They did not go to jail because they failed to predict an earthquake. They went to jail because they stated there would not be an earthquake in order to discredit somebody who claimed he had a system for predicting earthquakes. If they had stuck to procedure and official press releases, they'd have been fine and some quack would have a following and some new time, but they wanted to discredit the other guy so much they held and unofficial news conference. While starting off ok, they quickly devolved into making what sounded like confident claims there would be no earthquake under the questioning of the locals.
The IAU is an internationally recognized science group with rules and government recognition. THEY are the people who name bodies in space with a logical process.
I'm sure science and perhaps the government will use those names. However, if a private company would happen to make star charts with lists of planets and sell the naming rights*, publish and sell those charts to the common people with the sold naming rights not agreed upon by the IAU to the point that the common people use the private names rather than the science names, they will be come the de facto "real" names of those planets. The science names would just be like the science names of so many other things in the world that people have little care or knowledge about and never use.
*Let's say a private telescope is built by some eccentric rich billionaire that is much, much better than the rest in the world. They have the best data and sell the names anyway for the planets and stars they discover. I bet those will be the names that end up getting used.
If that were an actual answer instead of an ass-pull so that they could convince naive people that they didn't fuck up, it would have been in response to Kenobi asking "Is it a maneuverable ship" not "Is it a fast ship?"
You could do the Kessel run in 12 parsecs in a Ford Pinto, it would just take awhile.
Nope. because the Kessel run is around a black hole so by mentioning a distance, there is an inferred and determinable minimum velocity need to keep from being drawn off the path and therefore into a longer run or even into the black hole. Your Ford Pinto would never achieve escape velocity if you "take awhile".
So it's wrong to judge a party for their positions from 1957, because that was OMG 56 years ago and things have changed dramatically,...
Yes, because that's when they began to change. That's when the Dixiecrats started becoming Republicans only to later call themselves the Tea Party and attempt to take over their new party.
I would find this maybe sensical if the Republicans had, in the last ten or twenty years, ever actually tried to advocate for policies that were likely to actually lead to lower taxes.
...
They aren't the party of smaller government, and haven't been in a long time. They are the party that uses the phrase "small government" a lot while constantly looking for new ways to expand government powers and spend more money.
I'll put forth that they never have been. From Lincoln on, the Republicans have been for larger government taking more control in the US. They were liberal and making changes, although those changes may have not been what would be considered leftist changes (and they still are with Bush creating an entire new department of the government). They weren't even conservative as both parties had their conservative factions till the Democrats decided to back civil rights and the Dixiecrats got upset, broke up the solid South and later were invited to the Republicans by Nixon and cultivated for their money by Reagan. Today, those Southern conservative, state's right desiring people who are upset a black man is president would be Republican in name only except they are taking over the party. Still, they are hardly the historical pro-civil rights, pro-conservation, pro-union (or at least anti-corruption) party the Republicans were for their first hundred years.
Yes, NK could be flattened with conventional missiles. But they have enough artillery pieces lined up on the border (14,000, IIRC), with ammunition, to send up to half a million shells an hour into Seoul for a day or so. Before they were incapacitated, they could kill maybe ten million people is South Korea. Yes, it would be pointless slaughter, pure vindictiveness. But I am not prepared to say they wouldn't do it.
Yes, but SK also has lots of artillery bought with a larger military budget than NK. These things have state of the art anti-artillery radar and will track and return fire on incoming shells. This happened when their island was attacked a few years back. At a range of 12 miles they were able to fire back and score hits they say would have knocked out the NK artillery if they hadn't been loaded with practice rounds (their target practice into the sea being the excuse NK used to attack). The start of any war will be dueling artillery and even if it wasn't, Seoul has shelters for those people too once things start. Not to say there won't be damage but hardly ten million people. Any war started will begin the quick destruction of NK's defenses and offences.
They shut down a facility that was pumping tens of millions of dollars directly into their coffers.
That's the thing about this that makes the least amount of sense to me. I mean, kicking out the South Korean managers is just fine, but why not promote the most competent North Koreans to take their place and keep the factory operating?
They've shut it down before. No reason to think that it is once again not just a scheme to put pressure on the SK government since their business men are losing even more millions also.
XP -> 7 is entirely worth it. I'm no IT professional and don't know the logistics of it all but when I upgraded it was like day and night. I really don't understand the slow uptake to 7.
I agree, but on the enterprise side of things, there are several factors. One is simply transitioning thousands of computers over in an environment that is beginning to expect a 5+ year turn over of devices, but I suspect most places are ready for that. the big issue I'm seeing is getting vendors to upgrade the applications that enterprise uses to run their businesses. Can't switch over to Win7 till they are all updated and ready to go, so we can only move at the speed of the last straggler. In many cases, the vendor has made their product work with Win7, but it is in the new version, thus upgrading a companies computers to Win7 now involves upgrading an enterprise system that is a major project requiring a line item on a yearly budget that wasn't planned to be upgraded for a few more years out. Even if the money is there and it is given importance, now it is competing with the planned projects that were already going on so the regular staff might not be able to handle it, thus costing more money for more FTEs to make sure everything gets done. So, while enterprise IT has seen this coming and has been as ready as we can be for some time, there are many external factors causing us to 'hurry up and wait'.
What's that Monty Python skit? Contradiction is not an argument? Unless you can actually provide some sort of citation, I'm just going to have to consider you a troll.
"The big bang theory assumes that when the Universe was created there was nothing outside it. Therefore, for the big bang to be rotating when it occurred suggests that it was rotating relative to something. “The simple answer is that it was spinning relative to other Universes in some larger space,” says Longo. “We could never see outside of our Universe in principle, but if we could show that the present Universe still retains the initial angular momentum within its galaxies, it would be evidence that our Universe exists within some larger space.”"
Second, I think there is some relativity stuff going on too. For the universe to rotate, there must be something outside the universe for the universe to rotate in relation to.
No.
Hey, great. Now we have an absolute frame of reference with the axis that goes through the objective center.
One problem that I see with that, is that the event horizon is defined as the place where gravity is so strong that light can't escape - light can easily escape from 1g, so that's not the event horizon.
No, the event horizon is where the escape velocity equals the the speed of light, not where the gravitational acceleration equals the speed of light. At that point, energy will redshift infinitely before it is able to leave the influence of the black hole. Any matter could move away from the black hole at the event horizon, but it would need an infinite amount of energy to keep from falling back in.
Since the entire universe rotates (if galaxies rotate and super clusters do [as Our sun rotates around the center of the galaxy] then its logical that the whole freaking universe does) its at the center of the universe. Although I'd rather lob Pigs.
Nope. No evidence that the universe rotates. First, there is no evidence of it rotating and people have been looking. Just read a book that talked about it.
Second, I think there is some relativity stuff going on too. For the universe to rotate, there must be something outside the universe for the universe to rotate in relation to.
I saw a blurb somewhere that summed it up for me:
"Which is more likely: that 150 million Americans are lazy or that 400 Americans are greedy?"
A little of both, I'm sure. I know plenty of people who are marginal in either ability to work, ability to retain wealth, or both. I know some people who just cannot retain a job. Every six months for years, they are fired or laid off and spend a month before finding a new job. Another is a fairly well paid QA tester who take plenty of foreign vacations and always is eating out, but complains he can never save up enough money to buy even a used car. I kept track of the overdraft charges one always broke roommate complained about over six months and it was enough to pay a months rent. Then there are the people who just choose to live at a lower lifestyle either because they like what they do or lack of ambition. I know several teachers that could make more in the private sector but like teaching enough to work as much as a programmer in crunch time nine months out of the year. In my younger days, I knew lots of people who simply opted to effectively be homeless, ride the rails, and live the punk rock lifestyle.
Meanwhile, I doubt if the main quality of those 400 is greed. There's no shortage of greedy people and I bet a good share of those 150 million are greedy. From what I've seen from lists of the richest people, is that it is usually either luck or inheritance that gives them their money. Even in the case of the ones that have worked hard, invested everything, and had the ambition to make as much as possible, they only make that list because they happen to be lucky enough to get some opportunity that others did not have.
The context being that the top 400 have wealth equivalent to the bottom 50%.
Income and wealth inequality is not some abstract concept.
It is real and it is not about how whether the bottom 50% own TVs or a microwave.
However, in the end, it really is about that. So long as the masses have their bread and circuses, nobody except a few intellectuals are really interested in change.
I think it is something simpler: The "dark matter" would simply ordinary matter, but not detectable by us because it do not emit enough radiation and/or is not dense enough to block radiation.
Has been thought of. Has been tested. Empirical data shows that there is not enough non-radiative normal matter for it to be anything near dark matter. Via gravitational lensing and other large scale cosmological experiments, non-radiative matter has already been taken into account when studying other galaxies, and normal matter still comes up as only one sixth of the matter in the universe. All that was being done way back when they were trying to account for the rotational speeds of gravity. Since then, other data has shown up such as cosmic background radiation which allowed us to extrapolate back to what the early conditions of the universe were like, and they also gave evidence of dark matter in similar amounts as needed to account for galactic rotation speeds. The thing is that the arguement for dark matter is no longer one example that could be explained away with a different simple explaination. It is the result of several different paths that all point to the same conclusion. Any other method that would account for all of them would be a much more complicated cause which we have no idea what it would be. Take MOND for example. If the rotational speeds of galaxies were to be solved by changes to the equations of gravity, they are so complicated that nobody has yet been able to come up with a hypothetical equation that fits all the data we already have on how gravity is working. Even if they did, you'd still have about six more "that's interesting" observations in physics to deal with.
Loop Quantum Gravity is by far a more elegant theory. The only problem is Cambridge really...they like their multi-verse theory a little too much over there...
If only LQG said anything about dark matter then you might get your wish.
There's no such thing as 'post scarcity'. No matter how much is available, I can think of ways to use more.
Well, the Culture really isn't post scarcity. They just create scarcity by stating that any significant level of technology needs to be intelligent. Starships are a notable example and several stories told of how rare it was for a human to be able to just go where ever they wanted to in one. They basically had to find an intelligent ship that wanted to go there. This went all the way down to powered armor for their diplomats. Sure there was plenty of food, clothing and shelter as well as entertainment to keep the multitudes of humans and other aliens, but the industrial demands of that were practically nil compared to the capabilities of the Culture. If they needed space for a few billion people, they just built a new orbital which was effectively "giving birth" to a new Mind.
Slashdot Mirror
Two-term lifetime maximum regardless of office. No more entrenched career hacks.
No more people in office who care what the people who put them there think when they could just be lining their pockets instead.
It's possible. That's why six scientists were jailed for manslaughter after failing to predict an earthquake. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/23/world/europe/italy-quake-scientists-guilty
They did not go to jail because they failed to predict an earthquake. They went to jail because they stated there would not be an earthquake in order to discredit somebody who claimed he had a system for predicting earthquakes. If they had stuck to procedure and official press releases, they'd have been fine and some quack would have a following and some new time, but they wanted to discredit the other guy so much they held and unofficial news conference. While starting off ok, they quickly devolved into making what sounded like confident claims there would be no earthquake under the questioning of the locals.
The IAU is an internationally recognized science group with rules and government recognition. THEY are the people who name bodies in space with a logical process.
I'm sure science and perhaps the government will use those names. However, if a private company would happen to make star charts with lists of planets and sell the naming rights*, publish and sell those charts to the common people with the sold naming rights not agreed upon by the IAU to the point that the common people use the private names rather than the science names, they will be come the de facto "real" names of those planets. The science names would just be like the science names of so many other things in the world that people have little care or knowledge about and never use.
*Let's say a private telescope is built by some eccentric rich billionaire that is much, much better than the rest in the world. They have the best data and sell the names anyway for the planets and stars they discover. I bet those will be the names that end up getting used.
If that were an actual answer instead of an ass-pull so that they could convince naive people that they didn't fuck up, it would have been in response to Kenobi asking "Is it a maneuverable ship" not "Is it a fast ship?"
You could do the Kessel run in 12 parsecs in a Ford Pinto, it would just take awhile.
Nope. because the Kessel run is around a black hole so by mentioning a distance, there is an inferred and determinable minimum velocity need to keep from being drawn off the path and therefore into a longer run or even into the black hole. Your Ford Pinto would never achieve escape velocity if you "take awhile".
So it's wrong to judge a party for their positions from 1957, because that was OMG 56 years ago and things have changed dramatically,...
Yes, because that's when they began to change. That's when the Dixiecrats started becoming Republicans only to later call themselves the Tea Party and attempt to take over their new party.
I would find this maybe sensical if the Republicans had, in the last ten or twenty years, ever actually tried to advocate for policies that were likely to actually lead to lower taxes.
...
They aren't the party of smaller government, and haven't been in a long time. They are the party that uses the phrase "small government" a lot while constantly looking for new ways to expand government powers and spend more money.
I'll put forth that they never have been. From Lincoln on, the Republicans have been for larger government taking more control in the US. They were liberal and making changes, although those changes may have not been what would be considered leftist changes (and they still are with Bush creating an entire new department of the government). They weren't even conservative as both parties had their conservative factions till the Democrats decided to back civil rights and the Dixiecrats got upset, broke up the solid South and later were invited to the Republicans by Nixon and cultivated for their money by Reagan. Today, those Southern conservative, state's right desiring people who are upset a black man is president would be Republican in name only except they are taking over the party. Still, they are hardly the historical pro-civil rights, pro-conservation, pro-union (or at least anti-corruption) party the Republicans were for their first hundred years.
Yes, NK could be flattened with conventional missiles. But they have enough artillery pieces lined up on the border (14,000, IIRC), with ammunition, to send up to half a million shells an hour into Seoul for a day or so. Before they were incapacitated, they could kill maybe ten million people is South Korea. Yes, it would be pointless slaughter, pure vindictiveness. But I am not prepared to say they wouldn't do it.
Yes, but SK also has lots of artillery bought with a larger military budget than NK. These things have state of the art anti-artillery radar and will track and return fire on incoming shells. This happened when their island was attacked a few years back. At a range of 12 miles they were able to fire back and score hits they say would have knocked out the NK artillery if they hadn't been loaded with practice rounds (their target practice into the sea being the excuse NK used to attack). The start of any war will be dueling artillery and even if it wasn't, Seoul has shelters for those people too once things start. Not to say there won't be damage but hardly ten million people. Any war started will begin the quick destruction of NK's defenses and offences.
That's the thing about this that makes the least amount of sense to me. I mean, kicking out the South Korean managers is just fine, but why not promote the most competent North Koreans to take their place and keep the factory operating?
They've shut it down before. No reason to think that it is once again not just a scheme to put pressure on the SK government since their business men are losing even more millions also.
Bad management didn't have anything to do with it though, did it?
Considering bad management is the cause of unions, the blame should always go back to them.
XP -> 7 is entirely worth it. I'm no IT professional and don't know the logistics of it all but when I upgraded it was like day and night. I really don't understand the slow uptake to 7.
I agree, but on the enterprise side of things, there are several factors. One is simply transitioning thousands of computers over in an environment that is beginning to expect a 5+ year turn over of devices, but I suspect most places are ready for that. the big issue I'm seeing is getting vendors to upgrade the applications that enterprise uses to run their businesses. Can't switch over to Win7 till they are all updated and ready to go, so we can only move at the speed of the last straggler. In many cases, the vendor has made their product work with Win7, but it is in the new version, thus upgrading a companies computers to Win7 now involves upgrading an enterprise system that is a major project requiring a line item on a yearly budget that wasn't planned to be upgraded for a few more years out. Even if the money is there and it is given importance, now it is competing with the planned projects that were already going on so the regular staff might not be able to handle it, thus costing more money for more FTEs to make sure everything gets done. So, while enterprise IT has seen this coming and has been as ready as we can be for some time, there are many external factors causing us to 'hurry up and wait'.
What's that Monty Python skit? Contradiction is not an argument? Unless you can actually provide some sort of citation, I'm just going to have to consider you a troll.
If you have a center of the universe, then things are no longer relative.
Or you can check this out:
"The big bang theory assumes that when the Universe was created there was nothing outside it. Therefore, for the big bang to be rotating when it occurred suggests that it was rotating relative to something. “The simple answer is that it was spinning relative to other Universes in some larger space,” says Longo. “We could never see outside of our Universe in principle, but if we could show that the present Universe still retains the initial angular momentum within its galaxies, it would be evidence that our Universe exists within some larger space.”"
Second, I think there is some relativity stuff going on too. For the universe to rotate, there must be something outside the universe for the universe to rotate in relation to.
No.
Hey, great. Now we have an absolute frame of reference with the axis that goes through the objective center.
One problem that I see with that, is that the event horizon is defined as the place where gravity is so strong that light can't escape - light can easily escape from 1g, so that's not the event horizon.
No, the event horizon is where the escape velocity equals the the speed of light, not where the gravitational acceleration equals the speed of light. At that point, energy will redshift infinitely before it is able to leave the influence of the black hole. Any matter could move away from the black hole at the event horizon, but it would need an infinite amount of energy to keep from falling back in.
Since the entire universe rotates (if galaxies rotate and super clusters do [as Our sun rotates around the center of the galaxy] then its logical that the whole freaking universe does) its at the center of the universe. Although I'd rather lob Pigs.
Nope. No evidence that the universe rotates. First, there is no evidence of it rotating and people have been looking. Just read a book that talked about it.
Second, I think there is some relativity stuff going on too. For the universe to rotate, there must be something outside the universe for the universe to rotate in relation to.
Also, vacuum analogy is pretty shitty. I wouldn't buy a vacuum that only functions when internet is on.
Except he was comparing internet connections to electrical power, a basic utility that should be up all the time.
Single-player games don't need internet connectivity all the time -...
True, which means his analogy should have been buying a broom that only works when the electricity is on.
I saw a blurb somewhere that summed it up for me: "Which is more likely: that 150 million Americans are lazy or that 400 Americans are greedy?"
A little of both, I'm sure. I know plenty of people who are marginal in either ability to work, ability to retain wealth, or both. I know some people who just cannot retain a job. Every six months for years, they are fired or laid off and spend a month before finding a new job. Another is a fairly well paid QA tester who take plenty of foreign vacations and always is eating out, but complains he can never save up enough money to buy even a used car. I kept track of the overdraft charges one always broke roommate complained about over six months and it was enough to pay a months rent. Then there are the people who just choose to live at a lower lifestyle either because they like what they do or lack of ambition. I know several teachers that could make more in the private sector but like teaching enough to work as much as a programmer in crunch time nine months out of the year. In my younger days, I knew lots of people who simply opted to effectively be homeless, ride the rails, and live the punk rock lifestyle.
Meanwhile, I doubt if the main quality of those 400 is greed. There's no shortage of greedy people and I bet a good share of those 150 million are greedy. From what I've seen from lists of the richest people, is that it is usually either luck or inheritance that gives them their money. Even in the case of the ones that have worked hard, invested everything, and had the ambition to make as much as possible, they only make that list because they happen to be lucky enough to get some opportunity that others did not have.
The context being that the top 400 have wealth equivalent to the bottom 50%. Income and wealth inequality is not some abstract concept. It is real and it is not about how whether the bottom 50% own TVs or a microwave.
However, in the end, it really is about that. So long as the masses have their bread and circuses, nobody except a few intellectuals are really interested in change.
I think it is something simpler: The "dark matter" would simply ordinary matter, but not detectable by us because it do not emit enough radiation and/or is not dense enough to block radiation.
Has been thought of. Has been tested. Empirical data shows that there is not enough non-radiative normal matter for it to be anything near dark matter. Via gravitational lensing and other large scale cosmological experiments, non-radiative matter has already been taken into account when studying other galaxies, and normal matter still comes up as only one sixth of the matter in the universe. All that was being done way back when they were trying to account for the rotational speeds of gravity. Since then, other data has shown up such as cosmic background radiation which allowed us to extrapolate back to what the early conditions of the universe were like, and they also gave evidence of dark matter in similar amounts as needed to account for galactic rotation speeds. The thing is that the arguement for dark matter is no longer one example that could be explained away with a different simple explaination. It is the result of several different paths that all point to the same conclusion. Any other method that would account for all of them would be a much more complicated cause which we have no idea what it would be. Take MOND for example. If the rotational speeds of galaxies were to be solved by changes to the equations of gravity, they are so complicated that nobody has yet been able to come up with a hypothetical equation that fits all the data we already have on how gravity is working. Even if they did, you'd still have about six more "that's interesting" observations in physics to deal with.
the data can disprove 'Dark Matter' theories...
that's worth $2 Billion in my mind...
Loop Quantum Gravity is by far a more elegant theory. The only problem is Cambridge really...they like their multi-verse theory a little too much over there...
If only LQG said anything about dark matter then you might get your wish.
There's no such thing as 'post scarcity'. No matter how much is available, I can think of ways to use more.
Well, the Culture really isn't post scarcity. They just create scarcity by stating that any significant level of technology needs to be intelligent. Starships are a notable example and several stories told of how rare it was for a human to be able to just go where ever they wanted to in one. They basically had to find an intelligent ship that wanted to go there. This went all the way down to powered armor for their diplomats. Sure there was plenty of food, clothing and shelter as well as entertainment to keep the multitudes of humans and other aliens, but the industrial demands of that were practically nil compared to the capabilities of the Culture. If they needed space for a few billion people, they just built a new orbital which was effectively "giving birth" to a new Mind.
...and at the end of it all, he wakes up and finds Bobby in the shower.
Wouldn't that be a big middle finger to the audience? >:]
Not sure if it could be as big a middle finger to the audience as 'The New 52'.
I wish I had mod points.
MS XEROX APPLE
MS is like Apple from Bizarro-planet. Everything round is even squared. How appropriate.
"I think we copied everything down to the wooden tables and bar at the back. Now, when does the money come flying into our wallets?"
Sounds more like a cargo cult. Who is Steve Frum?
Assuming they're not faking the data...
An infographic posted to a commercial website trying to sell us stuff? How could we doubt that?
Its an old saying, but appropriate in this context:
If atheism is a religion, then "not collecting stamps" is a hobby.
Trouble is that lots of people make 'telling you that they don't collect stamps' a hobby. They're just as annoying as any other religious fanatic.