But the point is, the number of satellites should have nothing to do with whether a body is classified as a planet or not, because it's not logically connected to the classification. It's pretty intuitive that two planets of the same size could gobble up different numbers of smaller satellites on a pretty much random basis. We don't want to make a random factor paramount in defining something.
That bit about clearing orbits in the standard definition the IAU now uses... Isn't that an essentially random factor? You could have two planets the same mass and size, and if one of them is closer to a big gas giant world that does a lot of orbit clearing on its own, it would look like it had a clearer orbit than the other, wouldn't it? And, what about the objects being cleared? Doesn't their average orbital eccentricity have something to do with how swiftly they get assimilated as moons, nudged out of the region, and so on?
Once you include such odd concepts as the IAU chose as necessary to a definition, you lose your right to just say something such as "the number of satellites has nothing to do with whether a body is classified as a planet or not". See, your reason for rejecting it is because it's not logical to make something that isn't truly fundamental to your definition such a part of it. If you aren't applying that reason consistently to your own side of the discussion, that makes you a jerk. (Not you personally, I mean that hypothetical you that is known in real life as the IAU).
The trick there is, whatever we declare the worlds of an artificial rosette to be, what they are is whatever the transhuman species that made them calls them. Trust me - you don't want to get into an argument with people who can shoot you with a gun that causes your grandparents to have a 50 year string of bad luck, precluding you ever being born. Whether they call them "planets", "properly sorted and indexed lebensraum", or "the big round closets where I keep all my stuff when I'm back in this brane", we'd better stick to their definition.
But if you stop counting Pluto as a planet, and then you discover another Kuiper Belt object that's not only bigger than Eris but as big or bigger than Mercury, do you make it a planet, or do you take Mercury off the list?
Right now, the IAU definition of planet is deliberately limited to our own solar system, just so it doesn't apply to situations extra-solar astronomers have actually already found, or are very likely to find in the next few years (How do you determine what 'clears an orbit' in a young solar system where there's still lots of small stuff everywhere?). There's still a fair chance we will find something else in our own system that the definition either calls a planet or some sort of ambiguous case (If the albedo is average for an icy rock, then it's not a planet but if there's something darker on the surface, maybe it is...).
What has usually happened to complex, multi-part, legalistic definitions in the sciences? People tried to define every element on the periodic table as either a reactive element or an inert, 'noble' gas. Was there a move to take Xenon off the noble gas list when someone managed to get it to combine with fluorine under high enough pressures? Biologists had a big checklist for what constituted life - with sub-definitions of eating, excreting, reproducing, etc. When they first found viruses that could only reproduce by hijacking a cells reproductive copying systems, there was debate over whether viruses were truly alive - did anyone float a new, more complex definition of what counted as reproduction and demand that everything now fall squarely on one side or the other of the line they had drawn? Did they redraw the line again for Prions?
What you just wrote is totally true, and totally irrelevant. If the government slams these bratty kids hard enough to make the others back off, it goes on record as another example of the tyranny oppressing the people. We're talking about a government that is debating reducing only the social programs, ignoring the need to reduce security related spending in their talks, and so shifting towards more and more stick and less carrot, and shows every sign of going much further. These guys become another example of an insecure government trying to rule by fear and so proving it is becoming desperate and feeling vulnerable. The real resistance may have little or nothing to do with Anon/LulzSec. But, if the government screws up enough, the REAL resistance defines itself by succeeding at the public hangings, and those script kiddies can show up 5 seconds later and say, "Hey, I was part of the fight - those same people you just stuck their heads on pikes, they oppressed me. I fought for the cause. Anyone don't think I paid my dues, look at how they put me in prison and then kept me from finding work for years. I deserve a cushy job putting more heads on pikes, comrade!".
Point is, once the government puts you in prison for hacking Sony, you are stuck for life - either your own or the life of that government. It's a rough, tough economy out there, and the system holds lengthy grudges. To make the state die before you, you may have to become one of those guys who does the sort of thing the WW2 resistances did, like stringing fine wire at neck height in front of somebody's staff car. But if you were a political prisoner and not just a regular criminal, the new regime will let you have part of the credit, whether you did that much to earn it or not. You don't always get rated as a serious revolutionary because you actually threw the Molotovs, but sometimes just because someone in the old system acted like they were afraid of you.
Recent patent law rulings have made staying supposedly, deliberately ignorant of what the competition does in the same field less and less of a defense. Depending on just what the questions were, we may well be seeing the capstone case where several district courts have, between them, created an interpretation where the defending side is always "damned if they do, damned if they don't" regardless of the equities of the situation. If the questions were anything like you suggested, expect this one to be the case that has to go to SCOTUS for final resolution.
Dr. Dawkins pointed out certain problems with his model of Memes as a potential successor to Genes, and with Memes as hereditable units of any kind, in his early popular book, The Selfish Gene. * One basic problem is that Memes do not appear to prohibit unlimited blending as the genetic code does, and such blending, by Dr. Dawkins' own argument, should have precisely the same effect on Meme theory as unlimited blending of genes would have on Darwinian evolution. All the problems he himself acknowledged with Meme theory remain unsolved and largely unaddressed, and yet Dr. Dawkins has proceeded in every book since where he mentions Memes to simply handwave over his own earlier objections as though they have been fixed elsewhere, without being able to cite any sources. While Dr. Dawkins expressed hopes that Memetics can be placed on a truely scientific footing, there's no indication what-so-ever it has actually happened, and claiming ones opponent is Meme parasitised has become a tool for stifling dissent via a concealed ad hominem attack. That's one example of what people mean by saying he fails to re-examine his own arguments, and since not just some of his followers but he himself has used Meme theory to 'prove' the irrationality of his opponents, yes, he is a demagogue.
* Memes are discussed starting on page 203 of the Oxford University press paperback edition. Dawkins introduces his first specifically religious meme "life after death", on page 207, in the same paragraph where he describes some of what memes do as parasitization of the brain for the first time. He starts admitting there are some problems, notably with copying fidelity, on page 209. He uses the word blending in that very same paragraph, and clearly indicates he's using it in the same sense as for genetics, and also acknowledges meme mutation would have to be continueous and not descrete, another problem.
There actually was a short film based on space invaders. It was used as filler between movies on HBO in their very early days, and was credited as someone's student animation project. It involved a bunch of characters off of pinball games, including an Egyptian style god, coming to life and trying to fight off the waves of space invaders and defend civilians. Scenes where the defenders ducked and popped out from behind brownstones much like using the four space invaders shield walls still stick in my mind, but that's as much as I remember.
There is a time when what you have said of Will is true, and, specifically for you, an interval soon to come when it ceases being true. (and maybe a time when it is true again, if the Joy of Matter lies at the end of the aeons). This is not the place to speak of such things, nor are we in Daath where such things are neither spoken of or ignored. The request to address you despite this comes neither from my Will or my Desire (for certain values of my acceptable to majority consensus in western civilization).
The Why would anybody give them a loan? question is the most important. I deal with a number of living or deceased authors taxes, estates and financial instruments (mostly setting up S-corp based family trusts and filing the resulting yearly papers with the government). I've heard from several authors that they quit their day job when income from book sales was sufficient, only to find they had a much harder time getting credit. (In once case, the author was told by the dealer he could not finance with GMAC for a car loan, when he had 400,000+ in sales the year before, because the income was still irregular, whereas if he had kept that job at the co-op selling livestock feed he would have good enough credit to qualify).
In a way though, it's unfair to ask that question of the GP. Many banks are so incredibly irrational in deciding who they want to loan money to, and credit assurance organizations are so arbitrary in rating them, that even a normally good answer - "Because the bank will make lots and lots of money at very low risk and here's the math..." - won't cut it. I can imagine some reasons why I might give a music startup a loan and others why I might not - I once gave a small indy film-maker a loan and got it back quite nicely - but the people who make most loans are from my experience, all crazy, so there are no good answers why they would or wouldn't do something.
There are a whole hell of a lot of people who want to make it big big!BIG!!. Just look at all the people who are waiting for their big break in Hollywood while waiting tables or washing cars - there are literally a million people jockying for those few '10 Million a picture' jobs, and 99.something % of them have no chance at all by any objective measure. A person who gets a screen credit in a single motion picture during their acting career is in the top 1% of screen actors guild members. People most viewers think of as middle of the line actors (i.e. Whoopee Goldberg), are statistically in the top 1/100th of 1% by earnings, number of films or shows they have appeared on, recognizability and similar measures.
This goes for somewhat lesser extent for pop musicians, athletes (particularly football players) and many others. There's really no point in asking If these contracts are known for being so bad, why do people continue to sign them?, because it's like asking these same people why they took that triple dog dare and got their tongue stuck to a pole. An actor/rockstar/celebrity is either an idiot who has let his dream of being big enough to overcome the emptiness in his soul overwhelm everything else, or he has some actual understanding of the odds, some actual understanding of his own worth, and (by the time he's done a few contracts) knows that all those idiots aren't just competition, but a thing that keeps the real actors down come contract time. Any serious actor is aware that the producers can always find somebody who will do the job for a pittance just to break in. He or she is aware that the producers have a generalised contempt for the actors they deal with that seems fundamental to their business models, and that he or she has to negotiate every deal through that. He or she swiftly hires an agent to handle that part.
The first rule of Usenet is we do not talk about Usenet. The second rule of Usenet is we wave our hands in their faces and say "These are not the NZBs you're looking for."
Usenet - making old tech do things sane nature never intended to allow fall into the clever hands and febrile minds of mortals. (With NZB and PAR2 as the neck-bolts of our shambling creations brought back from beyond the ultimate veil).
Unicellular life does not have an easier time evolving - it's a false concept in Evolution - Here's just the simplest of several reasons why.
First, we have to define what we mean by evolving - let's go with one of the simplest measures - species lifetime. A species either dies without a successor or gives rise to its own successor, which is a new species. For simplicity, a new species happens when the successors cannot still interbreed at all with the original. There are more complicated definitions than those, but they are mostly agreed on in a specific context among professionals - for example, sometimes a species gives rise to another, but is still around as well, so it's not clear yet if the second should be called a successor, or sometimes we call things separate species even though some interbreeding is still possible (as for Zebras and Horses). I don't want to get into how and why these cases don't affect my basic line of thought here, as that's college level specialization in Biology to deal with, you probably won't get it from a general course.
Here's the basic idea: Organisms survive because they are pretty well adapted to their environment. In improvement is a small step towards more perfect adaptation, and huge jumps are not how evolution works. A typical good mutation means an organism reproduces just a little bit better than the ones without that mutation. Usually, it's more a matter of having 1.01 offsprings when the competitors have on average only 0.99 than a big spike. (Yes, there are exceptions, but usually...) A really simple organism has only a few genes - So each mutation is proportionately bigger. If only two genes control flagellum length in a bacterium, mutations are overwhelmingly too big to be of benefit, while if 38 genes control height in a Giraffe, a mutation in just one can occasionally be a good one, resulting in just enough of a tweak to make that Giraffe a little more successful than its neighbors. The technical term for this involves morpheme space - in a simple, low gene organism, even the simplest single point mutation typically results in a large jump across morpheme space for the organism, to a point that is nowhere close to any adaptation needed for its environment.
Here's an elaboration: More complex organisms can have lots of small tweaks which may be a bit negative by themselves, without dying of them. Bad genes can be just bad enough to linger for many generations without ever really spreading widely through the species. When one organism get a potentially positive mutation, one or more of those negatives may also become a positive in conjunction with the new gene. To use a simple textbook model that probably isn't a real example, A giraffe may get a slightly longer neck, and a gene that normally resulted in a slight problem with high blood pressure may turn out to now be needed to keep the new, taller giraffe from fainting spells. Again, this won't work as well in really simple organisms, and may not happen at all, but it may happen with complex ones and speed up splitting off new species.
Bacteria mutate a lot. But not all mutation affects natural selection. there are whole classes of mutation normally called stochastic. Stochastic normally means pretty much the same as random, and mutation is always random in a sense, but Darwin's model is that Natural Selection gives a direction to what would otherwise stay a random process. Stochastic mutations are ones where there doesn't seem to be any selection pressure. Thinking that the high percentage of bacterial and virus mutations that are stochastic get selected like other mutations is usually why people assume bacteria or viruses are ultra rapid evolvers.
It seems likely that both the fast reproductive rate and the high number of offspring could drive rapid evolution in simple lifeforms if it were not that these other factors also apply, but I don't see how that could be proved or disproved.
In 2002, Columbia School of Journalism studied how various news sources handled titles and signifiers. For example, if somebody was described as a retired Major, Columbia checked to see if both they were commissioned and made rank, and if they had enough time in to count as retired. If somebody was described as a psychiatrist, did they really have the full MD related degree, or were they maybe a psychologist instead. Sources that got titles and related right got higher scores. For this study, Columbia ignored everything else, just this one measure of accuracy, one that has few or no subjective components. NPR and the BBC both did pretty well, about 4.0 on a 1 to 5 scale. Incidentally, PRI did a bit worse than NPR, at about 3.2, which also put it about on par with the Christian Science Monitor. MSNBC, CBS News, the New York Times, and such all fell about in the middle of the pack - with the Times doing a little better than the Washington Post, but all scoring pretty close to 2.5. Fox and Al-Jazeera tied for last place at 1.2.
There've been other studies, from Columbia on other subjects, one from MIT on information science related reporting, one from somebody I don't recall offhand on whether the news source attributes famous quotations correctly, and various other types, and Fox invariably does no better than average, usually much worse. The titles study stuck in memory because once the study's authors decided how to count a few things (i.e. Is calling the assistant dean of women's studies at Stanford just "Dean So and So" in the scrolling bit at the bottom a hit or a miss?), there wasn't a lot of room for errors and political biases.
For a while, Gnome's Nautilus was the default file manager for my KDE desktop install, while I waited for Dolphin to get a true delete command on the drop down menu. That's been fixed since at least Kubuntu 10.4, but I don't remember if it was done before 9.10 or not. Still KDE ran it like it was native.
Why KDE in more general terms? There's slightly more Gnomestuff that works properly in KDE than KDEstuff that works in Gnome (even though most apps, probably 95% or so, work with each). I use a few astronomy related apps that had problems under Gnome, and switched because they worked right in KDE, before I worried that much about looks, but I got to love the sheer customisability of KDE. You could make KDE look like a default Gnome install, or Win 7, or a lot of other things, or you could make it look like you thought different, different from just about anything else.
There's also Debian apps and software originally developed for Enlightenment, XFCE or other environments, that you won't find in any of the default sources for most KDE distros, that I've been able to run anyway.
KDE runs pretty fast on an old IBM Thinkpad R32 I have with only 512 Meg of ram. I was able to selectively turn on a lot of bells and whistles - some of them slowed it down a lot, but some didn't. I ended up with a laptop that could never run windows 7, running something that looked sharp and functioned about equivalently. (Remember, there were many people who advocated downgrading R32s back to Windows 2000 because they were slow running XP.). Maybe it's just my lack of understanding, but I couldn't coax that kind of performance out of the equivalent Ubuntu distro).
KDE shines if you like little apps, like weather forecasts. stock tickers, or sticky notes. There's a lot of variety with add ons for Google Gadgets, Screenlets, Super Karamba, and the built in Widgets. If you need something such as a display with separate I/O tracking for multiple network ports, a Hebrew calender conversion or a lunar phases display, there's a good chance it exists. If you want to get into writing software, these sorts of small applets are a great place to start, where people can contribute to the Linux community with relatively simple, easy to master tools that have some real use to others. Again, maybe this is just my lack of understanding, but KDE seems to do a better job of letting you keep such applets on just the virtual desktop you want than Gnome does, reducing clutter.
I mostly agree with the idea that we won't want much, if any, more resolution than is possible now. However, I have to question your assumptions in using pop music as a test for MP3s. The real question should be, could those same people hear a difference with other types of music? I'm a 50+ year old, and I can still spot the difference in some 256 kbs and 128 kbs MP3s in a/b tests, but I'm mostly listening to classical, jazz, and such. Not to diss all pop listeners, but pop is where you have a substantial sub-group of listeners who literally can't enjoy anything that's a pure instrumental piece, but absolutely have to have vocals, or to them, it's not music. Pop is where you have a chunk of listeners who don't sense any emotional content in melody or harmony unless the words tell them what emotions go with the chords. It's where you have some listeners who actively want music to be played in the background without being too distracting as they concentrate on other things, and expect every song to be finished in less than four minutes. It's where most listeners don't call in to complain if the radio DJ talks over part of the song. It's where we have some performers who can't perform live without autotune, and were picked because of their looks and/or how well they can dance, and some fans who will describe why they like that performer and talk for ten minutes without ever mentioning anything related to how the performer sounds. Again, that's not all pop listeners, and it's certainly not all pop music, but I'm gonna have to go with elitiest snob mode here, and say no, we're not going to let those people define what's adequate.
What amazes me is some people think convicts will give some kind of justice when the 'system has failed'. Hey, we put some of these people in prison because they preyed on the most vulnerable - now these people think they are going to rape a 240 lb. bodybuilding child molester and treat a 155 lb. beanpole who's just in there for writing bad checks as off limits to 'convict justice'? Why on earth is anyone able to write stupid enough to think a locked up, violent rapist is likely to pick his targets to further justice? Yet we allow it.
I don't want to buy a thirteenth aircraft carrier for a country that already has twelve, especially since the only other nation with even two is Italy, and I don't think it's rational to spend that kind of money just in case we get into a war with them again (Yes, I know we had a bit of a dustup with them seventy years ago, but still, I'm an optimist. For that matter, the UK has a single carrier, and we did fight them in 1812, so maybe the reason we have 11 deployed, 1 reserve and 1 in the oven is in case we have to fight England and Australia too while we're dealing with carrier owners France, Russia, India, Spain, Brazil, and Thailand, plus non carrier owners 'Best Korea', Libya, Afghanistan, Sealand, and the frelling Martians, all at once). No way going totally overboard on national defence should ever be a right. I'm not a paranoid idiot, why should I pay to humor paranoid idiocy? Both providing for the common defence and promoting the general welfare are in the Preamble to the US Constitution, together. You're certainly free to argue that health care is not what the 'promote the general welfare' clause was meant to cover and so the promote clause doesn't imply a right, but I'd argue that we are at least eight carriers above providing for the common defence, as well as 100% outside of the provide clause in funding the war on drugs, and 80 to 100% over in many other areas lumped under Homeland Security. Every single person who supports overspending my taxes on defence has already trampled my right to keep my own income to help pay for my own health care. Every single person who supported taking separate tax money out of the Social Security and Medicare funds and making it available for the general fund to spend on such other things as defence projects has already trampled on my quite legitimate rights. I'd be comfortable with the government either just giving me all my non income related taxes back, or using those taxes where they said they would. Your position seems to rule out the pay it back into the system option, but that leaves pay it back to me, not just keep it for more carriers. So, what's your opinion? If I don't have a right to government health care, do I have a right to keep some money so I can buy my own? Or does the common defence clause have no limits, while the general welfare clause does?
Oh, and a plastic surgeon is one who restores function and not just cosmetic appearance. People who only do cosmetic surgery can't be board certified plastic surgeons - that takes them being able to do functional repairs, such as making a broken wrist joint have more range of movement, or applying skin grafts to fix major burns. The guy who removed my ex-wife's melanoma and transplanted skin from her abdomen to cover a baseball sized area on top of her head with it, then did three more minor procedures to eventually draw the hairline back into place, all while still leaving her able to move her facial muscles, close her eyes, and move her jaw normally, was a board certified plastic surgeon. Yes, he gave her back a good cosmetic appearance as well, but that was the most trivial part of what he did. He learned in Vietnam, repairing mostly limb damage, and can count over a thousand people where he at least preserved some parts of the damaged limb, and a thousand more where he successfully reattached hands or fingers, or got a full range of motion out of a rebuilt elbow, wrist, or knee.
At least that situation is equal in some respects. If you never married the deadbeat, you can still become ineligible for the same reason once the judge approves child support. The biggest difference is usually the cost of compelling the unmarried father to take a paternity test. In some states, it also is significantly harder to get the authorities to track an unwed father down and administer such a test, as the authorities tend to remember all the cases where someone turned out not to be the father, and resist enforcement.
However, a lot of young men (and I use that term very loosely), will tell these future unemployed mothers all sorts of stories about how marriage itself can backfire on them in just such ways. The system sometimes penalises people honestly attempting to commit to a lifetime relationship, but among people below the poverty level, greatly exaggerated rumours make it all much worse.
There apparently isn't going to be a third Fantastic Four film. I doubt there will be a single sequel to Green Lantern. The Star Trek reboot must have not done well enough to get an immediate sequel either, and we're just coming up on the second attempt to reboot the Planet of the Apes, (apparently unconnected to the Ape Lincoln Memorial version).
It's not just that sacrifice isn't permanent. Things don't get permanently changed in general. For the Fantastic 4 films, why not cure THE Thing? Why not have Reed Richards sell flying cars and other ultra tech to everybody until the world looks different? Why not permanently kill Dr. Doom? For Trek, why not make the 2009 Kirk not a womanizer? Did we really need a new Chekov? (Not that there's anything wrong with having one, but in the original series, he was added to target the same young girl audience that was interested in the Monkees - not exactly a good reason to add one for the film). Hollywood slavishly retains some things and drops others, and usually doesn't see the bigger picture. In the original Wild Wild West, the two characters formed a balanced pair, one mostly Physical, one mostly Mental. The fact that we never saw the train crew in the original helped play up that fact, because the viewers didn't worry about whether they were there more to support the physical actions of West or the mental feats of Gordon. Original Trek did the same thing, but with a Physical-Mental-Emotional triad. Does anyone think that the people who made the film Wild Wild West took that into account one way or the other before deciding to show the train crew, or make the only source of comedic relief a 'pseudo-poofter' angle?
Weather prediction is not climate prediction! People have predicted climate accurately for hundreds of years, if not thousands. Hurricane season is a climate prediction - that hurricanes will happen in a certain part of the year, not randomly scattered. Tornado alley is a climate prediction - that tornados will happen in certain locations, year after year, during (wait for it) Tornado season! Every Farmer's Almanac prediction about the time to plant beans or carrots is a climate prediction. Those little tags that come on garden plants and show a map of the USA divided into zones, and say that a given plant is suitable for zones 5-7 - that's a climate prediction.
When we have had reliable observation on hurricane seasons for several hundred years, and we start seeing hurricane seasons that start early just in the last few years, that's an anomaly. Some of the anti global warming forces are trying to claim that all those Atlantic sea captains before about 1935 or so were unlearned savages, and nobody made accurate observations of storms or wind speeds or even knew what day of the month it was, just so the recent data doesn't look as anomalous as it is.
We've had radar tracking tornados since at least the 1950s, and good counts on the total numbers of storms for many years, say from 1970 on. We've had programs such as tornado observation from Skylab during the early 1970s to help check those results. We've had substantially the same radar coverage with the same instruments for the midwest since about 1990. But every time somebody upgrades a system, replaces an older radar assembly with doppler or some other improvement, somebody claims that the older system must have been missing a great many storms, and that's why we seem to be seeing more tornados, not because we've really had some recent peak years for tornados. For the anti-climate change faction, minor improvements in fundamentally good observations become major gains in accuracy. And of course, nobody in the 1880s really knew if the storm that destroyed their whole town was really a tornado or not, because everybody back then was illiterate peasants, so those numbers are not accurate anyways. Modern tools detect more storms, detect them faster, and spot more small, borderline tornadoes far from direct human observers, but only the climate change deniers would believe that increased numbers of EF3's and above, within obvious visual range of towns and cities, is just a radar artefact.
We've had markers on mountains showing where their tree-lines are, for hundreds of years. It's not uncommon for timber cutters to mark areas because tree-lines are sometimes not real visible outside of the growing seasons. It's also quite common for timber companies to only run fire roads as far as the tree-lines, and not unusual for them to make maps of their fire-roads and register them (often the timberline contours are shown specifically on these maps). We have tree-line photos for some locations as old as 1860. People sold them by the thousands as postcards for tourists. This gives us a bunch of data showing regional climates that have remained much the same, until recently, when tree-lines have started rising in many areas. But there's still climate change deniers trying to argue this away.
We have drilling records for various locations, recording how far down people have had to go to hit water. People have generally counted drilling rod sections and kept track of how deep they drilled since the Egyptians or so, and there's plenty of reliable records on how deep water tables are, particularly for the American west. But there's still climate change deniers trying to argue this evidence away, too.
That's all US centric. Europe has had generally stable populations in many areas for a thousand years or more. You could go to locations in England where people have been measuring how many inches of rain they got
Only a very small fraction of neutrinos are captured by any detector. Most pass through without interaction. It's not possible to produce a neutrino, and swear that you have actually captured that particular neutrino at another spot. What the Japanese did is ran a procedure that created only (or at least predominately) a particular type of neutrino, and looked to see if the neutrinos arriving at the detector were all the same type (or types). Since the detector was also capturing the normal amount of neutrinos from other sources, such as the sun, in the normal mix of types, all that could be determined was that the total percentages of various types was either going to match all the other natural sources plus a spike in the one type emitted, or it wasn't, in which case some of the neutrinos from the source were changing phase.
Anonymous Coward, again putting the A and C into character assassination.
Re:I'll wager $723.42 that IBM goes another 100 ye
on
IBM Turns 100
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· Score: 3, Funny
It's easy to get confused when it's all three letter acronyms: IBM death knell - JFK death knoll (yes I went there) - D&D death gnoll, it just goes on and on and on.
What you say is technically true, but let's look at that 'price you may not agree with' part. Sometimes, we're not just talking about 2x Walmart standard prices, plus Amazon shipping added, but about dealing through Amazon with someone who runs a small collectable store, who bought up some copies of a rare performance, and now wants triple digit pricing, plus 20% for shipping. The 'price' you pay can include all sorts of indirect prices, such as dealing with someone who is charging unrealistic luxury prices, but doesn't want to bother with the sort of service that normally goes with that luxury pricing. It's one thing to pay a premium for a rare item, another to pay a $20 shipping and handling surcharge on sending a single CD - in the latter case, wouldn't you feel like you were doing business with someone who thought you were a sucker? They might charge you the same total whether they put some of the costs over in the shipping and handling column or not, but just maybe you prefer to deal with people who are honest about how they make their profit. That's not a cash price, but it's a price.
Meanwhile, the people who originally made the CD may be reluctant to press new copies because they don't think there's enough demand - you're part of that demand, but they don't know about you, or don't care to find out. Part of the prices you pay may be that they don't become more clued in to their potential market, or that absolutely none of that extra you pay goes to the original artist.
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But the point is, the number of satellites should have nothing to do with whether a body is classified as a planet or not, because it's not logically connected to the classification. It's pretty intuitive that two planets of the same size could gobble up different numbers of smaller satellites on a pretty much random basis. We don't want to make a random factor paramount in defining something.
That bit about clearing orbits in the standard definition the IAU now uses... Isn't that an essentially random factor? You could have two planets the same mass and size, and if one of them is closer to a big gas giant world that does a lot of orbit clearing on its own, it would look like it had a clearer orbit than the other, wouldn't it? And, what about the objects being cleared? Doesn't their average orbital eccentricity have something to do with how swiftly they get assimilated as moons, nudged out of the region, and so on?
Once you include such odd concepts as the IAU chose as necessary to a definition, you lose your right to just say something such as "the number of satellites has nothing to do with whether a body is classified as a planet or not". See, your reason for rejecting it is because it's not logical to make something that isn't truly fundamental to your definition such a part of it. If you aren't applying that reason consistently to your own side of the discussion, that makes you a jerk. (Not you personally, I mean that hypothetical you that is known in real life as the IAU).
The trick there is, whatever we declare the worlds of an artificial rosette to be, what they are is whatever the transhuman species that made them calls them. Trust me - you don't want to get into an argument with people who can shoot you with a gun that causes your grandparents to have a 50 year string of bad luck, precluding you ever being born. Whether they call them "planets", "properly sorted and indexed lebensraum", or "the big round closets where I keep all my stuff when I'm back in this brane", we'd better stick to their definition.
But if you stop counting Pluto as a planet, and then you discover another Kuiper Belt object that's not only bigger than Eris but as big or bigger than Mercury, do you make it a planet, or do you take Mercury off the list?
Right now, the IAU definition of planet is deliberately limited to our own solar system, just so it doesn't apply to situations extra-solar astronomers have actually already found, or are very likely to find in the next few years (How do you determine what 'clears an orbit' in a young solar system where there's still lots of small stuff everywhere?). There's still a fair chance we will find something else in our own system that the definition either calls a planet or some sort of ambiguous case (If the albedo is average for an icy rock, then it's not a planet but if there's something darker on the surface, maybe it is...).
What has usually happened to complex, multi-part, legalistic definitions in the sciences? People tried to define every element on the periodic table as either a reactive element or an inert, 'noble' gas. Was there a move to take Xenon off the noble gas list when someone managed to get it to combine with fluorine under high enough pressures? Biologists had a big checklist for what constituted life - with sub-definitions of eating, excreting, reproducing, etc. When they first found viruses that could only reproduce by hijacking a cells reproductive copying systems, there was debate over whether viruses were truly alive - did anyone float a new, more complex definition of what counted as reproduction and demand that everything now fall squarely on one side or the other of the line they had drawn? Did they redraw the line again for Prions?
What you just wrote is totally true, and totally irrelevant. If the government slams these bratty kids hard enough to make the others back off, it goes on record as another example of the tyranny oppressing the people. We're talking about a government that is debating reducing only the social programs, ignoring the need to reduce security related spending in their talks, and so shifting towards more and more stick and less carrot, and shows every sign of going much further. These guys become another example of an insecure government trying to rule by fear and so proving it is becoming desperate and feeling vulnerable. The real resistance may have little or nothing to do with Anon/LulzSec. But, if the government screws up enough, the REAL resistance defines itself by succeeding at the public hangings, and those script kiddies can show up 5 seconds later and say, "Hey, I was part of the fight - those same people you just stuck their heads on pikes, they oppressed me. I fought for the cause. Anyone don't think I paid my dues, look at how they put me in prison and then kept me from finding work for years. I deserve a cushy job putting more heads on pikes, comrade!".
Point is, once the government puts you in prison for hacking Sony, you are stuck for life - either your own or the life of that government. It's a rough, tough economy out there, and the system holds lengthy grudges. To make the state die before you, you may have to become one of those guys who does the sort of thing the WW2 resistances did, like stringing fine wire at neck height in front of somebody's staff car. But if you were a political prisoner and not just a regular criminal, the new regime will let you have part of the credit, whether you did that much to earn it or not. You don't always get rated as a serious revolutionary because you actually threw the Molotovs, but sometimes just because someone in the old system acted like they were afraid of you.
Recent patent law rulings have made staying supposedly, deliberately ignorant of what the competition does in the same field less and less of a defense. Depending on just what the questions were, we may well be seeing the capstone case where several district courts have, between them, created an interpretation where the defending side is always "damned if they do, damned if they don't" regardless of the equities of the situation. If the questions were anything like you suggested, expect this one to be the case that has to go to SCOTUS for final resolution.
Dr. Dawkins pointed out certain problems with his model of Memes as a potential successor to Genes, and with Memes as hereditable units of any kind, in his early popular book, The Selfish Gene. * One basic problem is that Memes do not appear to prohibit unlimited blending as the genetic code does, and such blending, by Dr. Dawkins' own argument, should have precisely the same effect on Meme theory as unlimited blending of genes would have on Darwinian evolution. All the problems he himself acknowledged with Meme theory remain unsolved and largely unaddressed, and yet Dr. Dawkins has proceeded in every book since where he mentions Memes to simply handwave over his own earlier objections as though they have been fixed elsewhere, without being able to cite any sources. While Dr. Dawkins expressed hopes that Memetics can be placed on a truely scientific footing, there's no indication what-so-ever it has actually happened, and claiming ones opponent is Meme parasitised has become a tool for stifling dissent via a concealed ad hominem attack. That's one example of what people mean by saying he fails to re-examine his own arguments, and since not just some of his followers but he himself has used Meme theory to 'prove' the irrationality of his opponents, yes, he is a demagogue.
* Memes are discussed starting on page 203 of the Oxford University press paperback edition. Dawkins introduces his first specifically religious meme "life after death", on page 207, in the same paragraph where he describes some of what memes do as parasitization of the brain for the first time. He starts admitting there are some problems, notably with copying fidelity, on page 209. He uses the word blending in that very same paragraph, and clearly indicates he's using it in the same sense as for genetics, and also acknowledges meme mutation would have to be continueous and not descrete, another problem.
There actually was a short film based on space invaders. It was used as filler between movies on HBO in their very early days, and was credited as someone's student animation project. It involved a bunch of characters off of pinball games, including an Egyptian style god, coming to life and trying to fight off the waves of space invaders and defend civilians. Scenes where the defenders ducked and popped out from behind brownstones much like using the four space invaders shield walls still stick in my mind, but that's as much as I remember.
There is a time when what you have said of Will is true, and, specifically for you, an interval soon to come when it ceases being true. (and maybe a time when it is true again, if the Joy of Matter lies at the end of the aeons). This is not the place to speak of such things, nor are we in Daath where such things are neither spoken of or ignored. The request to address you despite this comes neither from my Will or my Desire (for certain values of my acceptable to majority consensus in western civilization).
The Why would anybody give them a loan? question is the most important. I deal with a number of living or deceased authors taxes, estates and financial instruments (mostly setting up S-corp based family trusts and filing the resulting yearly papers with the government). I've heard from several authors that they quit their day job when income from book sales was sufficient, only to find they had a much harder time getting credit. (In once case, the author was told by the dealer he could not finance with GMAC for a car loan, when he had 400,000+ in sales the year before, because the income was still irregular, whereas if he had kept that job at the co-op selling livestock feed he would have good enough credit to qualify).
In a way though, it's unfair to ask that question of the GP. Many banks are so incredibly irrational in deciding who they want to loan money to, and credit assurance organizations are so arbitrary in rating them, that even a normally good answer - "Because the bank will make lots and lots of money at very low risk and here's the math..." - won't cut it. I can imagine some reasons why I might give a music startup a loan and others why I might not - I once gave a small indy film-maker a loan and got it back quite nicely - but the people who make most loans are from my experience, all crazy, so there are no good answers why they would or wouldn't do something.
There are a whole hell of a lot of people who want to make it big big! BIG!!. Just look at all the people who are waiting for their big break in Hollywood while waiting tables or washing cars - there are literally a million people jockying for those few '10 Million a picture' jobs, and 99.something % of them have no chance at all by any objective measure. A person who gets a screen credit in a single motion picture during their acting career is in the top 1% of screen actors guild members. People most viewers think of as middle of the line actors (i.e. Whoopee Goldberg), are statistically in the top 1/100th of 1% by earnings, number of films or shows they have appeared on, recognizability and similar measures.
This goes for somewhat lesser extent for pop musicians, athletes (particularly football players) and many others. There's really no point in asking If these contracts are known for being so bad, why do people continue to sign them?, because it's like asking these same people why they took that triple dog dare and got their tongue stuck to a pole. An actor/rockstar/celebrity is either an idiot who has let his dream of being big enough to overcome the emptiness in his soul overwhelm everything else, or he has some actual understanding of the odds, some actual understanding of his own worth, and (by the time he's done a few contracts) knows that all those idiots aren't just competition, but a thing that keeps the real actors down come contract time. Any serious actor is aware that the producers can always find somebody who will do the job for a pittance just to break in. He or she is aware that the producers have a generalised contempt for the actors they deal with that seems fundamental to their business models, and that he or she has to negotiate every deal through that. He or she swiftly hires an agent to handle that part.
The first rule of Usenet is we do not talk about Usenet.
The second rule of Usenet is we wave our hands in their faces and say "These are not the NZBs you're looking for."
Usenet - making old tech do things sane nature never intended to allow fall into the clever hands and febrile minds of mortals. (With NZB and PAR2 as the neck-bolts of our shambling creations brought back from beyond the ultimate veil).
Unicellular life does not have an easier time evolving - it's a false concept in Evolution - Here's just the simplest of several reasons why.
First, we have to define what we mean by evolving - let's go with one of the simplest measures - species lifetime. A species either dies without a successor or gives rise to its own successor, which is a new species. For simplicity, a new species happens when the successors cannot still interbreed at all with the original.
There are more complicated definitions than those, but they are mostly agreed on in a specific context among professionals - for example, sometimes a species gives rise to another, but is still around as well, so it's not clear yet if the second should be called a successor, or sometimes we call things separate species even though some interbreeding is still possible (as for Zebras and Horses). I don't want to get into how and why these cases don't affect my basic line of thought here, as that's college level specialization in Biology to deal with, you probably won't get it from a general course.
Here's the basic idea: Organisms survive because they are pretty well adapted to their environment. In improvement is a small step towards more perfect adaptation, and huge jumps are not how evolution works. A typical good mutation means an organism reproduces just a little bit better than the ones without that mutation. Usually, it's more a matter of having 1.01 offsprings when the competitors have on average only 0.99 than a big spike. (Yes, there are exceptions, but usually...) A really simple organism has only a few genes - So each mutation is proportionately bigger. If only two genes control flagellum length in a bacterium, mutations are overwhelmingly too big to be of benefit, while if 38 genes control height in a Giraffe, a mutation in just one can occasionally be a good one, resulting in just enough of a tweak to make that Giraffe a little more successful than its neighbors. The technical term for this involves morpheme space - in a simple, low gene organism, even the simplest single point mutation typically results in a large jump across morpheme space for the organism, to a point that is nowhere close to any adaptation needed for its environment.
Here's an elaboration: More complex organisms can have lots of small tweaks which may be a bit negative by themselves, without dying of them. Bad genes can be just bad enough to linger for many generations without ever really spreading widely through the species. When one organism get a potentially positive mutation, one or more of those negatives may also become a positive in conjunction with the new gene. To use a simple textbook model that probably isn't a real example, A giraffe may get a slightly longer neck, and a gene that normally resulted in a slight problem with high blood pressure may turn out to now be needed to keep the new, taller giraffe from fainting spells. Again, this won't work as well in really simple organisms, and may not happen at all, but it may happen with complex ones and speed up splitting off new species.
Bacteria mutate a lot. But not all mutation affects natural selection. there are whole classes of mutation normally called stochastic. Stochastic normally means pretty much the same as random, and mutation is always random in a sense, but Darwin's model is that Natural Selection gives a direction to what would otherwise stay a random process. Stochastic mutations are ones where there doesn't seem to be any selection pressure. Thinking that the high percentage of bacterial and virus mutations that are stochastic get selected like other mutations is usually why people assume bacteria or viruses are ultra rapid evolvers.
It seems likely that both the fast reproductive rate and the high number of offspring could drive rapid evolution in simple lifeforms if it were not that these other factors also apply, but I don't see how that could be proved or disproved.
In 2002, Columbia School of Journalism studied how various news sources handled titles and signifiers. For example, if somebody was described as a retired Major, Columbia checked to see if both they were commissioned and made rank, and if they had enough time in to count as retired. If somebody was described as a psychiatrist, did they really have the full MD related degree, or were they maybe a psychologist instead. Sources that got titles and related right got higher scores. For this study, Columbia ignored everything else, just this one measure of accuracy, one that has few or no subjective components. NPR and the BBC both did pretty well, about 4.0 on a 1 to 5 scale. Incidentally, PRI did a bit worse than NPR, at about 3.2, which also put it about on par with the Christian Science Monitor. MSNBC, CBS News, the New York Times, and such all fell about in the middle of the pack - with the Times doing a little better than the Washington Post, but all scoring pretty close to 2.5. Fox and Al-Jazeera tied for last place at 1.2.
There've been other studies, from Columbia on other subjects, one from MIT on information science related reporting, one from somebody I don't recall offhand on whether the news source attributes famous quotations correctly, and various other types, and Fox invariably does no better than average, usually much worse. The titles study stuck in memory because once the study's authors decided how to count a few things (i.e. Is calling the assistant dean of women's studies at Stanford just "Dean So and So" in the scrolling bit at the bottom a hit or a miss?), there wasn't a lot of room for errors and political biases.
For a while, Gnome's Nautilus was the default file manager for my KDE desktop install, while I waited for Dolphin to get a true delete command on the drop down menu. That's been fixed since at least Kubuntu 10.4, but I don't remember if it was done before 9.10 or not. Still KDE ran it like it was native.
Why KDE in more general terms? There's slightly more Gnomestuff that works properly in KDE than KDEstuff that works in Gnome (even though most apps, probably 95% or so, work with each). I use a few astronomy related apps that had problems under Gnome, and switched because they worked right in KDE, before I worried that much about looks, but I got to love the sheer customisability of KDE. You could make KDE look like a default Gnome install, or Win 7, or a lot of other things, or you could make it look like you thought different, different from just about anything else.
There's also Debian apps and software originally developed for Enlightenment, XFCE or other environments, that you won't find in any of the default sources for most KDE distros, that I've been able to run anyway.
KDE runs pretty fast on an old IBM Thinkpad R32 I have with only 512 Meg of ram. I was able to selectively turn on a lot of bells and whistles - some of them slowed it down a lot, but some didn't. I ended up with a laptop that could never run windows 7, running something that looked sharp and functioned about equivalently. (Remember, there were many people who advocated downgrading R32s back to Windows 2000 because they were slow running XP.). Maybe it's just my lack of understanding, but I couldn't coax that kind of performance out of the equivalent Ubuntu distro).
KDE shines if you like little apps, like weather forecasts. stock tickers, or sticky notes. There's a lot of variety with add ons for Google Gadgets, Screenlets, Super Karamba, and the built in Widgets. If you need something such as a display with separate I/O tracking for multiple network ports, a Hebrew calender conversion or a lunar phases display, there's a good chance it exists. If you want to get into writing software, these sorts of small applets are a great place to start, where people can contribute to the Linux community with relatively simple, easy to master tools that have some real use to others. Again, maybe this is just my lack of understanding, but KDE seems to do a better job of letting you keep such applets on just the virtual desktop you want than Gnome does, reducing clutter.
But obviously a Gnome app.
I mostly agree with the idea that we won't want much, if any, more resolution than is possible now. However, I have to question your assumptions in using pop music as a test for MP3s. The real question should be, could those same people hear a difference with other types of music? I'm a 50+ year old, and I can still spot the difference in some 256 kbs and 128 kbs MP3s in a/b tests, but I'm mostly listening to classical, jazz, and such. Not to diss all pop listeners, but pop is where you have a substantial sub-group of listeners who literally can't enjoy anything that's a pure instrumental piece, but absolutely have to have vocals, or to them, it's not music. Pop is where you have a chunk of listeners who don't sense any emotional content in melody or harmony unless the words tell them what emotions go with the chords. It's where you have some listeners who actively want music to be played in the background without being too distracting as they concentrate on other things, and expect every song to be finished in less than four minutes. It's where most listeners don't call in to complain if the radio DJ talks over part of the song. It's where we have some performers who can't perform live without autotune, and were picked because of their looks and/or how well they can dance, and some fans who will describe why they like that performer and talk for ten minutes without ever mentioning anything related to how the performer sounds. Again, that's not all pop listeners, and it's certainly not all pop music, but I'm gonna have to go with elitiest snob mode here, and say no, we're not going to let those people define what's adequate.
What amazes me is some people think convicts will give some kind of justice when the 'system has failed'. Hey, we put some of these people in prison because they preyed on the most vulnerable - now these people think they are going to rape a 240 lb. bodybuilding child molester and treat a 155 lb. beanpole who's just in there for writing bad checks as off limits to 'convict justice'? Why on earth is anyone able to write stupid enough to think a locked up, violent rapist is likely to pick his targets to further justice? Yet we allow it.
I don't want to buy a thirteenth aircraft carrier for a country that already has twelve, especially since the only other nation with even two is Italy, and I don't think it's rational to spend that kind of money just in case we get into a war with them again (Yes, I know we had a bit of a dustup with them seventy years ago, but still, I'm an optimist. For that matter, the UK has a single carrier, and we did fight them in 1812, so maybe the reason we have 11 deployed, 1 reserve and 1 in the oven is in case we have to fight England and Australia too while we're dealing with carrier owners France, Russia, India, Spain, Brazil, and Thailand, plus non carrier owners 'Best Korea', Libya, Afghanistan, Sealand, and the frelling Martians, all at once). No way going totally overboard on national defence should ever be a right. I'm not a paranoid idiot, why should I pay to humor paranoid idiocy?
Both providing for the common defence and promoting the general welfare are in the Preamble to the US Constitution, together. You're certainly free to argue that health care is not what the 'promote the general welfare' clause was meant to cover and so the promote clause doesn't imply a right, but I'd argue that we are at least eight carriers above providing for the common defence, as well as 100% outside of the provide clause in funding the war on drugs, and 80 to 100% over in many other areas lumped under Homeland Security. Every single person who supports overspending my taxes on defence has already trampled my right to keep my own income to help pay for my own health care. Every single person who supported taking separate tax money out of the Social Security and Medicare funds and making it available for the general fund to spend on such other things as defence projects has already trampled on my quite legitimate rights. I'd be comfortable with the government either just giving me all my non income related taxes back, or using those taxes where they said they would. Your position seems to rule out the pay it back into the system option, but that leaves pay it back to me, not just keep it for more carriers. So, what's your opinion? If I don't have a right to government health care, do I have a right to keep some money so I can buy my own? Or does the common defence clause have no limits, while the general welfare clause does?
Oh, and a plastic surgeon is one who restores function and not just cosmetic appearance. People who only do cosmetic surgery can't be board certified plastic surgeons - that takes them being able to do functional repairs, such as making a broken wrist joint have more range of movement, or applying skin grafts to fix major burns. The guy who removed my ex-wife's melanoma and transplanted skin from her abdomen to cover a baseball sized area on top of her head with it, then did three more minor procedures to eventually draw the hairline back into place, all while still leaving her able to move her facial muscles, close her eyes, and move her jaw normally, was a board certified plastic surgeon. Yes, he gave her back a good cosmetic appearance as well, but that was the most trivial part of what he did. He learned in Vietnam, repairing mostly limb damage, and can count over a thousand people where he at least preserved some parts of the damaged limb, and a thousand more where he successfully reattached hands or fingers, or got a full range of motion out of a rebuilt elbow, wrist, or knee.
At least that situation is equal in some respects. If you never married the deadbeat, you can still become ineligible for the same reason once the judge approves child support. The biggest difference is usually the cost of compelling the unmarried father to take a paternity test. In some states, it also is significantly harder to get the authorities to track an unwed father down and administer such a test, as the authorities tend to remember all the cases where someone turned out not to be the father, and resist enforcement.
However, a lot of young men (and I use that term very loosely), will tell these future unemployed mothers all sorts of stories about how marriage itself can backfire on them in just such ways. The system sometimes penalises people honestly attempting to commit to a lifetime relationship, but among people below the poverty level, greatly exaggerated rumours make it all much worse.
There apparently isn't going to be a third Fantastic Four film. I doubt there will be a single sequel to Green Lantern. The Star Trek reboot must have not done well enough to get an immediate sequel either, and we're just coming up on the second attempt to reboot the Planet of the Apes, (apparently unconnected to the Ape Lincoln Memorial version).
It's not just that sacrifice isn't permanent. Things don't get permanently changed in general. For the Fantastic 4 films, why not cure THE Thing? Why not have Reed Richards sell flying cars and other ultra tech to everybody until the world looks different? Why not permanently kill Dr. Doom? For Trek, why not make the 2009 Kirk not a womanizer? Did we really need a new Chekov? (Not that there's anything wrong with having one, but in the original series, he was added to target the same young girl audience that was interested in the Monkees - not exactly a good reason to add one for the film).
Hollywood slavishly retains some things and drops others, and usually doesn't see the bigger picture. In the original Wild Wild West, the two characters formed a balanced pair, one mostly Physical, one mostly Mental. The fact that we never saw the train crew in the original helped play up that fact, because the viewers didn't worry about whether they were there more to support the physical actions of West or the mental feats of Gordon. Original Trek did the same thing, but with a Physical-Mental-Emotional triad. Does anyone think that the people who made the film Wild Wild West took that into account one way or the other before deciding to show the train crew, or make the only source of comedic relief a 'pseudo-poofter' angle?
Weather prediction is not climate prediction!
People have predicted climate accurately for hundreds of years, if not thousands. Hurricane season is a climate prediction - that hurricanes will happen in a certain part of the year, not randomly scattered. Tornado alley is a climate prediction - that tornados will happen in certain locations, year after year, during (wait for it) Tornado season! Every Farmer's Almanac prediction about the time to plant beans or carrots is a climate prediction. Those little tags that come on garden plants and show a map of the USA divided into zones, and say that a given plant is suitable for zones 5-7 - that's a climate prediction.
When we have had reliable observation on hurricane seasons for several hundred years, and we start seeing hurricane seasons that start early just in the last few years, that's an anomaly. Some of the anti global warming forces are trying to claim that all those Atlantic sea captains before about 1935 or so were unlearned savages, and nobody made accurate observations of storms or wind speeds or even knew what day of the month it was, just so the recent data doesn't look as anomalous as it is.
We've had radar tracking tornados since at least the 1950s, and good counts on the total numbers of storms for many years, say from 1970 on. We've had programs such as tornado observation from Skylab during the early 1970s to help check those results. We've had substantially the same radar coverage with the same instruments for the midwest since about 1990. But every time somebody upgrades a system, replaces an older radar assembly with doppler or some other improvement, somebody claims that the older system must have been missing a great many storms, and that's why we seem to be seeing more tornados, not because we've really had some recent peak years for tornados. For the anti-climate change faction, minor improvements in fundamentally good observations become major gains in accuracy. And of course, nobody in the 1880s really knew if the storm that destroyed their whole town was really a tornado or not, because everybody back then was illiterate peasants, so those numbers are not accurate anyways. Modern tools detect more storms, detect them faster, and spot more small, borderline tornadoes far from direct human observers, but only the climate change deniers would believe that increased numbers of EF3's and above, within obvious visual range of towns and cities, is just a radar artefact.
We've had markers on mountains showing where their tree-lines are, for hundreds of years. It's not uncommon for timber cutters to mark areas because tree-lines are sometimes not real visible outside of the growing seasons. It's also quite common for timber companies to only run fire roads as far as the tree-lines, and not unusual for them to make maps of their fire-roads and register them (often the timberline contours are shown specifically on these maps). We have tree-line photos for some locations as old as 1860. People sold them by the thousands as postcards for tourists. This gives us a bunch of data showing regional climates that have remained much the same, until recently, when tree-lines have started rising in many areas. But there's still climate change deniers trying to argue this away.
We have drilling records for various locations, recording how far down people have had to go to hit water. People have generally counted drilling rod sections and kept track of how deep they drilled since the Egyptians or so, and there's plenty of reliable records on how deep water tables are, particularly for the American west. But there's still climate change deniers trying to argue this evidence away, too.
That's all US centric. Europe has had generally stable populations in many areas for a thousand years or more. You could go to locations in England where people have been measuring how many inches of rain they got
Only a very small fraction of neutrinos are captured by any detector. Most pass through without interaction. It's not possible to produce a neutrino, and swear that you have actually captured that particular neutrino at another spot. What the Japanese did is ran a procedure that created only (or at least predominately) a particular type of neutrino, and looked to see if the neutrinos arriving at the detector were all the same type (or types). Since the detector was also capturing the normal amount of neutrinos from other sources, such as the sun, in the normal mix of types, all that could be determined was that the total percentages of various types was either going to match all the other natural sources plus a spike in the one type emitted, or it wasn't, in which case some of the neutrinos from the source were changing phase.
Anonymous Coward, again putting the A and C into character assassination.
It's easy to get confused when it's all three letter acronyms: IBM death knell - JFK death knoll (yes I went there) - D&D death gnoll, it just goes on and on and on.
What you say is technically true, but let's look at that 'price you may not agree with' part. Sometimes, we're not just talking about 2x Walmart standard prices, plus Amazon shipping added, but about dealing through Amazon with someone who runs a small collectable store, who bought up some copies of a rare performance, and now wants triple digit pricing, plus 20% for shipping. The 'price' you pay can include all sorts of indirect prices, such as dealing with someone who is charging unrealistic luxury prices, but doesn't want to bother with the sort of service that normally goes with that luxury pricing. It's one thing to pay a premium for a rare item, another to pay a $20 shipping and handling surcharge on sending a single CD - in the latter case, wouldn't you feel like you were doing business with someone who thought you were a sucker? They might charge you the same total whether they put some of the costs over in the shipping and handling column or not, but just maybe you prefer to deal with people who are honest about how they make their profit. That's not a cash price, but it's a price.
Meanwhile, the people who originally made the CD may be reluctant to press new copies because they don't think there's enough demand - you're part of that demand, but they don't know about you, or don't care to find out. Part of the prices you pay may be that they don't become more clued in to their potential market, or that absolutely none of that extra you pay goes to the original artist.
You're lucky it was just the differential griddlespring. Mine turned out to be a Prall sprue issue.