Why is it so important that someone have the ability to reach rock-star level status?,
People need to really read that question literally - you're not claiming that rock-star status is bad, or that nobody should be 'allowed' to become that popular, but asking why that matters so much it swamps other issues. Maybe it is more important that any people who can create or perform decently and become moderately popular have a fair chance to get to 'I can do this full time and quit my day job' status. That's as much a 'fairness' issue as 'people who are really excellent should be able to rise to the top', to say 'people who are pretty good should get rewarded better than people who are lousy'.
There are industries such as pro sports and acting, where the top few have 'rock-star' status, but the base starts at or below minimum wage. There are industries where all members make a pretty good income but nobody goes three orders of magnitude higher. Nobody thinks it's really the most/sole/only important thing if somehow the best professional astronomers get paid millions a year and have first choice of all the telescope time in the world. We (as a culture) surely don't want brain surgeons to mostly put in long hours in very poor working conditions for less than break even pay so that a few of the best can command 50 million+ a year. The film industry may be fine with a few Tom Cruises at the top and a lot of actor's equity members waiting on tables hoping for a big break, but they don't want the same huge spread for directors or soundtrack composers, or even gaffers and best boys. You can do accomplished work and still starve to death as a painter, but not as an architect.
A few highly paid examples at the top and lots of proles at the bottom seems to happen where publicity and image play a huge role in selection. There are lots of jobs where the last thing we want is people getting paid based on image regardless of objective ability. I, at least, don't want an oncologist being told by a manager he can make 3% more if he gets this additional board certification, but 300% more if he gets his teeth capped.
I'm glad you wrote 'a monopoly abusing its position' and not 'having a monopoly'. The argument is:
1. Having a monopoly isn't illegal in itself, just abusing one. Under antitrust law, it's necessary to prove a monopoly exists, but that's just the first step to proving something illegal happened. 2. If the government awards some privilege that creates a monopoly (or in this case, extends one), then exercising that privilege isn't an abuse, it's just what the law intended. 3. Other actions, such as colluding to fix prices in an industry, are outside of the government's granting of privilege and so could still be illegal.
I'm not just debating the semantics of "If the government does it, that means it's legal." here. The breakup of 'Ma Bell' is a great example. Nobody reasonable denied that Bell was a monopoly. Allegations of its being abusive hinged on whether it made its money using the advantages that the government granted (i.e. right of way), or by other methods not connected to the law. The phone company tried for years to claim all their profit margin came either from being a physical or natural monopoly, or from law. High barriers to entry, for example would be a natural monopoly - it's expensive for anyone else to run a second set of wires to all subscribers. Privilege would be the government granted easements that had a condition of providing access to scattered farmhouses and other low profit clientele. If Bell had been able to prove that those factors were the full extent of the matter, the breakup would never have happened.
True, very early adopters find themselves in a sort of void, with nobody else connected, and support that still needs lots of debugging and testing. But, it's a high potential value void - the few people around are other early adopters, who tend to be technically literate and educated, and anyone in early can spread the word to their own friends, or other people they would like to see join them. Early adopters can have a great deal of control over the direction the system evolves (usually), and more personal contact with the system's originator(s). This has been true at least since the founding of Usenet. When there were only a few hundred people on, they tended to be people with a shared interest in computer science, a good chance of knowing the answers to some questions of mutual interest, and a tendency to stay civilised, so potential value was very high. Endless September is effectively the perpetual dilution of remaining potential value.The original incorporation of binary files added a lot of value, whereas a better binary encoding (i.e. Yenc), adds only marginal value in large part because of the number of latecomers now in the system. (Yes, I'm being elitist here).
For a more modern case, Farmville will add a certain amount of value to its system, as arguably the best game of its kind. The next such game will add less value in the eyes of most current users, even if it's arguably a better game, because more 'clueless newbies' will join in the meantime.
Put another way, why can't the average Joe get 88/3rds in punitive damages? Why does the average person wining a suit face a cap of triple damages, even after he or she has been required to prove that there's more than simple negligence involved, but some entities don't? What makes them special under law?
Watch "A New Hope", for the scene where Obi-Wan tells Luke he knew Luke's father in the Clone Wars. That's a classic throw away line. The writer thinks, "Where could they know each other from? I know, they were in the army together. Hey, it's SF, do they even have an army? Well, space navy or whatever... Anyhoo, they were in the war together. That oughtta fit with the title. We got this new rebellion, and now I should mention older wars so Star Wars makes more sense. Vietnam? No it's space, so they were in a spacy sounding war together. Hey, how about 'Clone Wars'?"
At that point. Lucas has no idea who or what the clones were clones of, which side the clones fought on, or anything else about the Clone Wars, just that they give the film a feel that fits his title. Later, when he writes sequels, prequels, and Christmas specials, he goes back to look for hooks that can anchor them into the same universe, and decides to make this one of his hooks.
That's not bad writing. It's also not good writing in and of itself. A half way competent writer normally asks some questions that don't follow from the basic plot ("OK, so Agent Clarice eventually stops Lecter, but what makes her succeed when others have failed? She's more committed. Why is she more committed? She really empathises with victims. I'd better write a scene to emphasise that." The writer looks for chances to fit that scene in, and a month later, realises he hasn't written a scene where Lecter tries his special mind screwing powers on Clarice yet, and realises he could probably combine the two. A week after that, the writer realises what the title of his work should be.). These days, college writing courses will teach people to add detail or individual touches to any line that comes out as cliched as "They met in the war" does in the short form. Lots of writers have learned, if you do this, you also automatically create hooks you can go back to if you want a sequel or whatever. Once it's clear that Kirk and Spock went through the academy together, a prequel about those days becomes an easier option. If the original throw away line says the academy is in Frisco, there's a setting for the new story, already picked. (Remember, for Trek, it was part of the basic rules not to show Trek era Earth, so references to where the academy was were never expected to be all that important until that rule was changed. In that case, the throw away nature of the line is more obvious than most.)
Nuclear reactions don't conserve the number of subatomic particles. They conserve matter/energy, Baryon number (if there are any Baryons involved), and charge. Some also conserve 'spin'. As simple a reaction as neutron decay shows this. A neutron (1 particle) splits into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino (3 particles). That's beta decay. When the initial neutron is in a nucleus, the resulting proton stays there. The total mass of the three particles, plus the kinetic energy added to the electron and neutrino (which both fly out of the nucleus) is the same as the total mass and kinetic energy of the original neutron. If you're talking massive particles, the electron certainly at least has a bit of mass, and the neutrino very probably does by current theories. You do start with one Baryon and end with one, as the other particles aren't Baryons - that's probably what you are thinking of. That's all classical Nucleonics.
You can also model it in Quantum Chromodynamics as a reaction involving three quarks. The quarks are two downs and an up in the neutron, and you end up with two ups and a down in the proton, so the number of quarks is technically conserved, but you also end up with the non-quark based particles (the electron and neutrino), so looked at that way, you're going from three particles to five. The more detailed version of the Quark conversion postulates a W- boson briefly exists, and that's a rather massive*, if short lived particle, so maybe the whole thing goes 3->4->5. Oh, and just because two quarks appear unchanged, doesn't mean that what's actually happened. It's not really true to assume one down flipped to an up and the others didn't do anything.
* 80.4 GeV/c^2, roughly 100 times as massive as the initial neutron, and actually heavier than a whole iron atom. That's certainly massive particles being changed, which is a darned good reason Baryon conservation should not be translated to mean massive particle conservation. Baryon conservation is also considered an empirical law - it's assumed to be true so as to explain why protons don't decay, but maybe protons do decay over very long timespans and the law may not be absolute.
Kirk ends up living in the country and raising horses (at least in the Nexus), and Picard retires to run a winery. Obviously, Star Fleet captains get paid in acreage.
If you could:
1. Block the politicians form becoming industry shills afterwards, even for just four or five years after the leave office.
2. Make them rely on the same public retirement system and medical system as everyone else.
3. Keep them from controlling their own payraises.
Then it wouldn't be necessary to have term limits or recalls. The people who would stay with the job under those conditions would only need to be selected on the basis of individual performance.
It's probably true, however unlikely it seems to you, but one of the best proofs doesn't come from animals. Plants don't wander around - Once a tree grows in a spot, it's committed. Some plants in particular drop heavy nuts or seeds that will only get transported as far as animals will move them at the very most, and some spread by runners or similar methods that mean the offspring will always be close to the parent and moving across large distances takes many generations. For one example that's been particularly useful to biologists, evergreens that live on tops of mountains above the deciduous tree line usually stay there unless the climate gets so warm that tree-line moves higher than the mountaintop. Climate change at one rate may let some of these species relocate, but at a faster rate will simply wipe them out locally. In the same way, some plant diseases may spread widely only if the tree-line becomes so low, the mountain peaks are all connected. That's a distinctive, temperature related effect. We can look at plant fossils and make some pretty good estimates of how long it took for prehistoric changes, in particular, there are formulas based on longevity and reproductive frequency that hold if species X stays viable in some area for Y time, the rate of change had to be slower than Z. I't's a pretty good argument if species are now going locally extinct at 10xZ or 50xZ rate, that nothing like that has happened in pre human times, or we wouldn't have living examples of those species. Because some of the currently observed rates can be tens or more times faster than the prehistoric rates, rather than just, say 50% faster, it's considered an unambiguous type of evidence.
To be fair, even this line of reasoning takes a lot of crosschecking. Plenty of legitimate scientific disputes exist over just how big a locale is meaningful, or how many different species should be checked before the results deserve a certain level of confidence, or whether the scars left by a particular plant disease are uniformly distinctive. For some cases, scientists do have to consider other events that may have happened that fast in prehistoric times (Dinos weren't the only thing clobbered by that asteroid 60 million years ago). So, it may be only fair to say, "unless the Cretacious extinctions were really caused by some sort of warming cycle and not a massive shield volcano super-eruption, asteroid impacts, or alien trophy hunters, nothing like this, this fast, has ever happened before." But, within limits such as that, the evidence is mounting.
Anyone who gets paid can be said to have an agenda. Any public university has some connections to people who get paid to do government. Ergo, people who don't have an agenda = a null set = invisible pink unicorns. The very idea of ice age and inter ice age periods means there must have been times when Greenland lost Ice before, as you point out. So? Who on the global warming side is claiming differently, and why are you attacking the straw man that somebody is making that claim, instead of addressing the real claim that this warm period exists and is man made. If we have to prove that nothing even vaguely like this ever happened before or it can't be man made this time, then humans didn't hunt the passenger pigeon to extinction, because extinctions have happened before there were people. Computerised trading didn't have any effects on the latest stock market crash, because crashes have happened before there were computers. Vaccines don't protect against plagues, because plagues died out before they killed everybody, long before there were vaccines.
Please go play in heavy traffic - you see, you've never been run over by a semi before, so by your logic, whether you look at the stoplights or not, it can't happen this time.
It never looks like "HAVE to" for a police state. There's always an apparent alternative someone claims will work, for example, privatising the prisons and running them at a profit to fund the rest of the government, or phasing out some 'unneeded' programs such as inspecting the packing plants. These alternatives always involve expanding the police side of the state if implemented, i.e. first you get the prisons making a profit, then you increase the number of people in prison, or first you get the government out of 'unneeded' social services, but then you add the savings to the police state side of the budget rather than give the taxpayers a rebate. When people steer away from these proposals, either they have gotten smart and realised the numbers don't add up, or they have gotten a moral compass. Given how improbable 'smart' is, 'decent' actually makes the most sense as an alternate hypothesis.
If a person knows they are a poor fit in their role in the military and really doesn't think they can adapt, there are some options to get a formal discharge and get out. These work better when it's not just a response to personal danger, as it's assumed you understood that it's a dangerous occupation when you signed. In my own time serving, I saw people who had legitimate moral issues, and some of whom had effectively become pacifists, and others who were having psychological issues and experiencing severe stresses. In fact, I saw some people who had more trouble with stresses from non-combat service than many combat veterans did. Unfortunately, there was sometimes a tendency to assume in either case they were just cowards, but there are some safeguards in place, to at least try and deal with the cases where it's, as you put it, unhealthy, either for the individual or others around them.
The whole reason to have multiple categories of discharge is to deal with this issue, so that someone can leave, even under strained terms with the system, without it automatically resulting in a dishonorable discharge. People discharged after less than 180 days in service usually get an entry level discharge, which nominally has no good or bad connotations, and general discharges are usually used where the person was in longer but became either physically or psychologically unable to continue. The easiest way to get into real trouble is to just up and leave before seeking an official resolution such as these routes.
More to the point, once the compromise is massively widespread and definitely already in the hands of enemy forces, there is no way our own people seeing it will result in further compromise to the enemy, so the only effect left for non-enemy personnel is the possible negative morale effect. Even if the law technically supports it, isn't worrying so quickly about the possible morale implications from an inconvenient set of facts, a sign that the administration is refusing to face up to much more primary implications of those facts. I know that when, for just one example, when it was first learned secrets being compromised may have helped the USSR develop its own nuclear weapons program, the joint chiefs and Dept. of Defense didn't focus on how that news would dampen the morale of US troops, but on the strategic and tactical implications for the whole free world.
It's an interesting comparison you offer, but I'm not sure what conclusion should be drawn as to safety. Half life for the Antimony (125Sb) would be 1008 days, so at 30 years out, we are looking at about 1/16th of the contribution you are projecting for 20 years. The numbers you use suggest human return certainly ought to be possible within 30 years, if not 20, even erring on the side of extreme caution.
But, I doubt there is a single mammalian species in the area that has half as long a typical time to reproductive maturity as humans. If a species such as deer or wild dogs is showing declining reproduction when they mature in as little as a single year, humans simply have to be more vulnerable to the same effects due to what's called reproductive differential. It's not really necessary to understand the effects that are causing the population decline in detail, or have a clear stepwise model of all the mechanisms involved, to predict this.* So, my estimate would be to wait until the fast reproducing species are all acting stable, and then wait another couple or three half lives of the Antimony, even if this takes more than 30 years total.
*assuming the species isn't declining because of being hunted to excess by humans or because we have screwed up the broader environment - rather that it's declining because of something originating with the Chernobyl event - we do still need to make sure of that!
Probably not. It's not that the binary telescope isn't capable of doing Deep Field work, but the deepest of the deep imaging shots took Hubble keeping its optics focused on a single, apparently dark area of the sky for literally months. Deepest sky search took up most of the Hubble's lifespan during the last few years, and many other projects had to be put on the back burner. Administering big science involves trying to share time fairly for many projects, and I'd bet that many of the first time slots scheduled on the new version of the binary array are promised to the people who were bumped from the Hubble when it became apparent it was a good tool to investigate the very early universe. Other time is doubtless already reserved for those non-cosmologists who want to do other important astronomical things, such as exoplanet searches and resolving what's possible in visible wavelengths of our own galactic core. There's also a need sometimes to do visual backup observation when the orbiting infra-red or x-ray scopes find something unexpected in their wavelengths, and how much time could be borrowed or traded around for this depends on just how weird the other observations are.
R'lyeh is in the south pacific. Pnakoticos is in the Australian desert. Irem is in Saudia Arabia. Unfortunately, the Pentagonally Symmetrical Elder Things named their last surface city 'Can'ned'spham', which is why the Shoggoths ate them.
They just went back to Charles Manson's ranch in 2008 and dug everywhere a dog showed interest, just in case they found new evidence for some disappearances that still haven't been solved since before the Tate/LaBianca murders. That's about a 39 year gap before an investigation gone cold got reopened, and it didn't lead to a new conviction in this case. Yet nobody is complaining that the police were negligent in not doing it right after the family arrests. Some times, nobody thinks of the thing that might crack a case wide open, or they don't see it until the investigation has been ongoing for quite some time.
Prison Rape isn't as common as the 'hope you get a cellmate who thinks you have a purty mouth' crowd assumes, but it certainly happens. It's also dumb for the guards or the whole system to allow. First, it's committed by the very violent types, and they don't pick victims because they secretly want to uphold the moral order and those victims are paedophiles or rapists on the outside, they pick them for vulnerability, which means they usually choose the persons with no physical, social or economic power first, not the ones society on the outside thinks are the 'most worthy'. The guy who committed rape on the outside is proven violent, and the cons will seek easier targets, like the kid whose only crime is dealing pot. Second, one way to avoid rape is to get with a gang and do other favors instead. The gangs all split totally along racial lines, all teach criminal methods to new members, and basically steer less violent criminals towards becoming more violent. Tolerating rape helps give gangs another recruitment tool, and empowers the most violent to think they can run the prisons, not the guards. Third, prison rape spreads AIDS, so now you have a growing pool of people who are going to be released in a few years, have become more and more violently inclined, are often hyperinsecure about their masculinity, and are HIV positive. Guards often have female family members too, or other women on the outside they care about. Priming someone to be a threat to them is a bad mistake. The Japanese run some very tough prisons, with almost no instances of rape because they take a prisoner thinking he can get away with more crimes while in prison as an automatic security threat.
That's always been one of my concerns about Atheism as an organized movement. Statistically, about 5% of people in the US identify as formally Atheist, and about 80% identify as Christian. So, if someone identifies as a Christian, and makes the claim that Christians are smarter than all other options, they have just declared they fall above the bottom 20% of the population. Any Christian that understands simple math recognizes that a claim that Christians are smarter than everyone else, if it were somehow true, would only mean he or she is personally above the low grade moron level. Such a person could still fall in the range from 20th to 50th percentile, hardly an ego booster. But if an Atheist makes a similar claim for their whole group, he or she is personally presumably in the highest 5% of the population, by intellect. Just being an Atheist can be twisted into proof of vast mental superiority, only because both Atheists and geniuses are similarly rare. It makes a marvelous shortcut to actually going out and winning a Nobel. If Atheism became more common in the US, would some people drop it just because it was no longer a small enough grouping to match up with the best and the brightest?
Wouldn't someone with omniscience be the focus of a religion rather than a practitioner? Your argument seems to boil down to: If there definitely was a being of godlike power, there would be no religion. That sounds a little odd. Also, various lines of reasoning, i.e. Godel's Second Great Proof in mathematics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem in quantum mechanics, argue that omniscience is literally impossible. That's probably a pretty good argument against the sort of God that possesses omniscience, but it's also a very good argument against answering your question with a simple yes or no. If omniscience is impossible/I never started beating my wife, then a fair answer might be "If we first assume something contrary to fact, my answer is yes." (or no). Demanding a simple yes or no answer here is a rhetorical trick, not an act of reason. Would science survive omniscience? As currently practiced, science involves falsifiability - can an omniscient being's theorems be falsified?
Uhm, not to put words in your mouth,* but I think you were aiming for something such as "This is the antithesis of the standard position, which is that Evolution proceeds inexorably towards a local optimum, rather than towards some abstract concept of perfection."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an interesting philosopher, and notable scientifically for his involvement as an anthropologist in the discovery of Peking man. Some people tried to blame him for the Piltdown man hoax, although that looks increasingly like a real stretch, motivated by "He's a Catholic priest, of course he's guilty" sort of 'reasoning'. Now that you've mentioned him, that will probably come up if it''s not addressed. Still, it's worth noting that the Roman Catholic church delayed publication of his writings by quite a few years. While he's popular with US Catholics and some in the European church, there are also some prominent Catholics who would still put his works on the proscribed list.
*but with phrases such as that, I'm afraid you need someone to build a new six lane interchange between your frontal lobes and Brocas region. You seem to be thinking quite intelligently, but it's getting a bit garbled in the 'writing it down' part - is English, by any chance, a second language for you?:-)
Oooh!, sounds like fun. I'll play. Here's one: 1. There's a strong tendency in nature to try to reduce mutation in the genetic code. The standard theory is that organisms went from single strand RNA based coding to the DNA double helix, and gained a much lower rate of copying errors. Sexual reproduction = lower copying errors. Moving the code into a nucleus at the center of the cell = protection from some chemical mutagens and most alpha particles = lower copying errors. Multicelled creatures, with the reproductive system mostly protected deep in the body = lower copying errors. There are several gene complexes in 'advanced' organisms focused solely on building proteins that correct copying errors in DNA to give us still greater copying fidelity. That's standard genetics. The people who teach Biology at Cambridge or MIT would agree 100% with all this. 2. A lower mutation rate/better copying fidelity can actually increase the rate of evolutionary change, not decrease it. That's because for a simple organism, like a bacterium, just about any change is lethal. When a creature has 12 genes that all affect height, a mutation in one may be a slight improvement. When an organism has just one gene that controls the length of a flagellum, getting it wrong is just about 100% negative in all possible environments. 2a. For more complex organisms, a lower mutation rate is still generally beneficial to evolution, and a higher rate is actually bad. (Bear with me, this is the part that seems counterintuitive to laymen until you hear the explanation). Most organisms are already pretty well adapted to their environment. So, an improvement is a small tweak. A Giraffe gets a neck 1 inch longer than the parent, that could be an advantage. A typical genetic improvement in creatures with sexual reproduction means the parents have, say, 2.01 kids that live to reproduce themselves, while the competing animals have, on average, only 1.99 offspring. Big advantages are rare as hell. So, a good mutant gene has to survive for many generations being tested as it gradually spreads through the population. A really, really high mutation rate simply kills everything off. A really high mutation rate greatly slows or stops evolution, as the good mutant gene gets overwritten by another mutation before it can be tested by the environment. A moderately high rate slows evolution, because most mutations are negative, so a good mutation gets taken out when some other, bad mutation in a different gene totally offsets any advantages from the first, good gene, by killing or crippling the organism. Again, this is real, standard genetics and evolutionary theory as they are taught at good schools and practiced by good professional biologists. 3. There IS some legitimate debate about just how low a copying error rate is good, but biologists mostly agree that nature would 'like' the error rate to be even lower than it is now. The optimum can't possibly be higher than the current rate - advanced organisms are either at the best possible rate or still above it. 4. This planet is about 4.5 Billion years old (in American billions). Fossils of DNA based life with advanced multicellular error correction go back at least 750 Million years, and show signs of rapid evolution throughout prehistory. DNA based fossils go back to nearly 2 Billion years, roughly halfway to the beginning. The earliest detectable, RNA based fossils are probably datable to abut 3.5 Billion years old. (I'm getting those numbers from a book by Simon Conway Morris, not exactly a maverick when it comes to teaching Evolution. A gain this is all standard theory, not any crackpot sources). 5. Most scientists in the field think there must have been several coding systems that were less stable than RNA, and the coding systems themselves gradually evolved. That's because (in part), all those 'synthesizing amino acids in big glass globes with electrodes' type experiments don't show any pathways that could make RNA from scratch. 6. So the standard theory says that we have to fit several stage
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Why is it so important that someone have the ability to reach rock-star level status?,
People need to really read that question literally - you're not claiming that rock-star status is bad, or that nobody should be 'allowed' to become that popular, but asking why that matters so much it swamps other issues. Maybe it is more important that any people who can create or perform decently and become moderately popular have a fair chance to get to 'I can do this full time and quit my day job' status. That's as much a 'fairness' issue as 'people who are really excellent should be able to rise to the top', to say 'people who are pretty good should get rewarded better than people who are lousy'.
There are industries such as pro sports and acting, where the top few have 'rock-star' status, but the base starts at or below minimum wage. There are industries where all members make a pretty good income but nobody goes three orders of magnitude higher. Nobody thinks it's really the most/sole/only important thing if somehow the best professional astronomers get paid millions a year and have first choice of all the telescope time in the world. We (as a culture) surely don't want brain surgeons to mostly put in long hours in very poor working conditions for less than break even pay so that a few of the best can command 50 million+ a year. The film industry may be fine with a few Tom Cruises at the top and a lot of actor's equity members waiting on tables hoping for a big break, but they don't want the same huge spread for directors or soundtrack composers, or even gaffers and best boys. You can do accomplished work and still starve to death as a painter, but not as an architect.
A few highly paid examples at the top and lots of proles at the bottom seems to happen where publicity and image play a huge role in selection. There are lots of jobs where the last thing we want is people getting paid based on image regardless of objective ability. I, at least, don't want an oncologist being told by a manager he can make 3% more if he gets this additional board certification, but 300% more if he gets his teeth capped.
I'm glad you wrote 'a monopoly abusing its position' and not 'having a monopoly'. The argument is:
1. Having a monopoly isn't illegal in itself, just abusing one. Under antitrust law, it's necessary to prove a monopoly exists, but that's just the first step to proving something illegal happened.
2. If the government awards some privilege that creates a monopoly (or in this case, extends one), then exercising that privilege isn't an abuse, it's just what the law intended.
3. Other actions, such as colluding to fix prices in an industry, are outside of the government's granting of privilege and so could still be illegal.
I'm not just debating the semantics of "If the government does it, that means it's legal." here. The breakup of 'Ma Bell' is a great example. Nobody reasonable denied that Bell was a monopoly. Allegations of its being abusive hinged on whether it made its money using the advantages that the government granted (i.e. right of way), or by other methods not connected to the law. The phone company tried for years to claim all their profit margin came either from being a physical or natural monopoly, or from law. High barriers to entry, for example would be a natural monopoly - it's expensive for anyone else to run a second set of wires to all subscribers. Privilege would be the government granted easements that had a condition of providing access to scattered farmhouses and other low profit clientele. If Bell had been able to prove that those factors were the full extent of the matter, the breakup would never have happened.
You try cranking them out as fast as good old AC does, and your quality will probably drop too.
True, very early adopters find themselves in a sort of void, with nobody else connected, and support that still needs lots of debugging and testing. But, it's a high potential value void - the few people around are other early adopters, who tend to be technically literate and educated, and anyone in early can spread the word to their own friends, or other people they would like to see join them. Early adopters can have a great deal of control over the direction the system evolves (usually), and more personal contact with the system's originator(s). This has been true at least since the founding of Usenet. When there were only a few hundred people on, they tended to be people with a shared interest in computer science, a good chance of knowing the answers to some questions of mutual interest, and a tendency to stay civilised, so potential value was very high. Endless September is effectively the perpetual dilution of remaining potential value.The original incorporation of binary files added a lot of value, whereas a better binary encoding (i.e. Yenc), adds only marginal value in large part because of the number of latecomers now in the system. (Yes, I'm being elitist here).
For a more modern case, Farmville will add a certain amount of value to its system, as arguably the best game of its kind. The next such game will add less value in the eyes of most current users, even if it's arguably a better game, because more 'clueless newbies' will join in the meantime.
Put another way, why can't the average Joe get 88/3rds in punitive damages? Why does the average person wining a suit face a cap of triple damages, even after he or she has been required to prove that there's more than simple negligence involved, but some entities don't? What makes them special under law?
Watch "A New Hope", for the scene where Obi-Wan tells Luke he knew Luke's father in the Clone Wars. That's a classic throw away line. The writer thinks, "Where could they know each other from? I know, they were in the army together. Hey, it's SF, do they even have an army? Well, space navy or whatever... Anyhoo, they were in the war together. That oughtta fit with the title. We got this new rebellion, and now I should mention older wars so Star Wars makes more sense. Vietnam? No it's space, so they were in a spacy sounding war together. Hey, how about 'Clone Wars'?"
At that point. Lucas has no idea who or what the clones were clones of, which side the clones fought on, or anything else about the Clone Wars, just that they give the film a feel that fits his title. Later, when he writes sequels, prequels, and Christmas specials, he goes back to look for hooks that can anchor them into the same universe, and decides to make this one of his hooks.
That's not bad writing. It's also not good writing in and of itself. A half way competent writer normally asks some questions that don't follow from the basic plot ("OK, so Agent Clarice eventually stops Lecter, but what makes her succeed when others have failed? She's more committed. Why is she more committed? She really empathises with victims. I'd better write a scene to emphasise that." The writer looks for chances to fit that scene in, and a month later, realises he hasn't written a scene where Lecter tries his special mind screwing powers on Clarice yet, and realises he could probably combine the two. A week after that, the writer realises what the title of his work should be.). These days, college writing courses will teach people to add detail or individual touches to any line that comes out as cliched as "They met in the war" does in the short form. Lots of writers have learned, if you do this, you also automatically create hooks you can go back to if you want a sequel or whatever. Once it's clear that Kirk and Spock went through the academy together, a prequel about those days becomes an easier option. If the original throw away line says the academy is in Frisco, there's a setting for the new story, already picked. (Remember, for Trek, it was part of the basic rules not to show Trek era Earth, so references to where the academy was were never expected to be all that important until that rule was changed. In that case, the throw away nature of the line is more obvious than most.)
Pinch Supergirl's ass and see if you can still swallow with that trachea.
Nuclear reactions don't conserve the number of subatomic particles. They conserve matter/energy, Baryon number (if there are any Baryons involved), and charge. Some also conserve 'spin'. As simple a reaction as neutron decay shows this. A neutron (1 particle) splits into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino (3 particles). That's beta decay. When the initial neutron is in a nucleus, the resulting proton stays there. The total mass of the three particles, plus the kinetic energy added to the electron and neutrino (which both fly out of the nucleus) is the same as the total mass and kinetic energy of the original neutron. If you're talking massive particles, the electron certainly at least has a bit of mass, and the neutrino very probably does by current theories. You do start with one Baryon and end with one, as the other particles aren't Baryons - that's probably what you are thinking of. That's all classical Nucleonics.
You can also model it in Quantum Chromodynamics as a reaction involving three quarks. The quarks are two downs and an up in the neutron, and you end up with two ups and a down in the proton, so the number of quarks is technically conserved, but you also end up with the non-quark based particles (the electron and neutrino), so looked at that way, you're going from three particles to five. The more detailed version of the Quark conversion postulates a W- boson briefly exists, and that's a rather massive*, if short lived particle, so maybe the whole thing goes 3->4->5. Oh, and just because two quarks appear unchanged, doesn't mean that what's actually happened. It's not really true to assume one down flipped to an up and the others didn't do anything.
* 80.4 GeV/c^2, roughly 100 times as massive as the initial neutron, and actually heavier than a whole iron atom. That's certainly massive particles being changed, which is a darned good reason Baryon conservation should not be translated to mean massive particle conservation. Baryon conservation is also considered an empirical law - it's assumed to be true so as to explain why protons don't decay, but maybe protons do decay over very long timespans and the law may not be absolute.
Kirk ends up living in the country and raising horses (at least in the Nexus), and Picard retires to run a winery. Obviously, Star Fleet captains get paid in acreage.
If you could:
1. Block the politicians form becoming industry shills afterwards, even for just four or five years after the leave office.
2. Make them rely on the same public retirement system and medical system as everyone else.
3. Keep them from controlling their own payraises.
Then it wouldn't be necessary to have term limits or recalls. The people who would stay with the job under those conditions would only need to be selected on the basis of individual performance.
It's probably true, however unlikely it seems to you, but one of the best proofs doesn't come from animals. Plants don't wander around - Once a tree grows in a spot, it's committed. Some plants in particular drop heavy nuts or seeds that will only get transported as far as animals will move them at the very most, and some spread by runners or similar methods that mean the offspring will always be close to the parent and moving across large distances takes many generations. For one example that's been particularly useful to biologists, evergreens that live on tops of mountains above the deciduous tree line usually stay there unless the climate gets so warm that tree-line moves higher than the mountaintop. Climate change at one rate may let some of these species relocate, but at a faster rate will simply wipe them out locally. In the same way, some plant diseases may spread widely only if the tree-line becomes so low, the mountain peaks are all connected. That's a distinctive, temperature related effect. We can look at plant fossils and make some pretty good estimates of how long it took for prehistoric changes, in particular, there are formulas based on longevity and reproductive frequency that hold if species X stays viable in some area for Y time, the rate of change had to be slower than Z. I't's a pretty good argument if species are now going locally extinct at 10xZ or 50xZ rate, that nothing like that has happened in pre human times, or we wouldn't have living examples of those species. Because some of the currently observed rates can be tens or more times faster than the prehistoric rates, rather than just, say 50% faster, it's considered an unambiguous type of evidence.
To be fair, even this line of reasoning takes a lot of crosschecking. Plenty of legitimate scientific disputes exist over just how big a locale is meaningful, or how many different species should be checked before the results deserve a certain level of confidence, or whether the scars left by a particular plant disease are uniformly distinctive. For some cases, scientists do have to consider other events that may have happened that fast in prehistoric times (Dinos weren't the only thing clobbered by that asteroid 60 million years ago). So, it may be only fair to say, "unless the Cretacious extinctions were really caused by some sort of warming cycle and not a massive shield volcano super-eruption, asteroid impacts, or alien trophy hunters, nothing like this, this fast, has ever happened before." But, within limits such as that, the evidence is mounting.
Anyone who gets paid can be said to have an agenda. Any public university has some connections to people who get paid to do government. Ergo, people who don't have an agenda = a null set = invisible pink unicorns.
The very idea of ice age and inter ice age periods means there must have been times when Greenland lost Ice before, as you point out. So? Who on the global warming side is claiming differently, and why are you attacking the straw man that somebody is making that claim, instead of addressing the real claim that this warm period exists and is man made. If we have to prove that nothing even vaguely like this ever happened before or it can't be man made this time, then humans didn't hunt the passenger pigeon to extinction, because extinctions have happened before there were people. Computerised trading didn't have any effects on the latest stock market crash, because crashes have happened before there were computers. Vaccines don't protect against plagues, because plagues died out before they killed everybody, long before there were vaccines.
Please go play in heavy traffic - you see, you've never been run over by a semi before, so by your logic, whether you look at the stoplights or not, it can't happen this time.
It never looks like "HAVE to" for a police state. There's always an apparent alternative someone claims will work, for example, privatising the prisons and running them at a profit to fund the rest of the government, or phasing out some 'unneeded' programs such as inspecting the packing plants. These alternatives always involve expanding the police side of the state if implemented, i.e. first you get the prisons making a profit, then you increase the number of people in prison, or first you get the government out of 'unneeded' social services, but then you add the savings to the police state side of the budget rather than give the taxpayers a rebate. When people steer away from these proposals, either they have gotten smart and realised the numbers don't add up, or they have gotten a moral compass. Given how improbable 'smart' is, 'decent' actually makes the most sense as an alternate hypothesis.
If a person knows they are a poor fit in their role in the military and really doesn't think they can adapt, there are some options to get a formal discharge and get out. These work better when it's not just a response to personal danger, as it's assumed you understood that it's a dangerous occupation when you signed. In my own time serving, I saw people who had legitimate moral issues, and some of whom had effectively become pacifists, and others who were having psychological issues and experiencing severe stresses. In fact, I saw some people who had more trouble with stresses from non-combat service than many combat veterans did. Unfortunately, there was sometimes a tendency to assume in either case they were just cowards, but there are some safeguards in place, to at least try and deal with the cases where it's, as you put it, unhealthy, either for the individual or others around them.
The whole reason to have multiple categories of discharge is to deal with this issue, so that someone can leave, even under strained terms with the system, without it automatically resulting in a dishonorable discharge. People discharged after less than 180 days in service usually get an entry level discharge, which nominally has no good or bad connotations, and general discharges are usually used where the person was in longer but became either physically or psychologically unable to continue. The easiest way to get into real trouble is to just up and leave before seeking an official resolution such as these routes.
More to the point, once the compromise is massively widespread and definitely already in the hands of enemy forces, there is no way our own people seeing it will result in further compromise to the enemy, so the only effect left for non-enemy personnel is the possible negative morale effect. Even if the law technically supports it, isn't worrying so quickly about the possible morale implications from an inconvenient set of facts, a sign that the administration is refusing to face up to much more primary implications of those facts. I know that when, for just one example, when it was first learned secrets being compromised may have helped the USSR develop its own nuclear weapons program, the joint chiefs and Dept. of Defense didn't focus on how that news would dampen the morale of US troops, but on the strategic and tactical implications for the whole free world.
It's an interesting comparison you offer, but I'm not sure what conclusion should be drawn as to safety. Half life for the Antimony (125Sb) would be 1008 days, so at 30 years out, we are looking at about 1/16th of the contribution you are projecting for 20 years. The numbers you use suggest human return certainly ought to be possible within 30 years, if not 20, even erring on the side of extreme caution.
But, I doubt there is a single mammalian species in the area that has half as long a typical time to reproductive maturity as humans. If a species such as deer or wild dogs is showing declining reproduction when they mature in as little as a single year, humans simply have to be more vulnerable to the same effects due to what's called reproductive differential. It's not really necessary to understand the effects that are causing the population decline in detail, or have a clear stepwise model of all the mechanisms involved, to predict this.* So, my estimate would be to wait until the fast reproducing species are all acting stable, and then wait another couple or three half lives of the Antimony, even if this takes more than 30 years total.
*assuming the species isn't declining because of being hunted to excess by humans or because we have screwed up the broader environment - rather that it's declining because of something originating with the Chernobyl event - we do still need to make sure of that!
Probably not. It's not that the binary telescope isn't capable of doing Deep Field work, but the deepest of the deep imaging shots took Hubble keeping its optics focused on a single, apparently dark area of the sky for literally months. Deepest sky search took up most of the Hubble's lifespan during the last few years, and many other projects had to be put on the back burner. Administering big science involves trying to share time fairly for many projects, and I'd bet that many of the first time slots scheduled on the new version of the binary array are promised to the people who were bumped from the Hubble when it became apparent it was a good tool to investigate the very early universe. Other time is doubtless already reserved for those non-cosmologists who want to do other important astronomical things, such as exoplanet searches and resolving what's possible in visible wavelengths of our own galactic core. There's also a need sometimes to do visual backup observation when the orbiting infra-red or x-ray scopes find something unexpected in their wavelengths, and how much time could be borrowed or traded around for this depends on just how weird the other observations are.
R'lyeh is in the south pacific. Pnakoticos is in the Australian desert. Irem is in Saudia Arabia. Unfortunately, the Pentagonally Symmetrical Elder Things named their last surface city 'Can'ned'spham', which is why the Shoggoths ate them.
They just went back to Charles Manson's ranch in 2008 and dug everywhere a dog showed interest, just in case they found new evidence for some disappearances that still haven't been solved since before the Tate/LaBianca murders. That's about a 39 year gap before an investigation gone cold got reopened, and it didn't lead to a new conviction in this case. Yet nobody is complaining that the police were negligent in not doing it right after the family arrests. Some times, nobody thinks of the thing that might crack a case wide open, or they don't see it until the investigation has been ongoing for quite some time.
Prison Rape isn't as common as the 'hope you get a cellmate who thinks you have a purty mouth' crowd assumes, but it certainly happens. It's also dumb for the guards or the whole system to allow. First, it's committed by the very violent types, and they don't pick victims because they secretly want to uphold the moral order and those victims are paedophiles or rapists on the outside, they pick them for vulnerability, which means they usually choose the persons with no physical, social or economic power first, not the ones society on the outside thinks are the 'most worthy'. The guy who committed rape on the outside is proven violent, and the cons will seek easier targets, like the kid whose only crime is dealing pot. Second, one way to avoid rape is to get with a gang and do other favors instead. The gangs all split totally along racial lines, all teach criminal methods to new members, and basically steer less violent criminals towards becoming more violent. Tolerating rape helps give gangs another recruitment tool, and empowers the most violent to think they can run the prisons, not the guards. Third, prison rape spreads AIDS, so now you have a growing pool of people who are going to be released in a few years, have become more and more violently inclined, are often hyperinsecure about their masculinity, and are HIV positive. Guards often have female family members too, or other women on the outside they care about. Priming someone to be a threat to them is a bad mistake. The Japanese run some very tough prisons, with almost no instances of rape because they take a prisoner thinking he can get away with more crimes while in prison as an automatic security threat.
Come on man, no one is shooting metals out into space, never to return.
For relatively small amounts of the total, isn't NASA doing just that? Voyagers 1 & 2, etc.
That's always been one of my concerns about Atheism as an organized movement. Statistically, about 5% of people in the US identify as formally Atheist, and about 80% identify as Christian. So, if someone identifies as a Christian, and makes the claim that Christians are smarter than all other options, they have just declared they fall above the bottom 20% of the population. Any Christian that understands simple math recognizes that a claim that Christians are smarter than everyone else, if it were somehow true, would only mean he or she is personally above the low grade moron level. Such a person could still fall in the range from 20th to 50th percentile, hardly an ego booster. But if an Atheist makes a similar claim for their whole group, he or she is personally presumably in the highest 5% of the population, by intellect. Just being an Atheist can be twisted into proof of vast mental superiority, only because both Atheists and geniuses are similarly rare. It makes a marvelous shortcut to actually going out and winning a Nobel. If Atheism became more common in the US, would some people drop it just because it was no longer a small enough grouping to match up with the best and the brightest?
Wouldn't someone with omniscience be the focus of a religion rather than a practitioner?
Your argument seems to boil down to: If there definitely was a being of godlike power, there would be no religion. That sounds a little odd.
Also, various lines of reasoning, i.e. Godel's Second Great Proof in mathematics and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Theorem in quantum mechanics, argue that omniscience is literally impossible. That's probably a pretty good argument against the sort of God that possesses omniscience, but it's also a very good argument against answering your question with a simple yes or no. If omniscience is impossible/I never started beating my wife, then a fair answer might be "If we first assume something contrary to fact, my answer is yes." (or no). Demanding a simple yes or no answer here is a rhetorical trick, not an act of reason.
Would science survive omniscience? As currently practiced, science involves falsifiability - can an omniscient being's theorems be falsified?
This is not the precise very of evolution...
Uhm, not to put words in your mouth,* but I think you were aiming for something such as "This is the antithesis of the standard position, which is that Evolution proceeds inexorably towards a local optimum, rather than towards some abstract concept of perfection."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an interesting philosopher, and notable scientifically for his involvement as an anthropologist in the discovery of Peking man. Some people tried to blame him for the Piltdown man hoax, although that looks increasingly like a real stretch, motivated by "He's a Catholic priest, of course he's guilty" sort of 'reasoning'. Now that you've mentioned him, that will probably come up if it''s not addressed. Still, it's worth noting that the Roman Catholic church delayed publication of his writings by quite a few years. While he's popular with US Catholics and some in the European church, there are also some prominent Catholics who would still put his works on the proscribed list.
*but with phrases such as that, I'm afraid you need someone to build a new six lane interchange between your frontal lobes and Brocas region. You seem to be thinking quite intelligently, but it's getting a bit garbled in the 'writing it down' part - is English, by any chance, a second language for you? :-)
Oooh!, sounds like fun. I'll play. Here's one:
1. There's a strong tendency in nature to try to reduce mutation in the genetic code. The standard theory is that organisms went from single strand RNA based coding to the DNA double helix, and gained a much lower rate of copying errors. Sexual reproduction = lower copying errors. Moving the code into a nucleus at the center of the cell = protection from some chemical mutagens and most alpha particles = lower copying errors. Multicelled creatures, with the reproductive system mostly protected deep in the body = lower copying errors. There are several gene complexes in 'advanced' organisms focused solely on building proteins that correct copying errors in DNA to give us still greater copying fidelity. That's standard genetics. The people who teach Biology at Cambridge or MIT would agree 100% with all this.
2. A lower mutation rate/better copying fidelity can actually increase the rate of evolutionary change, not decrease it. That's because for a simple organism, like a bacterium, just about any change is lethal. When a creature has 12 genes that all affect height, a mutation in one may be a slight improvement. When an organism has just one gene that controls the length of a flagellum, getting it wrong is just about 100% negative in all possible environments.
2a. For more complex organisms, a lower mutation rate is still generally beneficial to evolution, and a higher rate is actually bad. (Bear with me, this is the part that seems counterintuitive to laymen until you hear the explanation). Most organisms are already pretty well adapted to their environment. So, an improvement is a small tweak. A Giraffe gets a neck 1 inch longer than the parent, that could be an advantage. A typical genetic improvement in creatures with sexual reproduction means the parents have, say, 2.01 kids that live to reproduce themselves, while the competing animals have, on average, only 1.99 offspring. Big advantages are rare as hell. So, a good mutant gene has to survive for many generations being tested as it gradually spreads through the population. A really, really high mutation rate simply kills everything off. A really high mutation rate greatly slows or stops evolution, as the good mutant gene gets overwritten by another mutation before it can be tested by the environment. A moderately high rate slows evolution, because most mutations are negative, so a good mutation gets taken out when some other, bad mutation in a different gene totally offsets any advantages from the first, good gene, by killing or crippling the organism. Again, this is real, standard genetics and evolutionary theory as they are taught at good schools and practiced by good professional biologists.
3. There IS some legitimate debate about just how low a copying error rate is good, but biologists mostly agree that nature would 'like' the error rate to be even lower than it is now. The optimum can't possibly be higher than the current rate - advanced organisms are either at the best possible rate or still above it.
4. This planet is about 4.5 Billion years old (in American billions). Fossils of DNA based life with advanced multicellular error correction go back at least 750 Million years, and show signs of rapid evolution throughout prehistory. DNA based fossils go back to nearly 2 Billion years, roughly halfway to the beginning. The earliest detectable, RNA based fossils are probably datable to abut 3.5 Billion years old. (I'm getting those numbers from a book by Simon Conway Morris, not exactly a maverick when it comes to teaching Evolution. A gain this is all standard theory, not any crackpot sources).
5. Most scientists in the field think there must have been several coding systems that were less stable than RNA, and the coding systems themselves gradually evolved. That's because (in part), all those 'synthesizing amino acids in big glass globes with electrodes' type experiments don't show any pathways that could make RNA from scratch.
6. So the standard theory says that we have to fit several stage