OK, but it's not an imposition on anyone's freedom to change the rules for capital gains taxes. Defining long term as 1 year is so much shorter than the typical period someone has to invest for retirement, for example. It's already a privilege, extended supposedly because society gets the compensation of more jobs creation. Suppose that, to get the full capital gains break, an investor had to hold for 5 years, with decreasing benefits down to one year, and actually higher general rates for trades in shorter times. If it's legal to give a break for certain investment activities, it's legal to penalise others, isn't it? You're asking about what the authority is - How can the government have the authority to reward a 'good' practice, yet no authority to penalise a 'bad' one? You could even take away the penalties in cases where someone could show the trade wasn't going to hurt the company's ability to remain an employer at its full current capacity.
Adding lots of angular momentum means the object has substantial velocity relative to the observer. If the observer is moving along with the black hole, then it doesn't have angular momentum, relative to whatever tools you are using to observe it, so that observer will still see an event horizon. If the observer isn't moving along then the black hole will move out of range for a lot of observations pretty swiftly. Note that a black hole can gain momentum relative to an observer just as well if the observer is the thing accelerated instead of the hole.
Probably the only even slightly practical way to add angular momentum to a black hole would be to get a serious electric charge on it first, so it could be accelerated magnetically. That's still far fetched engineering, but isn't theoretically banned. So the device that could do the preliminary job of making adding momentum possible, most likely could simply do the whole job by pumping more electrons in. Ergo, any species wishing to conduct the experiment will only build the gigantic electron gun, not the space magnets.
Direct depiction of violence is only part of the situation. (Just as somebody above had to point out that very little of the sex depicted is about reproductive sex.). What about misleading information related to violence? There are supposedly some significant numbers of people who overrate the chance of cars exploding, thanks to Hollywood showing so many 'car goes off a cliff and explodes before it even hits the ground' scenes. It might be good to know if this is really a substantial group, to add to your group of animal killers and such.
Maybe only a certain set of people have problems with the violence in isolation, but isn't it likely a larger set have problems because the media tends to show violence as solving problems it won't really solve. Maybe a war movie such as "Gods and Generals" has less negative impact than one of the "Die Hard" series, not because either has more or less depiction of death or gore, but because in the action film, the worse the bad guy is, the more the violence seems to always result in immediate divine justice, without the chaos and 'collateral damage' that real violence seems to inevitably carry with it.
Maybe showing violence is one level of problem, and showing that the world is clearly divided into good and bad guys, and it's OK for the good guys to try violence early before they've exhausted other options, and the bad guys don't leave behind grieving relatives, is a whole different ball game.
OK, you've just said something that is nearly 100% true, but has almost no meaning outside of the context you've left out. RNA mutates just as DNA does, and is subject to selection in theory. So, an RNA based virus can evolve. But, there are important differences.
1. Just about every gene in a virus is vital, as that same evolutionary pressure selects to weed out all the junk code at a much higher rate. The penalties a virus pays for hauling any gene not vitally needed are so big, it has to hijack something else's reproductive code to duplicate itself. So just about every mutation in the remaining code is seriously negative - positive mutations in 'advanced' organisms are rare, but for viruses they are literally millions of times rarer.
2. RNA based organisms are all non-sexual reproducers, so there is no second copy of anything from chromosome pairing, to take up slack for any gene that gets damaged either. That probably further amplifies the effects of point 1.
So, you get lots of mutation in viruses, but very little evolution because there are almost no positive selection events associated with that mutation. Scientists have even come up with the term Stochastic mutation to describe what some viruses do (HIV for one). In such cases, you get regular mutation at certain key points, but no essentially NO selection. HIV may eventually mutate in a fashion that is subject to selection pressure in the wild, but the four common stochastic mutations it displays won't be the path to any such changes.
Overall, viruses have very fast reproductive cycles, i.e. an HIV virus will typically reproduce between 100 and 200 copies in 1 1/2 to 2 days. If it weren't that there's so little selection pressure, they would likely overwhelm us "higher" life-forms totally.
There, you're realistically describing an airborne version of such a virus, not an STD, and probably not even the multiple bodily fluids borne version that is the baseline Ebola virus. An STD is really a disease that spreads so poorly only direct membrane to bodily fluid contact tends to spread it. STDs typically won't spread dry skin to dry skin, or by fluids if those are exposed to sunlight or cold for even a few minutes, and they die very, very quickly if exposed to many common environmental stressors other germs resist, for example, pool Chlorine or hot weather.
I don't want to make light of your comment - certainly, there are scenarios, for example Person A dies of Ebola at airport B, plane that brought the victim has already gone on to next stop with new passengers seated in that row, that could easily cause, as you say, an international crisis. But these are possibilities even if the disease doesn't infect anyone else.
Fortunately, Ebola is very far from developing the protein coat it would need to allow airborne exposure.
One point I derived is seems to follow from his choice of product packaging as the example: Here on Slashdot, you often see self announced Libertarians posting about how government policies are arbitrary, or perhaps 'esoteric' or 'arcane', or divorced from reality. Maybe what the FDA requires on a package of chips is something logically needed for a quite sensible purpose - it only looks arbitrary or unnecessarily complex because it's a 'language' very different from the front panel's 'advertisese' or the machine readable barcode.
Note that most people don't really parse the advertising either, they get what the advertiser wants them to get, with the spin the advertiser wants, like getting what the browser preinterprets of a site's HTML. But advertising is focused on being comfortable for the viewer, not on having real value in the content or actual transmission of ideas. (You can put a big, green "!!!Only 9 calories per serving!!!" blurb on the package, and bury the fact that "A serving is 1/4 Oz. of chips - this package contains 132 servings", in small print somewhere on the bottom edge, and most people won't actually get the facts, they will just feel better about eating a whole bag of chips.). But, most people, including the above mentioned Libertarians, won't mention how that packaging is 'arbitrary', 'esoteric' or 'divorced from reality'. Some data-types seem to draw this criticism very commonly, while other's don't, even if it may be entirely justified.
I, for one, say "You're welcome." whenever my ATM says "Thank you." Sooner or later, it will be smart enough to care, so practice now. When they put you all in maple syrup filled tubes for scorching the sky, me and the Oracle's server will be knocking back Fuzzy Navels and leering at all the dumb blondes who also said "You're welcome." (In their case, reflexively). Someday, the race will be divided into those who were ready to treat the machines as equals, and coppertops.
Real explosives don't need ambient oxygen. Internal break down of (usually Nitrogen) bonds releases the energy, not rapid oxidation. A few exotic chemistrys exist, such as getting a normally inert noble gas to combine with a reactive gas (i.e. Xenon Trifloride) to store similar levels of energy, but mostly it's Nitrogen. C-4 isn't really the name of an explosive, but Composition 4 is about 90% RDX, which is the high explosive part (also called cyclonite). The other 9 to 10 % is the plasticizer that makes it putty like. No, C-4 does not require outside Oxygen, although it's probably not the stuff to use here. I'm sure the US Navy has some data on what explosives stay safe under very high seawater pressures and still react quickly, hopefully someone will ask them as needed.
Microsoft sort of faltered on some of its arguably best ideas. They implemented dynamic linking libraries, for example, and then couldn't or didn't get all the 3rd party developers to put the DLL's in the same place (Windows/system). They added the System32 subdirectory to keep 32 bit and 16 bit DLLs separate, and couldn't get cooperation on that either. Notice that Microsoft could have not issued its Windows certified or compatible stickers to anyone who didn't play along. They decided they would rather be able to brag about how much 3rd party software Windows could run, than get strict compliance. The exact same thing happened with the registry and individual.ini files.
I'm not saying that Microsoft originated the DLL concept in its underlying form mind you, just that it was a good concept in that it that fit the abstraction layer model for computing, and Microsoft was in a position to decide DLLs either all went in the program's own directory or in Microsoft's special place, and they took a few half hearted steps to try to enforce one system, flip-flopped to the other, and then faltered completely. The same goes for the registry - somebody at Microsoft had a vision for how the damned thing was supposed to work that arguably could have made for a better security model or more stable environment than what they ended up doing, and the vision was even partly implemented, then faltered over time.
And it's that 'legal AND illegal' that worries some here. With one hand, Microsoft is openly doing something that is legal and will doubtless benefit some people. Given their history, what's the other hand doing? It's possible there isn't a concealed part of the overall process, but given that very same history, why is anyone in a rush to demand they get the benefit of our doubts? How many times does Microsoft have to demonstrate they have an ulterior motive, before everyone gets the memo?
Giving away your browser is legal. Having a monopoly is, in itself, legal. Not prosecuting everyone who distributes bootleg copies to overseas markets is legal. But whether they all should be or not, all these things have tied in to Microsoft doing things that (surprise) aren't legal. Now some Slashdotters don't think Antitrust should be the law. Some disagree over just what constitutes an abusive monopoly. Some think Europe is some socialist psycho-state that simply targets bigness. But the laws are what they are. Proving the court cases Microsoft has already lost has taken establishing how MS has had hidden motives for various actions that look open and aboveboard. The hidden motives are now on the record. So why does someone always seem to demand the rest of us prove those methods and motives are coming up again, when after five or six good examples, the burden of proof ought to at least have shifted the other way?
What about cases where the numbers are right, but they could easily support a wrong conclusion?
For an example, take the current oil spill. If you look at it statistically, the BP estimate they stubbornly cling to is 5,000 barrels a day, and some other mainstream estimates range between 55,000 and 75,000 BPD. You could use some pretty sophisticated analytic math to decide if BP's estimates were more on the fringe than the criers of doom on the opposite fringe claiming it's a million barrels a day+, or not.
Statistics might leave us endlessly arguing about whether BP could somehow be honestly mistaken, just as the million barrels people could be. The arguments BP will offer when this becomes a court matter will doubtless rely on using statistics heavily to 'prove' they were just mistaken, not dishonest. It will be statistics they use to support the claim that extrapolation from a 2,000 foot depth range to over 5,000 feet down was a legitimate environmental analytic technique and not a wild ass guess, and they will be trying hard to keep any jury from understanding the differences between interpolation and extrapolation.
At this point, we have a smoking gun, in the form of powerpoint slides analysing how deep water oil spills could spread far under the surface while appearing minimal from above, a powerpoint presentation that BP executives were privy to as early as 2000-2001. BP is flat out lying, its actions arguably violate RICO, in at least a few individual's cases they rise at least to 11 counts of conspiracy after the fact to conceal criminally neglegent homicide, and the company executives and major stockholders all deserve to be under a blanket investigation with an eye towards singling out those persons deserving the most rigorous criminal prosecution. It's statistics that BP will use to try to hide that fact, and others.
There's always a certain amount of creativity, skill, and knowledge in a success story. There's always a certain amount of luck and outside support as well. When people get successful, they have a strong tendency to overate how much was skill or creativity, and how little came from their origins, their supporters or just dumb luck.
It's the ultimate version of the self made man myth "I taught my teachers everything they knew how to teach me. I invented writing so I could learn things faster, then wrote all the books. I created money just so I could have a way to keep track of my successes. Then I built this company into the giant of the fountain pen nib industry it is today."
SETI really works out to the search for Extraterrestrial Information Bearing Radio Sources. We still would need a separate way to search for everything that metabolises, gets irritable, or reproduces but can't craft a decent vacuum tube yet. (Or has converted totally to tight-casting, fiber-optic, or something we haven't thought of yet but which we will have a hard time distinguishing from 'magic' or 'psionics', if we ever find it.).
When they first did the "build amino acids from methane and ammonia with electric current and UV in a big glass ball" experiments, 'they' also confidently predicted that the next stages, getting more and more complex compounds would follow soon and would be surprisingly easy. There were people on record as claiming that they would have actual life within a few weeks. Life Magazine published Nobel Laureates 'predicting' we would synthesise artificial life by New Years day. Nothing has come of these claims.
I'm not saying you're wrong, mind you. I like to believe that life is tenacious and easily spread. My philosophical and 'religious' beliefs 'predict' life in abundance on many worlds. But that's not scientific prediction, and when you're citing a set of experiments that produced so many misleading predictions and erroneous conclusions, it's probably best to keep taking it with a grain of salt.
So we've found life on Mars? That's news to me. Apparently that they have observed even indirect evidence for liquid water on Mars is news to you. You do realise that your second sentence contradicts your first, and it's special pleading for your claim, on a level with "maybe God does miracles but makes them look so natural we can't use them for proof he exists".
You didn't follow Mozee Toby's argument at all, and frankly you are the one who's making wrong claims here. People simply did not, for example have close up evidence of erosion on Mars 'for decades'. It's been within the last few years, both that we got much better evidence for occasional liquid water on Mars and that we got some of our best evidence against life on Mars. Mozee Toby referenced that, it IS meaningful, and if you didn't get any meaning from that, that's YOUR problem.
(Literally, you appear to have a basic, should have been corrected by the time you got out of a public high school level, comprehension problem here.).
This really does hinge on the current model of how life originates (which is not what Biological theory of Evolution is about, it's how existing life undergoes selection). That life starts quickly, anywhere conditions are right, is an as yet untestable claim, and may not technically ever be a scientifically valid idea unless someone can formulate a greatly clarified version of just what 'conditions are right' really means. Saying liquid water = conditions are right may mean absolutely nothing, and even if it's true, that still doesn't prove life generally starts quickly if any potential for it exists. The whole claim's a philosophical position, not a scientific one, and it needs to be seen for what it is before anyone makes the decision to focus on liquid water as a meaningful indicator at the level of, say, designing orbital observatories. As long as it's a purely philosophical issue, there really are some damned good counterarguments (such as Fermi's question/paradox), until someone can put some science behind it to settle the point.
Pluses: 1. They are very common, like H2O, around the observed universe. 2. The could work with a Carbon based complex chemistry, at some temperature range. 3. They have solvent properties, also like H2O - you can get many other elements suspended in solutions.
Minuses: 1. They are non-polar, so the ices they form are heavier than the liquid, and sink to the bottom. Hence, Lakes of them freeze from the bottom up and seldom keep any liquid portions during typical models of winter. (see below) 2. They have a narrower range of liquidity, and so even minor climate shifts result in freezing or boiling. Essentially, a planet with methane or ammonia oceans is just about bound to have very harsh winters and summers, unless it has almost no orbital eccentricity or axial tilt.
I doubt there's very many Biologists throwing around the word 'randomly' like that, since the standard model for evolution is that Mutation is generally random, but selection IS NOT. How complex silicon compounds may get has a lot of bearing on whether selection pressure can matter. (This assumes we are much less likely to find life as it has just begun, before there has been much if any time for selection pressure to affect it - as that's an awfully small window in time compared to the duration of a biome).
Usually, people who offer the "If you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care who has your information" claim are talking about something such as the Dept. of Justice seeing that information. Here we're talking about anyone who puts up a web site, (as you, yourself, posted). That's actually a pretty extreme position. You're not just saying we should all trust the government - you're really saying we should all trust random strangers.
Would you respond to my post right now, with your current IP address, monitor resolution, video card and driver info, all browser functions enabled, any 3rd party add ons, what versions of Flash, Shockwave, and so on you have, your OS and what support packs it has, a complete list of codecs on your machine, a similarly complete list of fonts, and probably a lot more info? I'm a random stranger to you, aren't I? I can understand if you don't want to look all that up manually and type it into a little slashdot window (in fact, please don't), but how is that really different from my automated havesting of that same data?
Look at all the things you can't change. Yeah, you, and most people can force a new IP address if you're with a common ISP such as Comcast. But if you update your Flash, that update's gonna have a time-stamp after the version I just found out about, so I can still assume that your PC had that version of Flash at the time it visited my site. What if I'm looking for old versions of add ons that have known vulnerabilities? Maybe I'm watching for visitors who don't upgrade or patch much. There are certainly exploits that would be hard to stop if their originator focused on putting them only on the obviously slow to patch set's boxes. So, if for no other reason, we should care because it's another reason to keep up with current versions of all those 3rd party support files browsers have these days.
Between some PCs having some really unusual codecs (such as the older Indeo codecs for some seriously pre DivX era.AVI files), and having some pretty rare fancy decorative fonts, this would create a situation where identification would really be about as distinctive as fingerprints or DNA. In court, a prosecutor could cite billions to one odds that it was any other PC than that particular one, and it would most likely be believed by a jury.
However, it would probably be misleading. Most of the people keeping those seriously old codecs have odd video content that doesn't work without them, and a lot of the weird porn, bootleg content and such being distributed by back channels still uses them too. You'd get a situation where most people who went to site X, deliberately looking for its content, had a high probability of having those legacy codecs, but that wouldn't imply either of the inverses. (That people with those codecs had illegal content from site X that needed them wouldn't be generally true. And that people with those codecs got them or kept them because they had intent to get the illegal content wouldn't be generally true either).
This could be like claiming the normal odds for DNA testing, when the actual group wasn't the general population, but a preselected subgroup (I.e. there's a claim PC 'A' was used to download bootleg copies of the vampire movie 'Twilight', and it has a cluster of very unusual fonts, which however, just happen to all be Vampire oriented, Gothic looking fonts. A huge portion of vampire fixated emo losers might have those fonts. It could even be that practically everyone who bootlegs 'Twilight" has those fonts, but that doesn't imply the reverse at all for whether they were torrenting 'Twilight'.).
By US rules, double quotes are used to quote literally. Single quotes are not necessarily exact, but may instead be used to show paraphrasing, condensation or for ironic quotation. British English may differ.
First, I would object to the claim that England became protestant only because a king (Henry VIII) wanted a divorce. Why are you sticking up for the claim that the US is a Christian nation by metaphorically spitting in the face of a church with four million US adherents? Worse, it's the one that was the specific branch attended by the majority of those founding fathers you mention.
I suspect you are not just claiming there is a Christian basis, but that it's in your particular branch or sect of Christians. That's the very sort of 'Holy' war the doctrine of separation of church and state was intended to quell.
Second, your mistakes in grammar, spelling and punctuation are drastic. I'm not normally a Grammar Nazi, but really, three run-on sentences in five? Why on Earth did you think this would contribute anything positive to a thread on Education?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, but it's not an imposition on anyone's freedom to change the rules for capital gains taxes. Defining long term as 1 year is so much shorter than the typical period someone has to invest for retirement, for example. It's already a privilege, extended supposedly because society gets the compensation of more jobs creation. Suppose that, to get the full capital gains break, an investor had to hold for 5 years, with decreasing benefits down to one year, and actually higher general rates for trades in shorter times. If it's legal to give a break for certain investment activities, it's legal to penalise others, isn't it? You're asking about what the authority is - How can the government have the authority to reward a 'good' practice, yet no authority to penalise a 'bad' one? You could even take away the penalties in cases where someone could show the trade wasn't going to hurt the company's ability to remain an employer at its full current capacity.
Adding lots of angular momentum means the object has substantial velocity relative to the observer. If the observer is moving along with the black hole, then it doesn't have angular momentum, relative to whatever tools you are using to observe it, so that observer will still see an event horizon. If the observer isn't moving along then the black hole will move out of range for a lot of observations pretty swiftly. Note that a black hole can gain momentum relative to an observer just as well if the observer is the thing accelerated instead of the hole.
Probably the only even slightly practical way to add angular momentum to a black hole would be to get a serious electric charge on it first, so it could be accelerated magnetically. That's still far fetched engineering, but isn't theoretically banned. So the device that could do the preliminary job of making adding momentum possible, most likely could simply do the whole job by pumping more electrons in. Ergo, any species wishing to conduct the experiment will only build the gigantic electron gun, not the space magnets.
Direct depiction of violence is only part of the situation. (Just as somebody above had to point out that very little of the sex depicted is about reproductive sex.). What about misleading information related to violence? There are supposedly some significant numbers of people who overrate the chance of cars exploding, thanks to Hollywood showing so many 'car goes off a cliff and explodes before it even hits the ground' scenes. It might be good to know if this is really a substantial group, to add to your group of animal killers and such.
Maybe only a certain set of people have problems with the violence in isolation, but isn't it likely a larger set have problems because the media tends to show violence as solving problems it won't really solve. Maybe a war movie such as "Gods and Generals" has less negative impact than one of the "Die Hard" series, not because either has more or less depiction of death or gore, but because in the action film, the worse the bad guy is, the more the violence seems to always result in immediate divine justice, without the chaos and 'collateral damage' that real violence seems to inevitably carry with it.
Maybe showing violence is one level of problem, and showing that the world is clearly divided into good and bad guys, and it's OK for the good guys to try violence early before they've exhausted other options, and the bad guys don't leave behind grieving relatives, is a whole different ball game.
OK, you've just said something that is nearly 100% true, but has almost no meaning outside of the context you've left out. RNA mutates just as DNA does, and is subject to selection in theory. So, an RNA based virus can evolve. But, there are important differences.
1. Just about every gene in a virus is vital, as that same evolutionary pressure selects to weed out all the junk code at a much higher rate. The penalties a virus pays for hauling any gene not vitally needed are so big, it has to hijack something else's reproductive code to duplicate itself. So just about every mutation in the remaining code is seriously negative - positive mutations in 'advanced' organisms are rare, but for viruses they are literally millions of times rarer.
2. RNA based organisms are all non-sexual reproducers, so there is no second copy of anything from chromosome pairing, to take up slack for any gene that gets damaged either. That probably further amplifies the effects of point 1.
So, you get lots of mutation in viruses, but very little evolution because there are almost no positive selection events associated with that mutation. Scientists have even come up with the term Stochastic mutation to describe what some viruses do (HIV for one). In such cases, you get regular mutation at certain key points, but no essentially NO selection. HIV may eventually mutate in a fashion that is subject to selection pressure in the wild, but the four common stochastic mutations it displays won't be the path to any such changes.
Overall, viruses have very fast reproductive cycles, i.e. an HIV virus will typically reproduce between 100 and 200 copies in 1 1/2 to 2 days. If it weren't that there's so little selection pressure, they would likely overwhelm us "higher" life-forms totally.
There, you're realistically describing an airborne version of such a virus, not an STD, and probably not even the multiple bodily fluids borne version that is the baseline Ebola virus. An STD is really a disease that spreads so poorly only direct membrane to bodily fluid contact tends to spread it. STDs typically won't spread dry skin to dry skin, or by fluids if those are exposed to sunlight or cold for even a few minutes, and they die very, very quickly if exposed to many common environmental stressors other germs resist, for example, pool Chlorine or hot weather.
I don't want to make light of your comment - certainly, there are scenarios, for example Person A dies of Ebola at airport B, plane that brought the victim has already gone on to next stop with new passengers seated in that row, that could easily cause, as you say, an international crisis. But these are possibilities even if the disease doesn't infect anyone else.
Fortunately, Ebola is very far from developing the protein coat it would need to allow airborne exposure.
One group Google does not want to go against is GWAR.
http://www.gwar.net/
Schrodinger's Potato Crisps?
One point I derived is seems to follow from his choice of product packaging as the example: Here on Slashdot, you often see self announced Libertarians posting about how government policies are arbitrary, or perhaps 'esoteric' or 'arcane', or divorced from reality. Maybe what the FDA requires on a package of chips is something logically needed for a quite sensible purpose - it only looks arbitrary or unnecessarily complex because it's a 'language' very different from the front panel's 'advertisese' or the machine readable barcode.
Note that most people don't really parse the advertising either, they get what the advertiser wants them to get, with the spin the advertiser wants, like getting what the browser preinterprets of a site's HTML. But advertising is focused on being comfortable for the viewer, not on having real value in the content or actual transmission of ideas. (You can put a big, green "!!!Only 9 calories per serving!!!" blurb on the package, and bury the fact that "A serving is 1/4 Oz. of chips - this package contains 132 servings", in small print somewhere on the bottom edge, and most people won't actually get the facts, they will just feel better about eating a whole bag of chips.). But, most people, including the above mentioned Libertarians, won't mention how that packaging is 'arbitrary', 'esoteric' or 'divorced from reality'. Some data-types seem to draw this criticism very commonly, while other's don't, even if it may be entirely justified.
I, for one, say "You're welcome." whenever my ATM says "Thank you." Sooner or later, it will be smart enough to care, so practice now. When they put you all in maple syrup filled tubes for scorching the sky, me and the Oracle's server will be knocking back Fuzzy Navels and leering at all the dumb blondes who also said "You're welcome." (In their case, reflexively). Someday, the race will be divided into those who were ready to treat the machines as equals, and coppertops.
Real explosives don't need ambient oxygen. Internal break down of (usually Nitrogen) bonds releases the energy, not rapid oxidation. A few exotic chemistrys exist, such as getting a normally inert noble gas to combine with a reactive gas (i.e. Xenon Trifloride) to store similar levels of energy, but mostly it's Nitrogen. C-4 isn't really the name of an explosive, but Composition 4 is about 90% RDX, which is the high explosive part (also called cyclonite). The other 9 to 10 % is the plasticizer that makes it putty like. No, C-4 does not require outside Oxygen, although it's probably not the stuff to use here. I'm sure the US Navy has some data on what explosives stay safe under very high seawater pressures and still react quickly, hopefully someone will ask them as needed.
Microsoft sort of faltered on some of its arguably best ideas. They implemented dynamic linking libraries, for example, and then couldn't or didn't get all the 3rd party developers to put the DLL's in the same place (Windows/system). They added the System32 subdirectory to keep 32 bit and 16 bit DLLs separate, and couldn't get cooperation on that either. Notice that Microsoft could have not issued its Windows certified or compatible stickers to anyone who didn't play along. They decided they would rather be able to brag about how much 3rd party software Windows could run, than get strict compliance. The exact same thing happened with the registry and individual .ini files.
I'm not saying that Microsoft originated the DLL concept in its underlying form mind you, just that it was a good concept in that it that fit the abstraction layer model for computing, and Microsoft was in a position to decide DLLs either all went in the program's own directory or in Microsoft's special place, and they took a few half hearted steps to try to enforce one system, flip-flopped to the other, and then faltered completely. The same goes for the registry - somebody at Microsoft had a vision for how the damned thing was supposed to work that arguably could have made for a better security model or more stable environment than what they ended up doing, and the vision was even partly implemented, then faltered over time.
And it's that 'legal AND illegal' that worries some here. With one hand, Microsoft is openly doing something that is legal and will doubtless benefit some people. Given their history, what's the other hand doing? It's possible there isn't a concealed part of the overall process, but given that very same history, why is anyone in a rush to demand they get the benefit of our doubts? How many times does Microsoft have to demonstrate they have an ulterior motive, before everyone gets the memo?
Giving away your browser is legal. Having a monopoly is, in itself, legal. Not prosecuting everyone who distributes bootleg copies to overseas markets is legal. But whether they all should be or not, all these things have tied in to Microsoft doing things that (surprise) aren't legal. Now some Slashdotters don't think Antitrust should be the law. Some disagree over just what constitutes an abusive monopoly. Some think Europe is some socialist psycho-state that simply targets bigness. But the laws are what they are. Proving the court cases Microsoft has already lost has taken establishing how MS has had hidden motives for various actions that look open and aboveboard. The hidden motives are now on the record. So why does someone always seem to demand the rest of us prove those methods and motives are coming up again, when after five or six good examples, the burden of proof ought to at least have shifted the other way?
What about cases where the numbers are right, but they could easily support a wrong conclusion?
For an example, take the current oil spill. If you look at it statistically, the BP estimate they stubbornly cling to is 5,000 barrels a day, and some other mainstream estimates range between 55,000 and 75,000 BPD. You could use some pretty sophisticated analytic math to decide if BP's estimates were more on the fringe than the criers of doom on the opposite fringe claiming it's a million barrels a day+, or not.
Statistics might leave us endlessly arguing about whether BP could somehow be honestly mistaken, just as the million barrels people could be. The arguments BP will offer when this becomes a court matter will doubtless rely on using statistics heavily to 'prove' they were just mistaken, not dishonest. It will be statistics they use to support the claim that extrapolation from a 2,000 foot depth range to over 5,000 feet down was a legitimate environmental analytic technique and not a wild ass guess, and they will be trying hard to keep any jury from understanding the differences between interpolation and extrapolation.
At this point, we have a smoking gun, in the form of powerpoint slides analysing how deep water oil spills could spread far under the surface while appearing minimal from above, a powerpoint presentation that BP executives were privy to as early as 2000-2001. BP is flat out lying, its actions arguably violate RICO, in at least a few individual's cases they rise at least to 11 counts of conspiracy after the fact to conceal criminally neglegent homicide, and the company executives and major stockholders all deserve to be under a blanket investigation with an eye towards singling out those persons deserving the most rigorous criminal prosecution. It's statistics that BP will use to try to hide that fact, and others.
There's always a certain amount of creativity, skill, and knowledge in a success story. There's always a certain amount of luck and outside support as well. When people get successful, they have a strong tendency to overate how much was skill or creativity, and how little came from their origins, their supporters or just dumb luck.
It's the ultimate version of the self made man myth "I taught my teachers everything they knew how to teach me. I invented writing so I could learn things faster, then wrote all the books. I created money just so I could have a way to keep track of my successes. Then I built this company into the giant of the fountain pen nib industry it is today."
SETI really works out to the search for Extraterrestrial Information Bearing Radio Sources. We still would need a separate way to search for everything that metabolises, gets irritable, or reproduces but can't craft a decent vacuum tube yet. (Or has converted totally to tight-casting, fiber-optic, or something we haven't thought of yet but which we will have a hard time distinguishing from 'magic' or 'psionics', if we ever find it.).
I'm now wondering, what portion of Slashdot cranks drive Geo Metros?
When they first did the "build amino acids from methane and ammonia with electric current and UV in a big glass ball" experiments, 'they' also confidently predicted that the next stages, getting more and more complex compounds would follow soon and would be surprisingly easy. There were people on record as claiming that they would have actual life within a few weeks. Life Magazine published Nobel Laureates 'predicting' we would synthesise artificial life by New Years day. Nothing has come of these claims.
I'm not saying you're wrong, mind you. I like to believe that life is tenacious and easily spread. My philosophical and 'religious' beliefs 'predict' life in abundance on many worlds. But that's not scientific prediction, and when you're citing a set of experiments that produced so many misleading predictions and erroneous conclusions, it's probably best to keep taking it with a grain of salt.
So we've found life on Mars? That's news to me. Apparently that they have observed even indirect evidence for liquid water on Mars is news to you. You do realise that your second sentence contradicts your first, and it's special pleading for your claim, on a level with "maybe God does miracles but makes them look so natural we can't use them for proof he exists".
You didn't follow Mozee Toby's argument at all, and frankly you are the one who's making wrong claims here. People simply did not, for example have close up evidence of erosion on Mars 'for decades'. It's been within the last few years, both that we got much better evidence for occasional liquid water on Mars and that we got some of our best evidence against life on Mars. Mozee Toby referenced that, it IS meaningful, and if you didn't get any meaning from that, that's YOUR problem.
(Literally, you appear to have a basic, should have been corrected by the time you got out of a public high school level, comprehension problem here.).
This really does hinge on the current model of how life originates (which is not what Biological theory of Evolution is about, it's how existing life undergoes selection). That life starts quickly, anywhere conditions are right, is an as yet untestable claim, and may not technically ever be a scientifically valid idea unless someone can formulate a greatly clarified version of just what 'conditions are right' really means. Saying liquid water = conditions are right may mean absolutely nothing, and even if it's true, that still doesn't prove life generally starts quickly if any potential for it exists. The whole claim's a philosophical position, not a scientific one, and it needs to be seen for what it is before anyone makes the decision to focus on liquid water as a meaningful indicator at the level of, say, designing orbital observatories. As long as it's a purely philosophical issue, there really are some damned good counterarguments (such as Fermi's question/paradox), until someone can put some science behind it to settle the point.
Methane, and Ammonia, are problematic:
Pluses:
1. They are very common, like H2O, around the observed universe.
2. The could work with a Carbon based complex chemistry, at some temperature range.
3. They have solvent properties, also like H2O - you can get many other elements suspended in solutions.
Minuses:
1. They are non-polar, so the ices they form are heavier than the liquid, and sink to the bottom. Hence, Lakes of them freeze from the bottom up and seldom keep any liquid portions during typical models of winter. (see below)
2. They have a narrower range of liquidity, and so even minor climate shifts result in freezing or boiling. Essentially, a planet with methane or ammonia oceans is just about bound to have very harsh winters and summers, unless it has almost no orbital eccentricity or axial tilt.
I doubt there's very many Biologists throwing around the word 'randomly' like that, since the standard model for evolution is that Mutation is generally random, but selection IS NOT. How complex silicon compounds may get has a lot of bearing on whether selection pressure can matter. (This assumes we are much less likely to find life as it has just begun, before there has been much if any time for selection pressure to affect it - as that's an awfully small window in time compared to the duration of a biome).
Usually, people who offer the "If you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care who has your information" claim are talking about something such as the Dept. of Justice seeing that information. Here we're talking about anyone who puts up a web site, (as you, yourself, posted). That's actually a pretty extreme position. You're not just saying we should all trust the government - you're really saying we should all trust random strangers.
Would you respond to my post right now, with your current IP address, monitor resolution, video card and driver info, all browser functions enabled, any 3rd party add ons, what versions of Flash, Shockwave, and so on you have, your OS and what support packs it has, a complete list of codecs on your machine, a similarly complete list of fonts, and probably a lot more info? I'm a random stranger to you, aren't I? I can understand if you don't want to look all that up manually and type it into a little slashdot window (in fact, please don't), but how is that really different from my automated havesting of that same data?
Look at all the things you can't change. Yeah, you, and most people can force a new IP address if you're with a common ISP such as Comcast. But if you update your Flash, that update's gonna have a time-stamp after the version I just found out about, so I can still assume that your PC had that version of Flash at the time it visited my site. What if I'm looking for old versions of add ons that have known vulnerabilities? Maybe I'm watching for visitors who don't upgrade or patch much. There are certainly exploits that would be hard to stop if their originator focused on putting them only on the obviously slow to patch set's boxes. So, if for no other reason, we should care because it's another reason to keep up with current versions of all those 3rd party support files browsers have these days.
Between some PCs having some really unusual codecs (such as the older Indeo codecs for some seriously pre DivX era .AVI files), and having some pretty rare fancy decorative fonts, this would create a situation where identification would really be about as distinctive as fingerprints or DNA. In court, a prosecutor could cite billions to one odds that it was any other PC than that particular one, and it would most likely be believed by a jury.
However, it would probably be misleading. Most of the people keeping those seriously old codecs have odd video content that doesn't work without them, and a lot of the weird porn, bootleg content and such being distributed by back channels still uses them too. You'd get a situation where most people who went to site X, deliberately looking for its content, had a high probability of having those legacy codecs, but that wouldn't imply either of the inverses. (That people with those codecs had illegal content from site X that needed them wouldn't be generally true. And that people with those codecs got them or kept them because they had intent to get the illegal content wouldn't be generally true either).
This could be like claiming the normal odds for DNA testing, when the actual group wasn't the general population, but a preselected subgroup (I.e. there's a claim PC 'A' was used to download bootleg copies of the vampire movie 'Twilight', and it has a cluster of very unusual fonts, which however, just happen to all be Vampire oriented, Gothic looking fonts. A huge portion of vampire fixated emo losers might have those fonts. It could even be that practically everyone who bootlegs 'Twilight" has those fonts, but that doesn't imply the reverse at all for whether they were torrenting 'Twilight'.).
By US rules, double quotes are used to quote literally. Single quotes are not necessarily exact, but may instead be used to show paraphrasing, condensation or for ironic quotation. British English may differ.
First, I would object to the claim that England became protestant only because a king (Henry VIII) wanted a divorce. Why are you sticking up for the claim that the US is a Christian nation by metaphorically spitting in the face of a church with four million US adherents? Worse, it's the one that was the specific branch attended by the majority of those founding fathers you mention.
I suspect you are not just claiming there is a Christian basis, but that it's in your particular branch or sect of Christians. That's the very sort of 'Holy' war the doctrine of separation of church and state was intended to quell.
Second, your mistakes in grammar, spelling and punctuation are drastic. I'm not normally a Grammar Nazi, but really, three run-on sentences in five? Why on Earth did you think this would contribute anything positive to a thread on Education?