hard and long, there are absolutely no withdrawal symptoms when you stop. Even when you go from being constantly stoned to completely dry, you can quit and not have cravings.
Tobacco is completely the opposite. If I go more than a few hours without a smoke, I'm already hating life. I have quit three times, all of them for several months, but the craving for the nicotine rush just never seemed to go away. It really does suck.
Nicotine is highly toxic, and just a small drop of the pure stuff on the tongue can easily be fatal. With THC, however, you can consume an entire gram of the pure shit and you'll just get really, REALLY stoned. (That's hard to do by smoking, but not so hard to do if you're eating it...)
I remember a very vivid dream from my youth, in which I went into a gas station and bought a pack of Marlboro joints. They looked like cigarettes, and even had filters, and the box looked like a pack of Marlboro 100s except in deep green instead of red.
I think it's time we quit being stupid about the whole thing and flat-out make MJ be equally as legal and equally as commoditized as tobacco. But I'm happy for the baby steps. If it has to be "medicine" for "sick people" then so be it; eventually it'll be legal and commercialized. I guess when it comes right down to it we are ALL terminally ill and in chronic pain. It's just some of us are more immediately terminal and in more pain than others. But we all have pain and we are all gonna die.
What, scientists don't have politics and all the bullshit that comes with it? How would scientists decide what projects to fund, towards what ends? You think just because someone is a professional in sciences that he or she is automatically altruistic? Good lord, some of these science peeps are the most condescending, lost-in-their-own-world, self-centered bastards imaginable!
Yeah, professional politicians suck. But I say, better the devil you know.
120 half-frames per second versus 144 half-frames per second does make the difference for me. Shutter glasses give me headaches. I am sensitive to flicker in progressive-scan CRT displays running at 60Hz but not at 72 Hz, but interlaced displays at 60 Hz (or 30 for each half-frame) don't give me trouble. Standard movie theater framerate isn't an issue -- yes, the low framerate makes the picutre "jumpy", but the transition between frames is fast enough that I'm not sensitive to it. None of the 3D movies I've seen using the polarized glasses has caused me trouble.
I don't exactly "see" the flicker, but after looking at a low refresh rate display for a short time I see migraine-like auras. It's kind of like what diffuse electricity might look like, sort of like a deep violet fog floating in front of the display, -- it's what I think of when I hear the phrase "purple haze". I think it's a result of a large portion of my field of vision flickering just below the threshold of perception. I may not see it but it does cause issues.
No, the best 3D is with circularly polarized light (which works even if you tilt the glasses off vertical, unlike linearly polarized systems). The glasses are super cheap plastic. There is no need to blank each eye in turn for half of each frame, so there is a lot less flicker. (And flicker sensitivity isn't so much a matter of framerate but of how much of each frame is black; stereoscopic systems require 50% blankness.)
I know LCD displays are all linearly polarized. Can they be made circularly polarized instead, with rows or columns alternating polarity?
I know movie theatre screens can reflect circularly polarized light without changing the polarization, so it can work with projection home theater. But, what about DLP displays? Can the screens pass circularly polarized light with polarization intact?
I for one am not interested in home 3D that uses shutter glasses, but I'd definitely be interested in one that uses polarization.
'People should be free to give away or sell their tickets to whomever they want, whenever they want,' says Gary Adler, a Washington attorney who represents the National Association of Ticket Brokers. 'An open market is really best for consumers.' This is such a huge conundrum.
An open market is a great idea when built around the basic assumption that all the traders in it are potential consumers of the things being traded. But when entities whose sole motivation is profit enter the market, the game changes. The small consumers get screwed because the huge profiteers buy up enormous quantities of commodities and proceed to engage in arbitrage for the sole purpose of turning a profit.
Money goes to money. Wealthy 'investors' buy something up, creating scarcity, driving up the prices, then re-sell for a profit. Profiteering is the problem.
What needs to happen is the venues need to sell their tickets at auction, instead of setting a price based on what they think the tickets are worth. This would let them make most of the money, because the first-sale price would more closely match the actual value of the tickets, and such a system would be much more fair for everyone from the big resellers to the individual consumer.