Ok well until recently nobody had seen upward lightning and strange glowing sprites so. before that, those who said that they had seen them were clearly wrong because their statements did not correspond with empirically verified reality. Right?
No, not right. When we have our first report of a sprite or upward lightning, we then have a testable claim. Either the eyewitness is correct, or they are frauds or mistaken. We need more evidence to determine which is the case. More eyewitness reports lend a bit more credence than a single individual, but there are things like mass hysteria, so we still have doubts. Also eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, ask any courtroom. Then, from TFA we see that in 2003 somebody caught a "gigantic jet" on camera. It could have been photoshopped or it could have been real. But it's another data point. Then, most recently the subjects of the article measured the radio noise output of the gigantic jet and calculated the level of electrical discharge. Now we have two concrete pieces of physical evidence and a slew of eyewitness reports. The odds of fraud or mistaken observation are vastly diminished because of all the different actors and actual data collected. If other investigators set out to replicate the results from the data collected we could be even more certain.
*That* is what empirical verification of reality is. You chase the odds of lies or error into the smallest corner you can, so that you have a preponderance of evidence to back up your claims. That's what makes real scientific data better than supposition or dogma.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but a single report is not data either. Those original reporters of the gigantic jets have been proven right, through the appropriate process, not a rush to believe.
Yes, actually. We can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots by the degree of correspondence that their ideas have with empirically verified reality. People are *still* testing Einstein's ideas out through experiment, and they have largely held up, aside from his nonscientific statements like "God does not play dice with the Universe." If the great minds want to be recognized, they had either better provide very solid persuasive evidence, or recognize the fact that their ideas are untested at this time and encourage people to test them rigorously when it becomes possible. People who are afraid of empirical testing of their ideas are almost always frauds.
This is incorrect, if a person buys stocks on margin, using money borrowed from a bank propped up by TARP funds, then money was in fact created out of thin air. It wasn't the stock market that did it but the Fed which created the funds ab initio. But it's still the creation out of thin air.
Taxation is not theft. The United States was founded on the principle of taxation (with representation). President George Washington had tax protestors in Pennsylvania sentenced to death by hanging during the Whiskey rebellion and led the U.S. Army into the field himself to find them. Learn some history.
The moon is too small to terraform, it wouldn't hold an atmosphere. However, self-contained settlements,mining stations and robot outposts are eminently practical. Now yes, anything that we mine would cost more than the equivalent mined on earth, but it would cost far less than the equivalent mined and refined on earth and then launched into space at 20,000 dollars a lb. So the reason to go to space is to build infrastructure to harvest minerals and energy that a) make the subsequent larger missions cheaper, b) enable a permanent human presence in space (all this up and down business is very expensive) and c) prepare the way for the follow-on missions by creating a manufacturing and resupply base.
Oh, and as for "why would we want to go to space"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_solar_power
With this technology the U.S. could become an energy-exporting country again if we invested heavily in it.
There's no reason for anybody to be left behind. We have the entire resources of at least one, probably more, planets to be devoted to the problem of transport, and no reason to conserve anything on the planet.
Keep in mind that the Tesla battery packs are prototypes, designed for a limited run of cars, expressly created for the purpose of funding more research into improved production methods and economies of scale in battery technology and electric cars. Thus, the $30,000 dollar price tag will not stand. Computers used to cost millions of dollars 50 years ago. Technologies in their infancy usually don't match up well up compared to technologies with a century of R&D behind them like the gasoline car. The Wright flyer flew at 30 mph, for a couple hundred yards. Early refrigerators were so failure-prone that a repairman often brought two replacements on a service call in the 1920s because one was likely to be DOA. Wired telephones were not able to make transcontinental calls until the invention of the tube amplifier, 40 years after the telephone's invention.
Have a little appreciation for the evolution of technology; realize that your complaints are being worked on and are likely resolvable and that limitations of bleeding-edge technology are often totally irrelevant to its final form.
So sadly, the output of a good manager revolves mostly around neutralizing the effects of other people's bad hiring decisions, despite not having the authority to end the problem once and for all. I am so glad I left the corporate world for self-employment. I have one employee, and most of the time he's amazing and only rarely is a lazy git.
Not to mention being secured by the hull of the boat and several million pounds of water. Outside connectivity must be at a real premium aboard a nuclear sub, aside from comsat passes at periscope depth and VLF.
1) Yes, given that we have that now, even though we have significantly less launch capacity than the Saturn V.
2) Less frequent than what? There have been 0 trips between the ISS and the moon.
3) Yes, given that humans haven't been back to the moon since '72, that would be more frequent. No, if there is only one method of transport, it is, by definition the most economical. You have to have competition to have a comparison.
4) Possibly. Von Braun had plans for a very different type of shuttle called the Saturn shuttle.
5) Yes, given that we've already done this, Dawn Mission is En Route http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/
6) I disagree, the Saturn V launcher would have made it possible to assemble a mars ship in orbit in with multiple launches comparatively cheaply. It launched Skylab in one launch!
7) Also disagree, we've got fixed research stations on Mars in addition to the rovers, see the Mars Phoenix Lander, the Mars Pathfinder Lander (Carl Sagan Station) the Viking probes, etc.
8) Maybe. There's limited advantage in orbital nuke stations compared to ICBMs and IRBMs. Plus, they cost fuel to maintain and there's the danger of accidental reentry.
9) Cruise missiles are of more use in a Cold War since they don't have that nasty problem of appearing to be a strategic launch.
Firemacs, nifty. Although Firefox already has many Emacs keybindings by default in OS X as a side benefit of Cocoa. So I use vimperator to get VI-like goodness. Still, useful to know for other platforms.
Semantics is the study of meaning. So if you mean it's an argument about what things mean, then you're correct. Calling it useless is pretty asinine though.
That's the goal slick. Capitalism is supposed to be innovative and adaptable. By making existing fuel sources more expensive, it will spur interest in alternatives. If the only alternative they can think of is to go out of business, perhaps all that happy talk about capitalism is just propaganda? It's called "creative destruction" and free-marketeers are all for it, as long as the disruption is caused by another business and not the government. Businesses use existential threats all the time, against their customers, "This regulation will increase costs for the consumers", and their employees "Don't like it? Fine, starve, you're fired.". It's time for them to put up or shutup.
Aside from him making that pledge, why shouldn't we raise taxes? Have our infrastructure maintenance needs increased or decreased? Increased. Has our population increased, or decreased? Increased. Has our national debt increased or decreased? Increased. Do we have more or fewer wars than we used to? More. So, when you're going further and further into debt, and your house is crumbling around you and there's a new baby on the way, you'd turn down a raise? Please.
I don't suppose it occurred to them that the Eastern seaboard is also among the most congested airspace on Earth? Planes already have enough issues hitting birds. Solar thermal stations Solar Power satellites are the way to go, to deserted areas, with long haul transmission lines to population centers. Heck, if you wanted to you could do both, the waste absorbed energy in the atmosphere would probably make for some pretty consistent winds.
Republicans are afraid of slippery slopes, as always. If you start using the stem cells from miscarried fetuses, then that will create a market for miscarried fetuses. And fetuses are one of the few areas where Republicans do not support market solutions.
Foreign language courses frequently have an attendance requirement as participation with other speakers is vital to the language learning process. Similarly, lab sections have that requirement. How are you going to do the lab if you're not actually there?
Seriously,GM burnt through 5 billion in 3 months and we got bupkis for it. Costing only 5 billion extra over 20 years sounds pretty good to me if there's a chance we'll get fusion out of it. In fact, given unlimited funds, how much can we expedite this? We've spent hundreds of billions on banks that are worth less than nothing. Let's build some hardware!
So what you're saying is we need to pay government employees more so private industry won't be able to easily bribe them to act against America's interests? I'm all for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok well until recently nobody had seen upward lightning and strange glowing sprites so. before that, those who said that they had seen them were clearly wrong because their statements did not correspond with empirically verified reality. Right?
No, not right. When we have our first report of a sprite or upward lightning, we then have a testable claim. Either the eyewitness is correct, or they are frauds or mistaken. We need more evidence to determine which is the case. More eyewitness reports lend a bit more credence than a single individual, but there are things like mass hysteria, so we still have doubts. Also eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable, ask any courtroom. Then, from TFA we see that in 2003 somebody caught a "gigantic jet" on camera. It could have been photoshopped or it could have been real. But it's another data point. Then, most recently the subjects of the article measured the radio noise output of the gigantic jet and calculated the level of electrical discharge. Now we have two concrete pieces of physical evidence and a slew of eyewitness reports. The odds of fraud or mistaken observation are vastly diminished because of all the different actors and actual data collected. If other investigators set out to replicate the results from the data collected we could be even more certain. *That* is what empirical verification of reality is. You chase the odds of lies or error into the smallest corner you can, so that you have a preponderance of evidence to back up your claims. That's what makes real scientific data better than supposition or dogma. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but a single report is not data either. Those original reporters of the gigantic jets have been proven right, through the appropriate process, not a rush to believe.
Yes, actually. We can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots by the degree of correspondence that their ideas have with empirically verified reality. People are *still* testing Einstein's ideas out through experiment, and they have largely held up, aside from his nonscientific statements like "God does not play dice with the Universe." If the great minds want to be recognized, they had either better provide very solid persuasive evidence, or recognize the fact that their ideas are untested at this time and encourage people to test them rigorously when it becomes possible. People who are afraid of empirical testing of their ideas are almost always frauds.
This is incorrect, if a person buys stocks on margin, using money borrowed from a bank propped up by TARP funds, then money was in fact created out of thin air. It wasn't the stock market that did it but the Fed which created the funds ab initio. But it's still the creation out of thin air.
Taxation is not theft. The United States was founded on the principle of taxation (with representation). President George Washington had tax protestors in Pennsylvania sentenced to death by hanging during the Whiskey rebellion and led the U.S. Army into the field himself to find them. Learn some history.
Shows a healthy distrust of salesmen. Even if they're not actually dishonest, they are frequently clueless.
The moon is too small to terraform, it wouldn't hold an atmosphere. However, self-contained settlements,mining stations and robot outposts are eminently practical. Now yes, anything that we mine would cost more than the equivalent mined on earth, but it would cost far less than the equivalent mined and refined on earth and then launched into space at 20,000 dollars a lb. So the reason to go to space is to build infrastructure to harvest minerals and energy that a) make the subsequent larger missions cheaper, b) enable a permanent human presence in space (all this up and down business is very expensive) and c) prepare the way for the follow-on missions by creating a manufacturing and resupply base. Oh, and as for "why would we want to go to space"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_solar_power With this technology the U.S. could become an energy-exporting country again if we invested heavily in it.
There's no reason for anybody to be left behind. We have the entire resources of at least one, probably more, planets to be devoted to the problem of transport, and no reason to conserve anything on the planet.
Keep in mind that the Tesla battery packs are prototypes, designed for a limited run of cars, expressly created for the purpose of funding more research into improved production methods and economies of scale in battery technology and electric cars. Thus, the $30,000 dollar price tag will not stand. Computers used to cost millions of dollars 50 years ago. Technologies in their infancy usually don't match up well up compared to technologies with a century of R&D behind them like the gasoline car. The Wright flyer flew at 30 mph, for a couple hundred yards. Early refrigerators were so failure-prone that a repairman often brought two replacements on a service call in the 1920s because one was likely to be DOA. Wired telephones were not able to make transcontinental calls until the invention of the tube amplifier, 40 years after the telephone's invention. Have a little appreciation for the evolution of technology; realize that your complaints are being worked on and are likely resolvable and that limitations of bleeding-edge technology are often totally irrelevant to its final form.
So sadly, the output of a good manager revolves mostly around neutralizing the effects of other people's bad hiring decisions, despite not having the authority to end the problem once and for all. I am so glad I left the corporate world for self-employment. I have one employee, and most of the time he's amazing and only rarely is a lazy git.
I prefer Zeppelin NT. But I still use Linux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeppelin_NT
Not to mention being secured by the hull of the boat and several million pounds of water. Outside connectivity must be at a real premium aboard a nuclear sub, aside from comsat passes at periscope depth and VLF.
1) Yes, given that we have that now, even though we have significantly less launch capacity than the Saturn V. 2) Less frequent than what? There have been 0 trips between the ISS and the moon. 3) Yes, given that humans haven't been back to the moon since '72, that would be more frequent. No, if there is only one method of transport, it is, by definition the most economical. You have to have competition to have a comparison. 4) Possibly. Von Braun had plans for a very different type of shuttle called the Saturn shuttle. 5) Yes, given that we've already done this, Dawn Mission is En Route http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/ 6) I disagree, the Saturn V launcher would have made it possible to assemble a mars ship in orbit in with multiple launches comparatively cheaply. It launched Skylab in one launch! 7) Also disagree, we've got fixed research stations on Mars in addition to the rovers, see the Mars Phoenix Lander, the Mars Pathfinder Lander (Carl Sagan Station) the Viking probes, etc. 8) Maybe. There's limited advantage in orbital nuke stations compared to ICBMs and IRBMs. Plus, they cost fuel to maintain and there's the danger of accidental reentry. 9) Cruise missiles are of more use in a Cold War since they don't have that nasty problem of appearing to be a strategic launch.
Firemacs, nifty. Although Firefox already has many Emacs keybindings by default in OS X as a side benefit of Cocoa. So I use vimperator to get VI-like goodness. Still, useful to know for other platforms.
Semantics is the study of meaning. So if you mean it's an argument about what things mean, then you're correct. Calling it useless is pretty asinine though.
That's the goal slick. Capitalism is supposed to be innovative and adaptable. By making existing fuel sources more expensive, it will spur interest in alternatives. If the only alternative they can think of is to go out of business, perhaps all that happy talk about capitalism is just propaganda? It's called "creative destruction" and free-marketeers are all for it, as long as the disruption is caused by another business and not the government. Businesses use existential threats all the time, against their customers, "This regulation will increase costs for the consumers", and their employees "Don't like it? Fine, starve, you're fired.". It's time for them to put up or shutup.
Citation please?
Aside from him making that pledge, why shouldn't we raise taxes? Have our infrastructure maintenance needs increased or decreased? Increased. Has our population increased, or decreased? Increased. Has our national debt increased or decreased? Increased. Do we have more or fewer wars than we used to? More. So, when you're going further and further into debt, and your house is crumbling around you and there's a new baby on the way, you'd turn down a raise? Please.
No, nasa did not spend millions of dollars on a pen. Free enterprise did. http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
*the* Alex Jones?
I don't suppose it occurred to them that the Eastern seaboard is also among the most congested airspace on Earth? Planes already have enough issues hitting birds. Solar thermal stations Solar Power satellites are the way to go, to deserted areas, with long haul transmission lines to population centers. Heck, if you wanted to you could do both, the waste absorbed energy in the atmosphere would probably make for some pretty consistent winds.
Republicans are afraid of slippery slopes, as always. If you start using the stem cells from miscarried fetuses, then that will create a market for miscarried fetuses. And fetuses are one of the few areas where Republicans do not support market solutions.
Foreign language courses frequently have an attendance requirement as participation with other speakers is vital to the language learning process. Similarly, lab sections have that requirement. How are you going to do the lab if you're not actually there?
Seriously ,GM burnt through 5 billion in 3 months and we got bupkis for it. Costing only 5 billion extra over 20 years sounds pretty good to me if there's a chance we'll get fusion out of it. In fact, given unlimited funds, how much can we expedite this? We've spent hundreds of billions on banks that are worth less than nothing. Let's build some hardware!
Also, there was a giant fracking inland sea in the middle of north america.
So what you're saying is we need to pay government employees more so private industry won't be able to easily bribe them to act against America's interests? I'm all for that.