Depends upon the field that you are working in. In some fields you can get by with publishing a paper every six months or so where as other fields you might do a couple years of work before you have something that is publishable. Granted you may have other projects going on at the same time, but not all work is publishable.
This has been coming up over on Ars Technica for awhile now and the explanation isn't so much that the GPS equipment is poorly designed but rather that Lighsquared is trying to use the spectrum in a way that it was not licensed to do so in. In short, the spectrum that they licensed is for low power satellite communications (i.e. GPS) and they want to use the same spectrum but to increase the power at which they broadcast it up to normal terrestrial levels. At that point the common analogy is that it is like trying to tell the color of a flashlight from a couple miles away: once you spot it you can tell when the color changes, but if someone comes along and places a high power search light next to it, the flashlight will drown out by the power of the other light source.
Also, don't forget that radio signals aren't prefect pathways either and you can be broadcasting on one frequency and have it bleed over into another frequency. This is why radio stations and television channels are allocated in such a way that they aren't directly next to each other (think radio channel 100 and 100.1).
So in summary, this isn't an equipment problem but a physics problem: making the equipment better isn't going to help the fact that the signal would be drown out if Lighsquared were to broadcast on a satellite channel at terrestrial power levels.
I never said that those are questions that people go around asking people, I said that are questions that people confront at some point in their life. Most people do some sort of self examination at some point during their life and those are the times those questions come up and they don't necessarily need to be in relation to some sort of afterlife or higher power. The death of a parent can prompt someone to take a step back and examine where they are going in their life which can cause those questions to arise with a different context. The "Where did I come from?" question can also reflect someone trying to examine their upbringing and how it lead to how they now are. Sure science can provide some answers for this question, but at the end of the day the person needs to draw their own conclusions as to what it actually means which is where religion or (non secular) philosophy might come into play. Even if a person does not agree with where the ideas are coming from as a whole (i.e. religion) that doesn't mean that they can't find a form a personal truth on the basis of an examination of the ideas.
Likewise, the "Who am I?" question is quite common in the context of literature, for example, in science fiction is might be the "What does it mean to be human?" question that shows up when the topic of transhumanism shows up. However, you are correct that more context generally needs to be applied to them, otherwise, they form a fairly cliché list. It's a common cliché though, which can make it useful for discussion as it can alleviate the need to explain everything up front.
Stop trying to decorate your speech, it only makes it worse. The only possible "hard evidence of your philosophical thoughts" is you presenting those thoughts, so dropping the "hard evidence" part of that sentence will only make it less stupid.
You are correct, the only way you could have hard evidence would be if I told you exactly what my thoughts and options on a topic is. That means at best you have soft evidence or none at all and your apparent willingness to attack me in a personal manner (i.e. "Not that it would make your thoughts less stupid in their own right.") just shows that you are immature and incapable of reasoned debate and discussion of these subjects.
Do you have any facts to back up your theory, or are you basing it on a belief that I have some sort of religious background? Since, as near as I can tell, you don't have any demographic information on me, I must conclude that you are jumping to some sort of conclusion on the basis of my willingness to respond to the threads here on/. and my willingness to attempt to engage in some sort of reasoned discussion with you on the topics at hand.
Do you have evidence to support your claim? Most philosophers would argue that the questions that I postulated aren't exactly "stupid questions" and as near as I can tell, I have presented you with any hard evidence as to what my philosophical thoughts on those questions are.
I disagree, I've listened to and read some very reasoned arguments both for and against abortion that completely avoided the topic of relation and were entirely secular arguments. To say that it is only controversial because of religion is to ignore a large part of the debate surrounding the topic.
Also, I can name a lot of horrible things off the top of my head in which religion did not play a role. For example, just take a look at the French Revolution, a lot of things were done in the name of "rationalism" that most people wouldn't exactly consider to be pleasant.
Seeing as how your UID is lower than mine and you also have a Karma-Bonus Modifier I'm going to assume that you aren't being a troll in which case, why am I an idiot?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have never worked in a university setting and encountered that tenured professor whose original findings or theories were long since disproved but they still cling to them or hope to find that one piece of evidence that vindicates them.
Don't forget that at the end of the day people are still people and will find a way of rationalizing their beliefs regardless of their nature.
Science can deal with all the domains that religion deals with.
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. At the end of the day, if you boil down what make the core components of a religion, it is an attempt to answer the big philosophical questions that each person faces at some point in their life, namely:
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Where am I going?
While science and secular philosophy might be able to answer these questions in one way or another, they aren't exactly very satisfyingly answers for most when it comes to what science ("You are the product of chemical reactions.") or secular philosophy ("Wormfood.") has to say on any of the subjects.
Perhaps it is because when you put enough people together, regardless of what they think, they have the potential of screwing things up for everybody.
I tend to agree with this, even though that might be slightly ironic; however, say all organized religion vanishes overnight what is to say that people wouldn't move on to bickering about other things? Take a controversial subject (e.g. abortion) and people can find ways to argue about it without even bringing religion into the picture. I highly doubt that humanity is going to jump to some high form of enlightenment and peaceful existence through the loss of organized religion as some would have us to believe.
Who said I'm upset? I'm just pointing out that going around being vocal about something is annoying to the rest of the people out there that have other things to worry about. Additionally, indoctrination of children aside, as long as someone isn't directly impacting you, why should you care what they do or do not believe in?
When a better term is provided for people who don't believe in a god or gods but feel the need to go around telling themselves of the fact is invented we will use that term. Until then "atheist" is a blanket term for people who don't believe in a god or gods as well as people who hold those beliefs and feel the need to tell others about it as if they are trying to find new believers.
It's one thing to have your own beliefs, its another to go around telling people about them. That is what generally annoys people when it comes to religion otherwise, it would be a non-issue for the most part.
However, we also don't know if there really is any bleeding-edge tech on board. Granted there is a whole lot of nothing being said about it, but other than it kind of looking like a B2 which implies that there might be some low profile capability to it (likely nothing that isn't already known) nobody has actually produced any proof that it has bleeding-edge tech on board.
The percentage is likely less than that, some of this boils down to a specialty within a specialty that requires a PhD to get the background in before you can start learning about it. If you have read most of the lay blogs on the topic they jump to dismissing it on the basis of things that were among the first checked according to the paper.
Alright, so say we call the income tax that they pay a funny accounting trick, regardless, the point still stands that the CBO uses the "income tax" that federal employees pay in their calculations for forward tax receipts, if you start removing that money from the equation then that is a loss of revenue that you need to take into account.
Likewise, my point about private industry not having the jobs for a massive layoff of federal employees to fill still stands, if you start to have massive layoffs the unemployment numbers are going to have a major spike and will take years before you see them start coming back down. If something like that happens, it doesn't really matter who is in office, odds are they aren't going to get reelected come the end of their term and the same goes for their party for awhile.
This isn't to say that some house cleaning isn't needed when it comes to federal government though, there is a lot of redundancy that you can get rid of and simple attrition is also a good way to reduce number without seeing that massive spike in unemployment.
Serious question, but what do you think will happen to tax revenue when you start laying off large portions of the workforce? Federal employees still pay taxes and private industry isn't strong enough to absorb that many layoffs all at once either.
Depending upon how far along you are in your degree, changing schools may not be an option. Up until the start of your third year you can usually transfer to a different school and have most if not all of your credits transferred but after that it either gets harder to transfer, or they will not take all of the credits from a different school. Most schools want you to attend for at least one year before they will award you a degree and some require two years of attendance which puts another damper on the "just transfer someplace cheaper" option.
The $1000 that you loan is not taxed, you are only taxed on any money that you make off of the investment. For long term investments, it doesn't matter if you make $1 or $1000 on your original investment, you are only taxed on what you actually make, not what you make plus the original amount. Likewise, if I take a loss on my investments I can get adjust may taxes accordingly - this is why you always see a dip in the market towards the end of the year as low performing investments are sold off for the tax benefits.
The fact that they paid taxes on the money that the use for investments is the whole reason why we don't tax the original amount again when sell off the instrument that they are using to make the money.
Think of it this way (making up the numbers here): if you work for an hour and get paid $100 and get taxed 30% you get $70 in your pocket for one hours work. If I loan someone $1000 and they pay me back $1100 they get taxed 15% on the $100 profit that they made on that money, thus giving them $85 in the pocket (plus the original $1000) for nothing more than taking the risk of lending the money. As noted, nobody is faulting them for not having to work hard to make that money but at the end of the day they get more money back in their pocket after taxes than other people do. The fact that the money that the used to lend was already taxed is irreverent.
This might be a naive question, but my understanding is that neutrinos can travel at the speed of light so what is stopping them from actually having the top speed in the universe and photons travel slightly slower then them?
This might sound a bit rude, but put your words where you mouth is: lets see your portfolio and see what your work looks like. Even better, lets see the original negatives (You are shooting film, right? Digital cameras do some post-processing in the camera itself depending on the model and usually require minor correction on the computer just to compensate for how warm the sensor was when the photograph was taken.) and I want to see one perfect shot for each frame on the film.
Pretty much every professional photographer I have ever met does some sort of dark room manipulation (either with chemicals or in software), cropping, or even just taking a bunch of shots and picking the one prefect one that they show others.
History books tend to be quite biased towards the authors on take on the events involved and depending upon what you are reading, you can pick up two different books can find different dates for events as well. Case and point: read some books on the American Revolution (American authors) and the American War of Independence (British authors).
Also, historians and archaeologists are quite well known for ignoring evidence that they might be wrong up to the point where there is pretty much multiple sources of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Sometimes people like to play games they find fun, not everyone wants the game to play games that might stress them out before they finish the game. I have a small collection of games myself that I just gave up on after difficulty spikes or reflex based puzzles. A gradual ramp up over the course of the game is one thing, but I'm not a fan of games that surprise me with major difficulty spikes midway through the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends upon the field that you are working in. In some fields you can get by with publishing a paper every six months or so where as other fields you might do a couple years of work before you have something that is publishable. Granted you may have other projects going on at the same time, but not all work is publishable.
This has been coming up over on Ars Technica for awhile now and the explanation isn't so much that the GPS equipment is poorly designed but rather that Lighsquared is trying to use the spectrum in a way that it was not licensed to do so in. In short, the spectrum that they licensed is for low power satellite communications (i.e. GPS) and they want to use the same spectrum but to increase the power at which they broadcast it up to normal terrestrial levels. At that point the common analogy is that it is like trying to tell the color of a flashlight from a couple miles away: once you spot it you can tell when the color changes, but if someone comes along and places a high power search light next to it, the flashlight will drown out by the power of the other light source.
Also, don't forget that radio signals aren't prefect pathways either and you can be broadcasting on one frequency and have it bleed over into another frequency. This is why radio stations and television channels are allocated in such a way that they aren't directly next to each other (think radio channel 100 and 100.1).
So in summary, this isn't an equipment problem but a physics problem: making the equipment better isn't going to help the fact that the signal would be drown out if Lighsquared were to broadcast on a satellite channel at terrestrial power levels.
Likewise, the "Who am I?" question is quite common in the context of literature, for example, in science fiction is might be the "What does it mean to be human?" question that shows up when the topic of transhumanism shows up. However, you are correct that more context generally needs to be applied to them, otherwise, they form a fairly cliché list. It's a common cliché though, which can make it useful for discussion as it can alleviate the need to explain everything up front.
Stop trying to decorate your speech, it only makes it worse. The only possible "hard evidence of your philosophical thoughts" is you presenting those thoughts, so dropping the "hard evidence" part of that sentence will only make it less stupid.
You are correct, the only way you could have hard evidence would be if I told you exactly what my thoughts and options on a topic is. That means at best you have soft evidence or none at all and your apparent willingness to attack me in a personal manner (i.e. "Not that it would make your thoughts less stupid in their own right.") just shows that you are immature and incapable of reasoned debate and discussion of these subjects.
Do you have any facts to back up your theory, or are you basing it on a belief that I have some sort of religious background? Since, as near as I can tell, you don't have any demographic information on me, I must conclude that you are jumping to some sort of conclusion on the basis of my willingness to respond to the threads here on /. and my willingness to attempt to engage in some sort of reasoned discussion with you on the topics at hand.
Odds are your conclusions are likely false.
Do you have evidence to support your claim? Most philosophers would argue that the questions that I postulated aren't exactly "stupid questions" and as near as I can tell, I have presented you with any hard evidence as to what my philosophical thoughts on those questions are.
I disagree, I've listened to and read some very reasoned arguments both for and against abortion that completely avoided the topic of relation and were entirely secular arguments. To say that it is only controversial because of religion is to ignore a large part of the debate surrounding the topic.
Also, I can name a lot of horrible things off the top of my head in which religion did not play a role. For example, just take a look at the French Revolution, a lot of things were done in the name of "rationalism" that most people wouldn't exactly consider to be pleasant.
An idiot.
Seeing as how your UID is lower than mine and you also have a Karma-Bonus Modifier I'm going to assume that you aren't being a troll in which case, why am I an idiot?
SETI is mostly funded through private monies if people want to fund them then why shouldn't they be allowed to continue to operate?
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you have never worked in a university setting and encountered that tenured professor whose original findings or theories were long since disproved but they still cling to them or hope to find that one piece of evidence that vindicates them.
Don't forget that at the end of the day people are still people and will find a way of rationalizing their beliefs regardless of their nature.
Science can deal with all the domains that religion deals with.
Eh, I'm not so sure about that. At the end of the day, if you boil down what make the core components of a religion, it is an attempt to answer the big philosophical questions that each person faces at some point in their life, namely:
While science and secular philosophy might be able to answer these questions in one way or another, they aren't exactly very satisfyingly answers for most when it comes to what science ("You are the product of chemical reactions.") or secular philosophy ("Wormfood.") has to say on any of the subjects.
Perhaps it is because when you put enough people together, regardless of what they think, they have the potential of screwing things up for everybody.
I tend to agree with this, even though that might be slightly ironic; however, say all organized religion vanishes overnight what is to say that people wouldn't move on to bickering about other things? Take a controversial subject (e.g. abortion) and people can find ways to argue about it without even bringing religion into the picture. I highly doubt that humanity is going to jump to some high form of enlightenment and peaceful existence through the loss of organized religion as some would have us to believe.
Who said I'm upset? I'm just pointing out that going around being vocal about something is annoying to the rest of the people out there that have other things to worry about. Additionally, indoctrination of children aside, as long as someone isn't directly impacting you, why should you care what they do or do not believe in?
When a better term is provided for people who don't believe in a god or gods but feel the need to go around telling themselves of the fact is invented we will use that term. Until then "atheist" is a blanket term for people who don't believe in a god or gods as well as people who hold those beliefs and feel the need to tell others about it as if they are trying to find new believers.
It's one thing to have your own beliefs, its another to go around telling people about them. That is what generally annoys people when it comes to religion otherwise, it would be a non-issue for the most part.
The GPS signal is indeed weak, but why would it even be paying attention to the civilian band GPS signals?
However, we also don't know if there really is any bleeding-edge tech on board. Granted there is a whole lot of nothing being said about it, but other than it kind of looking like a B2 which implies that there might be some low profile capability to it (likely nothing that isn't already known) nobody has actually produced any proof that it has bleeding-edge tech on board.
The percentage is likely less than that, some of this boils down to a specialty within a specialty that requires a PhD to get the background in before you can start learning about it. If you have read most of the lay blogs on the topic they jump to dismissing it on the basis of things that were among the first checked according to the paper.
Alright, so say we call the income tax that they pay a funny accounting trick, regardless, the point still stands that the CBO uses the "income tax" that federal employees pay in their calculations for forward tax receipts, if you start removing that money from the equation then that is a loss of revenue that you need to take into account.
Likewise, my point about private industry not having the jobs for a massive layoff of federal employees to fill still stands, if you start to have massive layoffs the unemployment numbers are going to have a major spike and will take years before you see them start coming back down. If something like that happens, it doesn't really matter who is in office, odds are they aren't going to get reelected come the end of their term and the same goes for their party for awhile.
This isn't to say that some house cleaning isn't needed when it comes to federal government though, there is a lot of redundancy that you can get rid of and simple attrition is also a good way to reduce number without seeing that massive spike in unemployment.
Serious question, but what do you think will happen to tax revenue when you start laying off large portions of the workforce? Federal employees still pay taxes and private industry isn't strong enough to absorb that many layoffs all at once either.
Depending upon how far along you are in your degree, changing schools may not be an option. Up until the start of your third year you can usually transfer to a different school and have most if not all of your credits transferred but after that it either gets harder to transfer, or they will not take all of the credits from a different school. Most schools want you to attend for at least one year before they will award you a degree and some require two years of attendance which puts another damper on the "just transfer someplace cheaper" option.
The $1000 that you loan is not taxed, you are only taxed on any money that you make off of the investment. For long term investments, it doesn't matter if you make $1 or $1000 on your original investment, you are only taxed on what you actually make, not what you make plus the original amount. Likewise, if I take a loss on my investments I can get adjust may taxes accordingly - this is why you always see a dip in the market towards the end of the year as low performing investments are sold off for the tax benefits.
The fact that they paid taxes on the money that the use for investments is the whole reason why we don't tax the original amount again when sell off the instrument that they are using to make the money.
Think of it this way (making up the numbers here): if you work for an hour and get paid $100 and get taxed 30% you get $70 in your pocket for one hours work. If I loan someone $1000 and they pay me back $1100 they get taxed 15% on the $100 profit that they made on that money, thus giving them $85 in the pocket (plus the original $1000) for nothing more than taking the risk of lending the money. As noted, nobody is faulting them for not having to work hard to make that money but at the end of the day they get more money back in their pocket after taxes than other people do. The fact that the money that the used to lend was already taxed is irreverent.
This might be a naive question, but my understanding is that neutrinos can travel at the speed of light so what is stopping them from actually having the top speed in the universe and photons travel slightly slower then them?
This might sound a bit rude, but put your words where you mouth is: lets see your portfolio and see what your work looks like. Even better, lets see the original negatives (You are shooting film, right? Digital cameras do some post-processing in the camera itself depending on the model and usually require minor correction on the computer just to compensate for how warm the sensor was when the photograph was taken.) and I want to see one perfect shot for each frame on the film.
Pretty much every professional photographer I have ever met does some sort of dark room manipulation (either with chemicals or in software), cropping, or even just taking a bunch of shots and picking the one prefect one that they show others.
History books tend to be quite biased towards the authors on take on the events involved and depending upon what you are reading, you can pick up two different books can find different dates for events as well. Case and point: read some books on the American Revolution (American authors) and the American War of Independence (British authors).
Also, historians and archaeologists are quite well known for ignoring evidence that they might be wrong up to the point where there is pretty much multiple sources of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Sometimes people like to play games they find fun, not everyone wants the game to play games that might stress them out before they finish the game. I have a small collection of games myself that I just gave up on after difficulty spikes or reflex based puzzles. A gradual ramp up over the course of the game is one thing, but I'm not a fan of games that surprise me with major difficulty spikes midway through the game.