The flip side of this may be that the what conventional TV turned into "just a swamp" will look like an "interesting marshland ecosystem", and actually filming on location in a real 400 year old castle will make a version of Dracula that will spook your socks off.
Except for those pesky counter-intuitive feedback loops: Seriously reducing Testosterone over a long therm also tends to make males flabby and reduce muscular mass, unless it's done by a calculated combination of physical and mental stress (as in basic training), thereby often decreasing the male's chance of attracting a partner. Without an appropriate other (not necessarily significant, although personally, I'm picky), they have to use their remaining sex drive solo, therefore requiring more porn.
The short answer is that people who use another ISP than MSN and have a hotmail account are generally the at least semi-clueful that use hotmail as a secondary, throw away account where nothing important happens.
I found myself using hotmail because they offered me a very simple, easy to remember address at the time, so I could give it out to people who would have trouble with my main e-address. My regular ISP mail didn't end in.com, for example, and there were some clueless people who kept typing.com instead of.net. I had some 0's in my primary address, and some people kept thinking they were o's instead.
In a few weeks, that little, tiny light bulb came on, and I realized I was doing actual needed business on a no-guarentees what-so-ever account, AND selectively steering my problem case customers towards it. Just the people who might make me want a good paper trail someday.
If you count something apparently simple, like read/write processes, there are still at least two ways to look at it. I can save or read a 1 Mb document with apparently not a single bit out of line, so that it could be said the system is already operating with an accident rate of much less than 1 in a million.
Alternately, it is incredibly unlikely I will open, copy or save even a thousand such documents in a typical working manner (performing different operations on assorted types of files) without such operations causing some sort of OS error to be reported, a parent program to crash, or (in Windows at least) a system lockup somewhere along the line (I've probably done a thousand assorted document edits, transfers and reads in a row in Unixen without a system-wide glitch, but not without more local glitches). That gives PCs an accident rate of worse than 1 in 1,000. The question is, which measurement is the most relevant?
Re:Sorry, no poetry here
on
Spam as Poetry
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If Spam based on the RIAA actions becomes as common as the Nigerian scam, there are going to be some people taken in by it. Hello, RIAA - not only are you getting (deserved, IMHO) negative publicity for your own choices, looks like you're about to get a bunch more you didn't even earn.
Reifman mentions a series of mistakes he thinks hurt Microsoft over a multi-year period. He also interweaves descriptions of mistakes, and why he thinks they are mistakes, with asides about other Microsoft actions, which I gather he means to present as background to the reader. I'm assuming this, because he analyzes some actions as explicit mistakes, and just mentions others uncritically or even in a positive light.
That's not necessarily bad, mind you. If it's not clear whether something is a mistake or not, it's better (IMHO) to stick to the clearcut cases.
Reifman's mention of the MSNBC 'merger' as one of his background bits got me thinking though. What if that's one of Microsoft's bigger mistakes? Was there a way to create a stand alone ISP and content sources, and would it have been bold, inovative, and even profitable? Microsoft is known for an embrace and extend approach to small companies. What if they had built up the Microsoft Network's proprietary content entirely by e&e'ing a bunch of small content owners, and stayed away from 'media giants"?
Dealing with a company as large as NBC means adjusting your views on DRM to better fit with theirs. In Microsoft's case, it moved the company towards the same situation as Sony, in that they have divisions that see DRM mostly as something to be imposed preferrably at the hardware level (i.e. the Windows development team), vrs. divisions that want it in the OS (probably everyone who wouldn't have to code it). The situation also sounds a lot like AOL/Time Warner's, which is also a bit strained.
1. I responded to a post that already raised the point I addressed. So why not criticize that poster for wandering off topic already. At the worst, I followed him. 2. If you go back and reread the entire thread, that same mistaken point was made independantly by at least two other posters at the time I posted, and some other posters seem to be taking it very uncritically. When the same mistake keeps being promagulated as a basic truth pervading the discussion, it needs to be addressed. (Who am I kidding - Slashdotters actually reading before posting?) 3. Just what did I say that's anti business? Stockholders can and sometimes do complain about what they feel are missed opportunities. That's a fact, not an opinion. CEOs and boards can choose to yield to any such pressure or to stick to their original aims. If a minority stockholder doesn't like that they don't have to sue, there are the (sometimes seen as old fashioned) options of voting their shares and hoping for agreement from other stockholders or selling. Those are also simply facts. Judges don't normally accept arguements based on a requirement for absolute infaliability, so many of these threatened suits don't fly. That's admittedly not absolutely always true, but as Runion said "That's the way to bet". Microsoft is an example of a company that did not bow to some stockholder's pressures on the issue of dividends. Berkshire Hathaway is a company that did not bow to some stockholder's prssures on the issue of splitting shares. Yep, Fact, and Fact. YOU see an anti-business rant in those facts.
That's a good summary explantion, and you're right, this simply doesn't add up to a criminal action. With that said, do you ever get the feeling when you run across cases like this that the decision makers didn't really do the math?
Sometimes it feels like the marketroids start from some really weird false assumption and then everything that follows is technicallly correct but won't really work out to give the predicted profit, and sometimes it feels like they got part way into the cost benefit analysis and started just guesstimating when they couldn't quite remember what their professor said about the difference between mean, median, and mode.
I read about 3,000 words a minute for light fiction. If $/hour is the standard, I'm the epitome of the person getting poor value for buying a book rather than a film ticket. So how come I don't mind buying a 6.00$ US paperback, but I think 17.00$ is unreasonable for a CD? By the original logic, the faster you read, the less books you should buy. And you'ld have to be insane to collect hardbacks unless you read about 30 words a minute or less, in which case your entertainment value is so great the packaging costs become trivial. In fact, all book sales should be to functional illiterates, and since these will largely skill themselves out of that category on the first book, no sequel ever makes economic sense.
"Reasonable" - i do not think that word means what you think it does.
A very real source of the increased costs isn't going to be in the area of energy prices increasing, or food prices, or whatever, but in what look like unrelated areas. Western civilisation has become very committed to massive integration for every sort of good and service. To move towards more individualized production of power, food, clean water, data services, and the rest will all entail additional costs, where we trade economies of scale for more personal control or better survivability.
As just one example: How much would you pay to know that the power grid you hook up to isn't vulnerable to the sort of problem that hit the north-east US and southern Canada recently, or the rolling brownouts of California? Do you think your answer will stay the same for the next decade?
A facility that handles both nuclear and chemical wastes near where I live had two accidents about a week apart, recently.
One was a nuclear incident, where a truck traveling between two locations about 10 miles apart had some leaking liquid waste on arrival and the authorities had to meter the roadbed to see if any had spilled en-route. Net result, the road was closed for a few days, which was a bit inconvenient for some people who had to take longer routes but didn't do a lot of financial damage. It did cost a bit to go over the road at 1/4 mile an hour, and figuring in some overtime for state safety personnel seems fair as well, but it probably should be counted as an incident - nobody hurt, moderate costs to fix. The worst case scenario for the incident looks like it would have been some leakage on the road, someone drives through before it is discovered, and they get a free carwash and new set of tires out of the deal.
The chemical accident was a metallic Sodium fire. Financial costs were a lot higher (write off a 10,000 square foot building for starters), a mile radius of residences were evacuated for a couple of days, some people went to the hospitals for inhalation related problems, and there were some moderate injuries among the persons actually responsible for containing the fire until it burned itself out. The plausable worst case scenarios could have included actual fatalities among the firefighters, neighborhood robberies in the evacuated areas, and maybe even serious injuries or deaths to some of the nearby civilians.
While I'm hoping neither of these is the start of a trend, I know which one was worse. Just from a few accidents that made the news, there were chemicals as hazardous as that much Sodium present in what started as a propane fire in a Texas freightyard this year, in a train/truck colision in Ohio, in the crash of a fire fighting plane in Colorado, etc. It's May - there has probably been a chemical related accident that could have killed some innocent bystander in every one of the 50 states already this year.
What i'd like is to see the press use words such as accident and incident in a way that reflects the gravity of the situation. Then maybe we could expect the voting public to make a reasonable decision when it comes time to switch to either nuclear power or to something else.
The distinction is made because men have at least some ability to predict the consequences of actions, while natural selection is (quite correctly) characterized as the blind watchmaker in Dawkins' metaphor. You seem to be regarding human ability to anticipate the consequences of actions as not only limited and imperfect, but effectively nonexistant. Frankly, if I thought that human foresight had absolutely no effect on the human contribution to processes of nature, I would not have a "not so humble opinion" on anything whatsoever, but would express all my opinions with the utmost humility, as i would be absolutely unable to anticipate whether they would work any good or ill in the expression.
Except I didn't actuallly conclude B => C I concluded that EITHER B=>C OR it becomes necessary to show why both A and B produce !C, even when A and B are apparently two sets with no members in common.
Another way of putting this is that the claims AUB is !1 or AxB is !0, (or both) is/are implied in accepting the alternative B=>!C. Those are positive claims, not unversal negatives, and I should like to see some proof of one or both of them from those wishing to advance them. If you have a cosmological theory D that stands in complete contrast to both A and B, AND can be shown not to reduce itself to a minor variant on either of the two, then you may want to present it. Otherwise I hold that the union of A and B covers the universal set of alternatives in this discourse (AUB=1). If you have a list of underlieing commonalities in both A & B, besides the claimed commonality of some persons that they both imply !C, again, I shall gladly withdraw my claim that A's intersection with B is the empty set, but I will not withdraw it when the only commonality adduced is the one we are still trying to either prove or disprove.
I hope this clarifies my point. I appologise if I've used some non-standard symbolism, but I have tried to restate it in English where that rather non-logical language allows. It's been 30 years or so since I last had to dig up some of those symbols, about high school, so please excuse.
Even neutronium is not infinitely dense, so there should be sizes/masses of quantum holes too small to gobble it up faster than they radiate, and as you point out, there could also be ones big enough to grow.
The original (Stephen Hawking) theory that predicted quantum black holes said they might form in the very early expansion phase, and some sizes could linger until now so they might be observable as they finished radiating a way, as bright flashes of gamma rays with certain time curves. Hawking was pretty sure there wouldn't be new ones forming after the first few nano-seconds of the universe, and there aren't any solid observations of what Hawking said to look for, although there are a few borderline possibles.
I sure wouldn't bet on new ones being formed unless we at least become sure some were formed in the big bang era.
As another example of the problems with Occam's razor and cosmology...
Several physical modes, including notably Guth's inflationary hypothesis (which is pretty much the standard model these days) assume certain physical ratios and constants start out randomized, and many astrophysicists have interpreted this to imply there might be an infinite number of "parellel" universes, which can never be observed. (Witness the last chapter of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, as well as Hawking, Timothy Ferris, and others).
Now perhaps this is just one complexity that might make us prefer a simpler theory if it looks as good in other respects, but what if it should be counted as an infinite number of complexities that therefore implies any other theory, no matter how baroquely complex, should be automatically preferred, just so it has a finite number of complications and seems to cover all the observations. Worse yet, we're talking about an infinite number of complications that the theory itself claims can't be observed, which seems to take it out of the realm of science entirely.
There are supposedly several million gods in Hinduism. Some Christian sources classify angels into seven distinct types and forty-nine flavors and claim to know many of them by name, without ever having produced evidence to satisfy a sceptical scientist. Hundreds of acid-tripping freaks have come up with psycho-babble about the universe being a bit of lint in their own navels, or a jelly doughnut, or tuesday afternoon. However bizarre these theories may seem, they avoid having an actually infinite number of complications, and at worst have only a finite number of things we can't observe. So, why are we so quick to dismiss them?
Obviously, there are good scientific or logical arguements against at least some such models, as I'm sure someone will point out. The problem is, if the scentists making those arguements were applying formal logic from the start, they should have given all those models, even the very silliest, a lot of brownie points for satisfying the first test of Occam's razor when weighed against the standard model.
Unless someone can construct a formal arguement for that speculation about an infinite number of universes being counted as just one complication, they can't show why they ever considered the standard model, instead of putting it 500th on the list after all the drug induced babble, which would leave them still working through those 'theories' about holes in space time that only appear in laundry baskets and swallow only left handed gloves, by the ends of their careers. No one would ever look for data designed to support the standard model, (so it wouldn't be standard would it?).
Hawking style singularities theoretically have an event horizon. It's typically much smaller than the size of a proton or neutron, so it's pretty difficult for normal matter to cross it, and the amount of time for something to 'get lucky' and tunnel in is many orders of magentude more than the amount of time for the same mass of virtual particles to tunnel out. However, this is a function of environment. A 'quantum' black hole the mass of say, a baseball, floating in empty space would last for a tiny fraction of a second, and ones the mass of Mt.Everest would last for a few million years or so (if memory serves), but the same mass hole in a really dense environment, like the heart of a star, can last much longer, and some of the bigger ones may be able to grow there even though they would shrink in empty space.
I'm getting really tired of seeing variations on the the claim that any publicly held company must take all actions that seem likely to make them more money, or face criticism that can devalue their stock and even lawsuits from investors.
First, Investors whine, usually because they didn't make twice the national average for the period, and investors sue, frequently filing rediculous suits that end up having no chance of winning, whether the company acts on an opportunity or declines it. There is always someone who will second guess any action, and swear the company should have done b not a. In this case, the commercial station faces at least as much risk if they get their new location and then it doesn't do as well as projected, as if they didn't move on the percieved opportunity.
Second, it goes against the actual letter of the law, which narrowly defines what is valid grounds for such a suit by pevious case law, and specifically includes exemptions for when the CEO or board thinks an action might violate criminal law OR civil penalties under anti-trust. Professional analysts (there are a lot of self professed 'gifted' amateurs), know that they too can get in trouble for getting too free waht are undenyabley specualtions instead of facts in the 20-20 hindsight type article.
Third, if investors could have won some of these threatened lawsuits or influenced their corporations with various publicty campaigns, Bill Gates would have already declared a stock dividend for Microsoft every quarter starting 8 or 9 years ago, and Berkshire-Hathaway would have split shares at least five times. There were analysts and pundits advocating both of those. It took a major court case of a different kind to get MS offering dividends, and BH is still doing exactly as it damn well pleases.
I've long thought that the classic 'big bang' theory ought to count as an actual arguement for God's existence, by this line of reasoning. 1. The Big Bang model was originally developed as the alternative to the steady state model, and was its opposite in apparently every way. 2. The steady state model was offered as a disproof of the existence of God by many Atheists, with their reasoning being (paraphrased a bit) "The universe has been around forever, so there never was a moment of creation. No creation, no need to postulate a creator." 3. If the steady state model is actually the basis for a good, rational arguement along these lines, then either its opposite theory must be the basis for an equally good counter-arguement, or the claim becomes "these two theories, so apparently conflicting, are united on one and only one point - they both somehow make good arguements against God." That last sounds an awful lot like Atheism as a dogmatic religion, which assumes that all possible science will end up supporting its views.
Domestication is by artificial selection. That theory some people disagree with isn't really called evolution the way Darwin wrote it, it's much more properly called natural selection. This is to distinguish it from at least one major theory of evolution that has been very largely disproved only in the last century(Lamark's Theory of eveolution by inheritance of acquired characteristics, see also Lysinkoism), and may be necessary to distinguish it from some other variants still floating around in the zeitgest.
One of the problems some people have with the Darwinian theory, is it is too often presented as "All selection is natural selection" or "Natural selection is sufficient to account for all observed variation", which is precisely what you yourself just offered a fine counter-example to. Proof of natural selection would be better based on those wolves you bring up towards the end, but the evidence there is in the line that extends backwards in time from the modern wolf to the varois proto wolves, rather than the branches off that line that make up domestic dogs.
OK, but would you consider the opinion of a scientist that accurately predicts a change in the number of tornadoes each season for the next couple of years, if he or she makes a century long prediction?
I can't tell you who will win the next state lottery, or which week will have a big winner. I _can_ tell you with pretty good accuracy how much those lotteries will make for the states that run them, on a multi-year average. If I tried to make a 100 year prediction based on that, there would doubtless be growing inaccuracies, because my guesses at the rate of population growth, or the effects of lotteries on the crime rate would be part of that process, and would doubtless be seriously flawed over such a long time, but still, wouldn't my 100 year estimate still have a better chance than a prediction that the lottery will be hit for 81 million dollars next tuesday by Mildred Schmeckler of Hackensack?
The federal government has a mixed record on supporting cheap anything. They have supported the airlines far more than buses or passenger trains, leading some to speculate that, since the overwhelming majority of congress-critters fly to and from their districts, they perhaps undervalue the other industries.
Air travel also is affected by the military needs of the country, i.e. trained pilots are produced by the military in substantial numbers, cutting costs to civil air, and planes, particularly cargo planes, are an emergency asset that can go to possible combat support areas (whereas it's hard to send supplies to Afghanistan via Amtrak, if the government needed to badly enough, they could borrow Fedex jets and crews.).
"Why should the roadways, which are public property on public land, have to "compete" with trains?"
Ok, so roadways shouldn't have to compete with trains. Now invent enough new businesses that need things shipped that there is exactly enough income to support the trucking industry and the freight rail industry as is, or destroy all excess trucks and railcars if there are more than enough to handle current production, then lock all contracts between all those businesses forever, fix all salaries for every US business at rates that will make the contracts stable and mandate that all the companies in either business have to produce the exact same quality of service. Enforce these new laws by draconian methods, such as shooting family members of people who attempt to cheat the system, so you can get close to 100% compliance. There, you have no competition between the trucking industry and the railroad industry (until your populace revolts). Anything less, and you do have competition. It's simply a fact. Why should the railroads have to compete with the highways? Basic economic laws.
The rest of your post is as bad. Your second sentence implies that the only form of competition is toal roads, ergo roads financed by taxes don't cout as competing. Sorry, but paid by taxes isn't the same as free.
There are a lot of area 51s out west. Yucca Flats, where a lot of nuke tests happened, has an area 51 (if memory serves, they have areas up to about 100 or so marked off on the unclassified maps, actually showing at least some of the surface craters). Near White Sands New Mexico there is at least one more area marked 51, which was a missile impact area (just Nikes and small surface to air designs, no live nukes used there). You see the military is rather unimaginative when it comes to naming these things, and when you have a big military base, it's rather common to just number all the parts. You may be conflating the Yucca Flats area 51 with the one at Groom lake, which was supposedly used for aircraft testing, but again supposedly may hae some chemical (not nuclear) contamination.
Slashdot Mirror
The flip side of this may be that the what conventional TV turned into "just a swamp" will look like an "interesting marshland ecosystem", and actually filming on location in a real 400 year old castle will make a version of Dracula that will spook your socks off.
Stay tuned for the next thread, wherein it isrevealed Ron Jeremy is Cthulhu. Aaauggh, my eyes!
Except for those pesky counter-intuitive feedback loops:
Seriously reducing Testosterone over a long therm also tends to make males flabby and reduce muscular mass, unless it's done by a calculated combination of physical and mental stress (as in basic training), thereby often decreasing the male's chance of attracting a partner. Without an appropriate other (not necessarily significant, although personally, I'm picky), they have to use their remaining sex drive solo, therefore requiring more porn.
The short answer is that people who use another ISP than MSN and have a hotmail account are generally the at least semi-clueful that use hotmail as a secondary, throw away account where nothing important happens. .com, for example, and there were some clueless people who kept typing .com instead of .net. I had some 0's in my primary address, and some people kept thinking they were o's instead.
I found myself using hotmail because they offered me a very simple, easy to remember address at the time, so I could give it out to people who would have trouble with my main e-address. My regular ISP mail didn't end in
In a few weeks, that little, tiny light bulb came on, and I realized I was doing actual needed business on a no-guarentees what-so-ever account, AND selectively steering my problem case customers towards it. Just the people who might make me want a good paper trail someday.
If you count something apparently simple, like read/write processes, there are still at least two ways to look at it. I can save or read a 1 Mb document with apparently not a single bit out of line, so that it could be said the system is already operating with an accident rate of much less than 1 in a million.
Alternately, it is incredibly unlikely I will open, copy or save even a thousand such documents in a typical working manner (performing different operations on assorted types of files) without such operations causing some sort of OS error to be reported, a parent program to crash, or (in Windows at least) a system lockup somewhere along the line (I've probably done a thousand assorted document edits, transfers and reads in a row in Unixen without a system-wide glitch, but not without more local glitches). That gives PCs an accident rate of worse than 1 in 1,000. The question is, which measurement is the most relevant?
A puma? Now you're just making things up!
If Spam based on the RIAA actions becomes as common as the Nigerian scam, there are going to be some people taken in by it. Hello, RIAA - not only are you getting (deserved, IMHO) negative publicity for your own choices, looks like you're about to get a bunch more you didn't even earn.
Reifman mentions a series of mistakes he thinks hurt Microsoft over a multi-year period. He also interweaves descriptions of mistakes, and why he thinks they are mistakes, with asides about other Microsoft actions, which I gather he means to present as background to the reader. I'm assuming this, because he analyzes some actions as explicit mistakes, and just mentions others uncritically or even in a positive light.
That's not necessarily bad, mind you. If it's not clear whether something is a mistake or not, it's better (IMHO) to stick to the clearcut cases.
Reifman's mention of the MSNBC 'merger' as one of his background bits got me thinking though. What if that's one of Microsoft's bigger mistakes? Was there a way to create a stand alone ISP and content sources, and would it have been bold, inovative, and even profitable? Microsoft is known for an embrace and extend approach to small companies. What if they had built up the Microsoft Network's proprietary content entirely by e&e'ing a bunch of small content owners, and stayed away from 'media giants"?
Dealing with a company as large as NBC means adjusting your views on DRM to better fit with theirs. In Microsoft's case, it moved the company towards the same situation as Sony, in that they have divisions that see DRM mostly as something to be imposed preferrably at the hardware level (i.e. the Windows development team), vrs. divisions that want it in the OS (probably everyone who wouldn't have to code it). The situation also sounds a lot like AOL/Time Warner's, which is also a bit strained.
1. I responded to a post that already raised the point I addressed. So why not criticize that poster for wandering off topic already. At the worst, I followed him.
2. If you go back and reread the entire thread, that same mistaken point was made independantly by at least two other posters at the time I posted, and some other posters seem to be taking it very uncritically. When the same mistake keeps being promagulated as a basic truth pervading the discussion, it needs to be addressed. (Who am I kidding - Slashdotters actually reading before posting?)
3. Just what did I say that's anti business? Stockholders can and sometimes do complain about what they feel are missed opportunities. That's a fact, not an opinion. CEOs and boards can choose to yield to any such pressure or to stick to their original aims. If a minority stockholder doesn't like that they don't have to sue, there are the (sometimes seen as old fashioned) options of voting their shares and hoping for agreement from other stockholders or selling. Those are also simply facts. Judges don't normally accept arguements based on a requirement for absolute infaliability, so many of these threatened suits don't fly. That's admittedly not absolutely always true, but as Runion said "That's the way to bet". Microsoft is an example of a company that did not bow to some stockholder's pressures on the issue of dividends. Berkshire Hathaway is a company that did not bow to some stockholder's prssures on the issue of splitting shares. Yep, Fact, and Fact. YOU see an anti-business rant in those facts.
That's a good summary explantion, and you're right, this simply doesn't add up to a criminal action. With that said, do you ever get the feeling when you run across cases like this that the decision makers didn't really do the math?
Sometimes it feels like the marketroids start from some really weird false assumption and then everything that follows is technicallly correct but won't really work out to give the predicted profit, and sometimes it feels like they got part way into the cost benefit analysis and started just guesstimating when they couldn't quite remember what their professor said about the difference between mean, median, and mode.
I read about 3,000 words a minute for light fiction. If $/hour is the standard, I'm the epitome of the person getting poor value for buying a book rather than a film ticket. So how come I don't mind buying a 6.00$ US paperback, but I think 17.00$ is unreasonable for a CD? By the original logic, the faster you read, the less books you should buy. And you'ld have to be insane to collect hardbacks unless you read about 30 words a minute or less, in which case your entertainment value is so great the packaging costs become trivial. In fact, all book sales should be to functional illiterates, and since these will largely skill themselves out of that category on the first book, no sequel ever makes economic sense.
"Reasonable" - i do not think that word means what you think it does.
A very real source of the increased costs isn't going to be in the area of energy prices increasing, or food prices, or whatever, but in what look like unrelated areas. Western civilisation has become very committed to massive integration for every sort of good and service. To move towards more individualized production of power, food, clean water, data services, and the rest will all entail additional costs, where we trade economies of scale for more personal control or better survivability.
As just one example: How much would you pay to know that the power grid you hook up to isn't vulnerable to the sort of problem that hit the north-east US and southern Canada recently, or the rolling brownouts of California? Do you think your answer will stay the same for the next decade?
A facility that handles both nuclear and chemical wastes near where I live had two accidents about a week apart, recently.
One was a nuclear incident, where a truck traveling between two locations about 10 miles apart had some leaking liquid waste on arrival and the authorities had to meter the roadbed to see if any had spilled en-route. Net result, the road was closed for a few days, which was a bit inconvenient for some people who had to take longer routes but didn't do a lot of financial damage. It did cost a bit to go over the road at 1/4 mile an hour, and figuring in some overtime for state safety personnel seems fair as well, but it probably should be counted as an incident - nobody hurt, moderate costs to fix. The worst case scenario for the incident looks like it would have been some leakage on the road, someone drives through before it is discovered, and they get a free carwash and new set of tires out of the deal.
The chemical accident was a metallic Sodium fire. Financial costs were a lot higher (write off a 10,000 square foot building for starters), a mile radius of residences were evacuated for a couple of days, some people went to the hospitals for inhalation related problems, and there were some moderate injuries among the persons actually responsible for containing the fire until it burned itself out. The plausable worst case scenarios could have included actual fatalities among the firefighters, neighborhood robberies in the evacuated areas, and maybe even serious injuries or deaths to some of the nearby civilians.
While I'm hoping neither of these is the start of a trend, I know which one was worse. Just from a few accidents that made the news, there were chemicals as hazardous as that much Sodium present in what started as a propane fire in a Texas freightyard this year, in a train/truck colision in Ohio, in the crash of a fire fighting plane in Colorado, etc. It's May - there has probably been a chemical related accident that could have killed some innocent bystander in every one of the 50 states already this year.
What i'd like is to see the press use words such as accident and incident in a way that reflects the gravity of the situation. Then maybe we could expect the voting public to make a reasonable decision when it comes time to switch to either nuclear power or to something else.
The distinction is made because men have at least some ability to predict the consequences of actions, while natural selection is (quite correctly) characterized as the blind watchmaker in Dawkins' metaphor. You seem to be regarding human ability to anticipate the consequences of actions as not only limited and imperfect, but effectively nonexistant. Frankly, if I thought that human foresight had absolutely no effect on the human contribution to processes of nature, I would not have a "not so humble opinion" on anything whatsoever, but would express all my opinions with the utmost humility, as i would be absolutely unable to anticipate whether they would work any good or ill in the expression.
Except I didn't actuallly conclude B => C
I concluded that EITHER B=>C OR it becomes necessary to show why both A and B produce !C, even when A and B are apparently two sets with no members in common.
Another way of putting this is that the claims AUB is !1 or AxB is !0, (or both) is/are implied in accepting the alternative B=>!C. Those are positive claims, not unversal negatives, and I should like to see some proof of one or both of them from those wishing to advance them. If you have a cosmological theory D that stands in complete contrast to both A and B, AND can be shown not to reduce itself to a minor variant on either of the two, then you may want to present it. Otherwise I hold that the union of A and B covers the universal set of alternatives in this discourse (AUB=1). If you have a list of underlieing commonalities in both A & B, besides the claimed commonality of some persons that they both imply !C, again, I shall gladly withdraw my claim that A's intersection with B is the empty set, but I will not withdraw it when the only commonality adduced is the one we are still trying to either prove or disprove.
I hope this clarifies my point. I appologise if I've used some non-standard symbolism, but I have tried to restate it in English where that rather non-logical language allows. It's been 30 years or so since I last had to dig up some of those symbols, about high school, so please excuse.
Even neutronium is not infinitely dense, so there should be sizes/masses of quantum holes too small to gobble it up faster than they radiate, and as you point out, there could also be ones big enough to grow.
The original (Stephen Hawking) theory that predicted quantum black holes said they might form in the very early expansion phase, and some sizes could linger until now so they might be observable as they finished radiating a way, as bright flashes of gamma rays with certain time curves. Hawking was pretty sure there wouldn't be new ones forming after the first few nano-seconds of the universe, and there aren't any solid observations of what Hawking said to look for, although there are a few borderline possibles.
I sure wouldn't bet on new ones being formed unless we at least become sure some were formed in the big bang era.
As another example of the problems with Occam's razor and cosmology...
Several physical modes, including notably Guth's inflationary hypothesis (which is pretty much the standard model these days) assume certain physical ratios and constants start out randomized, and many astrophysicists have interpreted this to imply there might be an infinite number of "parellel" universes, which can never be observed. (Witness the last chapter of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, as well as Hawking, Timothy Ferris, and others).
Now perhaps this is just one complexity that might make us prefer a simpler theory if it looks as good in other respects, but what if it should be counted as an infinite number of complexities that therefore implies any other theory, no matter how baroquely complex, should be automatically preferred, just so it has a finite number of complications and seems to cover all the observations. Worse yet, we're talking about an infinite number of complications that the theory itself claims can't be observed, which seems to take it out of the realm of science entirely.
There are supposedly several million gods in Hinduism. Some Christian sources classify angels into seven distinct types and forty-nine flavors and claim to know many of them by name, without ever having produced evidence to satisfy a sceptical scientist. Hundreds of acid-tripping freaks have come up with psycho-babble about the universe being a bit of lint in their own navels, or a jelly doughnut, or tuesday afternoon. However bizarre these theories may seem, they avoid having an actually infinite number of complications, and at worst have only a finite number of things we can't observe. So, why are we so quick to dismiss them?
Obviously, there are good scientific or logical arguements against at least some such models, as I'm sure someone will point out. The problem is, if the scentists making those arguements were applying formal logic from the start, they should have given all those models, even the very silliest, a lot of brownie points for satisfying the first test of Occam's razor when weighed against the standard model.
Unless someone can construct a formal arguement for that speculation about an infinite number of universes being counted as just one complication, they can't show why they ever considered the standard model, instead of putting it 500th on the list after all the drug induced babble, which would leave them still working through those 'theories' about holes in space time that only appear in laundry baskets and swallow only left handed gloves, by the ends of their careers. No one would ever look for data designed to support the standard model, (so it wouldn't be standard would it?).
Hawking style singularities theoretically have an event horizon. It's typically much smaller than the size of a proton or neutron, so it's pretty difficult for normal matter to cross it, and the amount of time for something to 'get lucky' and tunnel in is many orders of magentude more than the amount of time for the same mass of virtual particles to tunnel out. However, this is a function of environment. A 'quantum' black hole the mass of say, a baseball, floating in empty space would last for a tiny fraction of a second, and ones the mass of Mt.Everest would last for a few million years or so (if memory serves), but the same mass hole in a really dense environment, like the heart of a star, can last much longer, and some of the bigger ones may be able to grow there even though they would shrink in empty space.
First - I ain't no lawyer. With that said...
I'm getting really tired of seeing variations on the the claim that any publicly held company must take all actions that seem likely to make them more money, or face criticism that can devalue their stock and even lawsuits from investors.
First, Investors whine, usually because they didn't make twice the national average for the period, and investors sue, frequently filing rediculous suits that end up having no chance of winning, whether the company acts on an opportunity or declines it. There is always someone who will second guess any action, and swear the company should have done b not a. In this case, the commercial station faces at least as much risk if they get their new location and then it doesn't do as well as projected, as if they didn't move on the percieved opportunity.
Second, it goes against the actual letter of the law, which narrowly defines what is valid grounds for such a suit by pevious case law, and specifically includes exemptions for when the CEO or board thinks an action might violate criminal law OR civil penalties under anti-trust. Professional analysts (there are a lot of self professed 'gifted' amateurs), know that they too can get in trouble for getting too free waht are undenyabley specualtions instead of facts in the 20-20 hindsight type article.
Third, if investors could have won some of these threatened lawsuits or influenced their corporations with various publicty campaigns, Bill Gates would have already declared a stock dividend for Microsoft every quarter starting 8 or 9 years ago, and Berkshire-Hathaway would have split shares at least five times. There were analysts and pundits advocating both of those. It took a major court case of a different kind to get MS offering dividends, and BH is still doing exactly as it damn well pleases.
I've long thought that the classic 'big bang' theory ought to count as an actual arguement for God's existence, by this line of reasoning.
1. The Big Bang model was originally developed as the alternative to the steady state model, and was its opposite in apparently every way.
2. The steady state model was offered as a disproof of the existence of God by many Atheists, with their reasoning being (paraphrased a bit) "The universe has been around forever, so there never was a moment of creation. No creation, no need to postulate a creator."
3. If the steady state model is actually the basis for a good, rational arguement along these lines, then either its opposite theory must be the basis for an equally good counter-arguement, or the claim becomes "these two theories, so apparently conflicting, are united on one and only one point - they both somehow make good arguements against God." That last sounds an awful lot like Atheism as a dogmatic religion, which assumes that all possible science will end up supporting its views.
Domestication is by artificial selection. That theory some people disagree with isn't really called evolution the way Darwin wrote it, it's much more properly called natural selection. This is to distinguish it from at least one major theory of evolution that has been very largely disproved only in the last century(Lamark's Theory of eveolution by inheritance of acquired characteristics, see also Lysinkoism), and may be necessary to distinguish it from some other variants still floating around in the zeitgest.
One of the problems some people have with the Darwinian theory, is it is too often presented as "All selection is natural selection" or "Natural selection is sufficient to account for all observed variation", which is precisely what you yourself just offered a fine counter-example to. Proof of natural selection would be better based on those wolves you bring up towards the end, but the evidence there is in the line that extends backwards in time from the modern wolf to the varois proto wolves, rather than the branches off that line that make up domestic dogs.
OK, but would you consider the opinion of a scientist that accurately predicts a change in the number of tornadoes each season for the next couple of years, if he or she makes a century long prediction?
I can't tell you who will win the next state lottery, or which week will have a big winner. I _can_ tell you with pretty good accuracy how much those lotteries will make for the states that run them, on a multi-year average. If I tried to make a 100 year prediction based on that, there would doubtless be growing inaccuracies, because my guesses at the rate of population growth, or the effects of lotteries on the crime rate would be part of that process, and would doubtless be seriously flawed over such a long time, but still, wouldn't my 100 year estimate still have a better chance than a prediction that the lottery will be hit for 81 million dollars next tuesday by Mildred Schmeckler of Hackensack?
The federal government has a mixed record on supporting cheap anything. They have supported the airlines far more than buses or passenger trains, leading some to speculate that, since the overwhelming majority of congress-critters fly to and from their districts, they perhaps undervalue the other industries.
Air travel also is affected by the military needs of the country, i.e. trained pilots are produced by the military in substantial numbers, cutting costs to civil air, and planes, particularly cargo planes, are an emergency asset that can go to possible combat support areas (whereas it's hard to send supplies to Afghanistan via Amtrak, if the government needed to badly enough, they could borrow Fedex jets and crews.).
"Why should the roadways, which are public property on public land, have to "compete" with trains?"
Ok, so roadways shouldn't have to compete with trains. Now invent enough new businesses that need things shipped that there is exactly enough income to support the trucking industry and the freight rail industry as is, or destroy all excess trucks and railcars if there are more than enough to handle current production, then lock all contracts between all those businesses forever, fix all salaries for every US business at rates that will make the contracts stable and mandate that all the companies in either business have to produce the exact same quality of service. Enforce these new laws by draconian methods, such as shooting family members of people who attempt to cheat the system, so you can get close to 100% compliance. There, you have no competition between the trucking industry and the railroad industry (until your populace revolts). Anything less, and you do have competition. It's simply a fact. Why should the railroads have to compete with the highways? Basic economic laws.
The rest of your post is as bad. Your second sentence implies that the only form of competition is toal roads, ergo roads financed by taxes don't cout as competing. Sorry, but paid by taxes isn't the same as free.
There are a lot of area 51s out west. Yucca Flats, where a lot of nuke tests happened, has an area 51 (if memory serves, they have areas up to about 100 or so marked off on the unclassified maps, actually showing at least some of the surface craters). Near White Sands New Mexico there is at least one more area marked 51, which was a missile impact area (just Nikes and small surface to air designs, no live nukes used there). You see the military is rather unimaginative when it comes to naming these things, and when you have a big military base, it's rather common to just number all the parts. You may be conflating the Yucca Flats area 51 with the one at Groom lake, which was supposedly used for aircraft testing, but again supposedly may hae some chemical (not nuclear) contamination.