Yes, that's strange, but my point was that thinking of spirits as immaterial and so invisible makes more sense than claiming they are simultaniously non-material and have a property only material things can have. It's something like when Quantum Chromodynamics names some properties of Quarks after colors. That sounds pretty strange, but it would be a whole lot stranger if they were claiming things smaller than a single wavelength of light actually had certain colors, rather than it being a result of metaphor and figurative language.
The problem with the invisible friends routine is it's simply stupid (Note I didn't say YOU are stupid, I said the routine's stupid).
What do you believe in?
Capitalists worship a giant invisible hand (and sacrifice people to it). Socialists believe everyone will be honest and decent if they get elected. Democrats believe in a 300% tax rate. The NRA wants everyone to have their own Rocket Launchers. The ACLU never defends anybody but Scum. The French believe everybody is male (liberty, equality and fraternity - nothing about sorority there) (Yes, some English wags actually used this line in print discussing the revolution). Quantum Physicists all keep cats locked up in boxes, how cruel. People who believe in George Washington all think he was stronger than the Incredible Hulk (to throw a silver dollar across a broad river)...
There's no real belief or opinion that can't be oversimplified to the point of looking absurd. Name a few beliefs of your own, and somebody will be glad to reduce everything you stand up for to a sound-bite and try to make you look like a fool too.
Most Christians, Muslims, etc. believe that God is a spirit - what's so strange about believing that a spirit is invisible, it would be even stranger if they thought that it wasn't. Now you want something really silly, try the trinity. That three in one business is weird enough to be part of Scientology's schtick.
Now as a Christian, I'll gladly defend your right to make fun of us. Yes, you should be able to make either jokes or serious and realistic criticisms of my beliefs. The real question is, are you, I or anyone else actually benefiting from making this particular criticism?
Long Form: Human beings are biologically capable of exercising independent thought. Indeed, doing this is the test we most rely on for determining what is human. By thinking for themselves, humans often come to different conclusions. Thoughts affect actions, and to some extent thoughts can even be assigned based on the thinker's subsequent actions. Privacy with regard to actions thus protects privacy of thought. Many times, valuable ideas require some time to develop and are destroyed if criticized too early. If everything is public, the tyranny of the majority becomes absolute, and all humans have to agree with the majority or risk being compelled to act against their own best opinions if they do not. New thoughts cease to be developed as they cannot yet withstand the pressure of public scrutiny, particularly from a public that believes it holds a collective right and there is no individual right offsetting it. This equates to making humans into creatures which cannot exercise independent thought. It also means humans as a whole cannot develop new ideas in response to changes in their environment which will doubtless keep happening, (in other words, the species cannot use one of its most fundamental biological abilities to survive anymore). That destroys the humans, in just the same way as trying to make a fish into a desert creature destroys the fish.
Short Form: The opposite of a Birthright is a Death sentence.
I get tired of people misusing phrases along the lines of "can't disprove a negative".
First, that's got to be a universal negative they are talking about, specific negatives get disproved all the time.
Second, a good book on logic will list some exceptions to that general rule even if it is correctly limited to universals.
Third, you can't use the same methods to disprove an axiom and a theorem - you disprove axioms by methods such as showing that accepting all of them and correctly applying procedural rules of logic leads to an absurd conclusion, you mostly disprove theorems by showing a procedure has been applied incorrectly.
So until you know whether something is being offered as an axiom or a theorem, you generally can't disprove it via logic. (You might be able to do the extra work of treating it both ways and guessing at what other axioms or steps in a proof the other person hasn't said yet, but that's likely to get the whole discussion off track, and is essentially putting words in the other person's mouth and then arguing with them, itself another logical fallacy). There's little point in whipping out the "can't disprove a negative" rule until you at least know what element of logic the claim is.
But, people like this claim - it shuts up some of the 'UFO freaks', 'Jesus freaks', etc. Insisting that it has severe limits on fair use makes one a Grammar Nazi, uptight, or something else totally unrelated, even if only one poster in 10 or so actually gets it right. Expect to see the same thing for your pet peeve 'Slippery Slope'.
If Gene Siskel appears before me now and says "Don't see 'movie X'!". I'm gonna skip it - who wants to have the ghost of Gene Siskel following him around saying "I told ya so!".
Truth does not equal provability. (Kurt Godel in his (in)famous incompleteness theorem).
Truth does not equal reality (Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger - various others).
It's that conflation "The final theory is closer to the truth, or reality, than the first one was. Isn't this what science is about?"
The final theory is closer to explaining and systematizing your observations, than the first one was. You're still assuming that your observations ARE the truth or reality, and that's an assumption outside of science. Yes, it may well be true, and real, that truth === reality, but it's not something provable within the scientific method, rather it's a priori. Science can't pull itself up by its own bootstraps. To put it more simply: You can't prove that science produces truth by applying the scientific method, because if the method is flawed, it might falsely tell you it isn't.
(You also can't just go around saying truth === reality in the context I just gave - "Science produces Truth" is a culturally defensible construct in English, but "Science produces Reality" almost certainly isn't. Neither is defensible under some schools of logic, mathematics, or philosophy.).
And 99.9999999999937624% of the time, making up statistics to 'prove' your point just shows you're an ass. (That's right, this post of mine is the sole known exception:-) ).
And I read the whole review. There's no specific claim that the writer is attempting to 'debunk Darwin', rather, one that his pretty models are irrelevant to real biology. The review's writer is apparently an atheist, by the header on his page that refers to godless liberalism. He is likely an atheist as a reasoned, philosophical point, and I can easily respect his opinions.
The article said nothing one way or the other about Christianity. Despite this, many of the posts have been "Oh Noes! the nasty awful Xians are oppressing us again!". It must be horrible to be so filled with hate and fear.
There's a Story about the Hashasshim (The original assassins). New potential assassins were recruited, and were given a strong dose of drugs (probably not just Hashish, but a special formula also incorporating such compounds as Belladonna and Stramonium). While under the influence, they awakened in the presence of beautiful 'houris', and had hours of kinky sex, while eating exotic foods such as ice cream. Eventually, they fell asleep and awakened back in the normal world.
Then they were told that the cult's leader had given them a taste of the paradise that awaited them if they died serving the cause. All this is pretty well documented history, with thanks to Robert Anton Wilson for the claim that the drug mixture used had to be more than just hashish.
Here's where this ties into your remarks about the Scientologists. By some sources, those people who believed the cult leaders uncritically were recruited as assassins. The ones who said, in effect "BS! You just got me stoned and laid, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna believe you have a direct pipeline to Allah." ended up becoming potential cult leaders. So maybe the people running Scientology were recruited from the ones who said "Thetans, eh? Roight, now pull the other one!" .
Finally - over 20 people posted to the header "When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack!," without anyone save you apparently noticing there are no specifically Christian examples given in the first use. Either the parent poster thinks the Church of Scientology is a Christian sect, or that one of the Crackpot individuals mentioned is specifically a Wealthy Christian. I suppose the later could in fact be the case, but would like to see some proof rather than assumption. Am I missing something here, or did 20 or so supposedly rational individuals just jump on the bash Christians bandwagon with no reason?
The Carnot cycle determines the theoretical maximum efficency of heat transfer. There are basic topside limits (In a pipe that's uncapped at the end going into the river, water can't be hotter than 100 C or it's not water anymore). Practically, all the heat exchange systems, even ones with molten sodium and such, have absolute thermal upper limits. These are usually above the sensible ecological limits, so engineers normally design for the more restrictive, environmentally safe limits.
But, the difference between cold and hot determines maximum efficiency possible even for a theoretically perfect system. If the top stays fixed, and the low temperature base goes up, the cycle HAS to become less efficient. This applies to all power-plants, not just nuclear ones. A coal plant that uses a river for cooling, a sterling cycle solar engine, or the internal combustion engine under the hood of your car, all become less efficient from this effect. While this power-plant has to stay shut down, every single car driving across the south and southwest is running at lower efficiency than usual, and wasting more gasoline.
Re:Dear Mr. /. ,where can I has find the kitty pic
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Fox Hacks Fark
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· Score: 1
I totally quit going to Fark when the critical density of malicious idiots was reached (for my personal threshold). The only thing I miss is Caturdays.* So ordnarily, I don't reccomend Fark to people who don't know it already. In this case however, whoever modded you Troll is probably not malicious, but might want to go to Fark long enough so he understands what your post was about.
*If you think I'm fibbing, remember Foobies has been split off.
Now how do we get Slashdot to add a cat pics section?
The Website has been showing a link for submissions to the online versions of Dragon and Dungeon for about two weeks now. I would guess that link has gotten them a hundred or so pitches for articles, ALL from people doubtless planning at that time to write them to 3.5 standard formats. That means every single one of those prospective article writers is now wondering if they will need to first buy an unknown amount of new rules before they can submit what they offered to write, (assuming they get accepted, of course), or wondering if this will impose months of additional delays on acceptance or requests for revisions, or on actually seeing a check, or wondering if the online versions will still be publishing articles under the old rules for a time, and for how long.
This looks like WotC might have done something that will alienate not just its consumers, but its suppliers. Shades of SCO! I hope that at least the independent publishers that rely on the OGL (Open Gaming Licence) relationship to publish their own 3.5 related material, have been told what effects WotC thinks this will have. Maybe there has been some advance discussion with them under nondisclosure agreements or something - I really hope so. I also hope when the site becomes accessible, the legal issues are already being addressed for the general public, but given the way this timing has to be affecting independent contractors for the magazines, I won't be surprised if it takes months for WotC to clarify whether any parts of 4.0 will be under the OGL, whether there will be an available Systems Resource Document for download (and when) and other such issues.
Very roughly around 200 years ago, Bishop Berkely was able to argue against the very existence of Matter with some real conviction. After all, the properties we observed directly were never common to all matter. Watter was wet, but not all stuff was wet. Some things were hard, some brittle, some flexible, some red, some noisy, etc. You could say a whole group of things were solid, or liquid, but just how solid was another question when solid meant 'resisting being crushed' as much, maybe more than it meant 'not changing shape despite being on a slope', and you weren't sure yet which was more fundamental. The systemizable properties common to all matter weren't known, only the arbitrary, quirky ones.
Atoms were treated as a theoretical construct after Dalton. Many Chemists thought they were a nice mathematical trick that simplified calculations, but not necessarily real things. Einstein's paper on Brownian motion in 1905 is considered the first real proof that Dalton's atoms were real in the same sense macroscale stuff is real. Right now, the state vectors of Quantum Mechanics are still being treated as atoms were in the 1800's - very useful as math, but not necessarily real things. Will there soon be a paper that shows QM entities definitely can be regarded as physically real things? (Or that they definitely cannot?)
Trek plot-lines involved an awful lot of really big disaster scenarios. By the movies, something so big, so tragic that even very poorly understood time travel might look worth the risk was happening quite frequently. They traveled back in time to save the Earth from one alien probe (ST 4 -Quest for Whales), so why didn't they consider it with V'ger? (ST 1 - Quest for Boring Uniforms)? Or why not risk it to stop the Klingon moon from blowing up? (ST 6 - Quest for Shakespeare References) - Even if the Federation wouldn't, why didn't some Klingon commander risk it? Let me guess, there's something in the tech manuals about why the Klingon's warp drives don't allow time travel?
There's a difference between being punished because you did something wrong, and being punished because some goon five level down from you on the corporate chain made a dumb mistake.
Which is why the law calls for limited liability. Properly interpreted, that phrase means you (as a member of the board, say), have only some liability for what Goon did. You can be punished, but only to a limited extent. The point is, Goon can have done something seriously wrong (Drove a truckload of Dioxin away from the factory in the middle of the night, and poured it onto the ground where that new subdivision is being built). You can have done something much less blatantly wrong (Scrimped on budgeting background checks for your drivers, or telling the Dept Head "I don't care how you get rid of it, just do it."). There's still room for liability, and should be. In fact, you seem to be arguing from that perspective too, in your last paragraph.
But, there are areas you're not addressing, Particularly the law (frequently misinterpreted here on Slashdot) which says corporate management has a duty to maximize shareholder profits. This does not include committing even the most minor criminal acts to do so. Once somebody commits an actual crime, the only defense that should fully protect higher management and owners is full non-compliance. It's not enough to say "I never ordered Goon to actually commit that particular crime", the management and owners need to be able to show they didn't create an environment where people thought their jobs were threatened if they didn't break the law somewhere. What's commonly called the 'veil of corporate secrecy' makes that hard to determine.
This creates a set of alternatives society can live with. Either strip away much of the veil, (particularly for publicly traded corporations), or presume limited liability can by default extend pretty far for even fairly trivial errors so that somebody with deep pockets can be sued.
Partnerships, Sole Proprietorships, and variants on traditional incorporation, like S-Corps. All have differing liability standards. Plus the FDIC and banking structure is what lets most capital get raised, and the rest is affected chiefly by inheritance taxes, not corporation law - you're posting about how there can be things for capital to be applied to, not initially raised.
My Godfather's first PhD was in Nuclear Physics (Second was in Theology), and he once chaired the National Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, you insensitive clod.
Really, I learned some serious physics in church, listening to discussions of Dirac's Bra-Ket notation and Feynman Diagrams, even though a lot of it was probably way over my head in third grade.
There's way too much: The Doughnut in the City on the Edge of Forever, The library or whatever where Spock gets into Hot Cave Snogging with Mariette Hartley, Slingshotting around a Star at Warp 8, Screwing with the Matter/Antimatter intermix (to get away from the planet where the water makes Sulu take his shirt off, or something like that), etc.
This worked for the original series, where there were no extended plotlines and the audience was comfortable with a more anthology show-like structure. It made for flaws that really hurt all the sequels, even by Next Generation.
100 years ago they didn't think you could change one to another, or split or fuse them to gain energy
On this, you're actually being conservative. There were prominent physicists as late as the mid 1930's who didn't think there was any way to actually get a net gain of energy from nuclear reactions, and they included people who had specifically researched Uranium. Until the curve of binding energy became well known among them, most would have bet a week's pay that there was no possible natural radioactive compound that would exist in enough quantities to refine and could still be induced to give up that many neutrons.
Here's why Copyright Violation simply isn't Theft (whatever else it is, and without going into whether it's ever right or always wrong).
1. Copyright lasts for a limited time. If violation is theft, it would be immoral for someone to be able to avoid being charged only because the item stolen, while still quite valuable, had passed a certain age. Can you imagine if it was legal to take an antique chair because it had entered the public domain? To make Copyright violation = theft, it can't remain time limited.
2. Copyright violation is a federal issue only (in the U. S.). If copyright violation = theft, a 1978 Supreme Court decision has taken away the rights of the individual states to prosecute a type of theft, even where this theft is happening exclusively inside their borders. When the Supreme Court ruled that State Copyright laws were unconstitutional because the document didn't give Congress the right to delegate copyright enforcement down to the individual states, the decision specifically said that Copyright Violation did not equal Theft, and that this decision was therefore not based on the limitations which would have been imposed under the Interstate Commerce clause (which presumably would have applied if CV = Theft), and that argument did not apply.
3. Not all Copyright violation is criminal. Non-criminal Theft is an absurdity, Non-criminal Copyright Violation is a real, possible thing. Making CV = Theft means making all cases criminal. Even the pettiest violation would be a criminal offense, as is petty theft.
4. Copyright Violation was very carefully put in a completely different section of the U. S. code than theft. CV is all in title 17, Theft in Title 18 with all the other always criminal acts. That's deliberate.
So if you really, sincerely think Copyright Violation = Theft, you need to get up a petition to impeach several of the Supreme Court justices and much of the rest of the Federal Government. At a conservative estimate, at least 120 still serving congresscritters have been in long enough to have voted for the last major revisions of the U. S. code, and over 200 still serving members of congress ratified the Berne treaty. An actual majority of the current congress was in when the proposal to include some forms of CV as terrorism related theft in the USAPATRIOT act was floated by industry lobbyists, and roundly rejected. So, if you really believe, morally speaking, Copyright Violation = Theft, you are morally obligated to seek the impeachment of over half of Congress and much, maybe all, of the Supreme Court. If you don't, then you're talking the talk, but not walking the walk. If you believe it is true, legally speaking, the Supreme Court disagrees with you. Guess who wins that argument.
So yes, you're either a troll or a fool. You either don't mean a word of what you say (Troll), or you've decided that a lot of people who don't violate, but know at least some of these facts and are trying to apply them fairly are instead, all violating the law and just rationalizing their crimes, so you've falsely accused them (Fool, and Worse).
That's why I said Irwin? - parent poster probably meant Schrödinger too, but had Schrödinger's first name wrong. But your explanation of how it would work in this context is very clever, and you well deserved the +1 funny mod.
In the end, you're just saying that because some proponents of abiogenesis made one assumption that turned out to be wrong, your ad-hoc, gut instinct guesses have to be more correct - which is silly.
There's one ad hoc, gut instinct guess between both our posts. Guess which person's it came from.
For the last time, Dawkins, Gould, Morris, and essentially all the most respected biologists writing for the popular press have said this. So have more scholarly authors such as Mark Ridley in college textbooks. If you have a problem with it, you're the one disagreeing with 99+% of all modern biologists.
You know, there is an explanation for your incorrect claim about viruses. I could tell you, and if a third party posts to this thread asking, I WILL GLADLY TELL THEM WHAT IT IS AND PROVE MY CLAIM. I won't tell you - you're a crackpot who disagrees with the established experts and because of that resorts to personal attacks - you can stay stupid as far as I'm concerned.
Artificial change cannot intrinsically be defined as better or worse than natural change.
So, by the same token, murder is no worse than someone falling off a ladder.
That metaphor would have been clearer if you'd just said 'by the same token, murder is no worse than accidental death.'. I had to parse your version quite a bit - "Is he saying ladders are natural and something else is artificial? Is he claiming that for non-lethal falls too or just lethal ones?".
Here's just one example of why (this) artificial change can clearly and intrinsically be defined as worse than natural change:
We have records from sources such as core samples of deep ice-packs that show how quickly natural changes have occurred. The speed is slow enough that various tree-lines only need to change at a speed trees can keep up with. Tree populations on hills and mountains can move by gradually seeding each new generation at slightly higher or lower altitudes, and if the change is gradual, the tree species will survive in that area.
The current changes are happening at a rate that is far faster than a tree population's very limited ability to move over many generations. To keep up with the changes, instead of preferential seeding, the individual trees would have to get up and walk. At this point, the people claiming that nature can deal with man-made climate changes just as it dealt with natural ones are essentially claiming 'trees got legs!', which is perhaps why many of us have lost patience debating this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's strange, but my point was that thinking of spirits as immaterial and so invisible makes more sense than claiming they are simultaniously non-material and have a property only material things can have. It's something like when Quantum Chromodynamics names some properties of Quarks after colors. That sounds pretty strange, but it would be a whole lot stranger if they were claiming things smaller than a single wavelength of light actually had certain colors, rather than it being a result of metaphor and figurative language.
The problem with the invisible friends routine is it's simply stupid (Note I didn't say YOU are stupid, I said the routine's stupid).
What do you believe in?
Capitalists worship a giant invisible hand (and sacrifice people to it).
Socialists believe everyone will be honest and decent if they get elected.
Democrats believe in a 300% tax rate.
The NRA wants everyone to have their own Rocket Launchers.
The ACLU never defends anybody but Scum.
The French believe everybody is male (liberty, equality and fraternity - nothing about sorority there) (Yes, some English wags actually used this line in print discussing the revolution).
Quantum Physicists all keep cats locked up in boxes, how cruel.
People who believe in George Washington all think he was stronger than the Incredible Hulk (to throw a silver dollar across a broad river)...
There's no real belief or opinion that can't be oversimplified to the point of looking absurd. Name a few beliefs of your own, and somebody will be glad to reduce everything you stand up for to a sound-bite and try to make you look like a fool too.
Most Christians, Muslims, etc. believe that God is a spirit - what's so strange about believing that a spirit is invisible, it would be even stranger if they thought that it wasn't. Now you want something really silly, try the trinity. That three in one business is weird enough to be part of Scientology's schtick.
Now as a Christian, I'll gladly defend your right to make fun of us. Yes, you should be able to make either jokes or serious and realistic criticisms of my beliefs. The real question is, are you, I or anyone else actually benefiting from making this particular criticism?
Long Form: Human beings are biologically capable of exercising independent thought. Indeed, doing this is the test we most rely on for determining what is human. By thinking for themselves, humans often come to different conclusions. Thoughts affect actions, and to some extent thoughts can even be assigned based on the thinker's subsequent actions. Privacy with regard to actions thus protects privacy of thought. Many times, valuable ideas require some time to develop and are destroyed if criticized too early. If everything is public, the tyranny of the majority becomes absolute, and all humans have to agree with the majority or risk being compelled to act against their own best opinions if they do not. New thoughts cease to be developed as they cannot yet withstand the pressure of public scrutiny, particularly from a public that believes it holds a collective right and there is no individual right offsetting it. This equates to making humans into creatures which cannot exercise independent thought. It also means humans as a whole cannot develop new ideas in response to changes in their environment which will doubtless keep happening, (in other words, the species cannot use one of its most fundamental biological abilities to survive anymore). That destroys the humans, in just the same way as trying to make a fish into a desert creature destroys the fish.
Short Form: The opposite of a Birthright is a Death sentence.
I get tired of people misusing phrases along the lines of "can't disprove a negative".
First, that's got to be a universal negative they are talking about, specific negatives get disproved all the time.
Second, a good book on logic will list some exceptions to that general rule even if it is correctly limited to universals.
Third, you can't use the same methods to disprove an axiom and a theorem - you disprove axioms by methods such as showing that accepting all of them and correctly applying procedural rules of logic leads to an absurd conclusion, you mostly disprove theorems by showing a procedure has been applied incorrectly.
So until you know whether something is being offered as an axiom or a theorem, you generally can't disprove it via logic. (You might be able to do the extra work of treating it both ways and guessing at what other axioms or steps in a proof the other person hasn't said yet, but that's likely to get the whole discussion off track, and is essentially putting words in the other person's mouth and then arguing with them, itself another logical fallacy). There's little point in whipping out the "can't disprove a negative" rule until you at least know what element of logic the claim is.
But, people like this claim - it shuts up some of the 'UFO freaks', 'Jesus freaks', etc. Insisting that it has severe limits on fair use makes one a Grammar Nazi, uptight, or something else totally unrelated, even if only one poster in 10 or so actually gets it right. Expect to see the same thing for your pet peeve 'Slippery Slope'.
But how are we going to apply it to all the politicians at once?
If Gene Siskel appears before me now and says "Don't see 'movie X'!". I'm gonna skip it - who wants to have the ghost of Gene Siskel following him around saying "I told ya so!".
Truth does not equal provability. (Kurt Godel in his (in)famous incompleteness theorem).
Truth does not equal reality (Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger - various others).
It's that conflation "The final theory is closer to the truth, or reality, than the first one was. Isn't this what science is about?"
The final theory is closer to explaining and systematizing your observations, than the first one was. You're still assuming that your observations ARE the truth or reality, and that's an assumption outside of science. Yes, it may well be true, and real, that truth === reality, but it's not something provable within the scientific method, rather it's a priori. Science can't pull itself up by its own bootstraps.
To put it more simply: You can't prove that science produces truth by applying the scientific method, because if the method is flawed, it might falsely tell you it isn't.
(You also can't just go around saying truth === reality in the context I just gave - "Science produces Truth" is a culturally defensible construct in English, but "Science produces Reality" almost certainly isn't. Neither is defensible under some schools of logic, mathematics, or philosophy.).
And 99.9999999999937624% of the time, making up statistics to 'prove' your point just shows you're an ass. (That's right, this post of mine is the sole known exception :-) ).
And I read the whole review. There's no specific claim that the writer is attempting to 'debunk Darwin', rather, one that his pretty models are irrelevant to real biology. The review's writer is apparently an atheist, by the header on his page that refers to godless liberalism. He is likely an atheist as a reasoned, philosophical point, and I can easily respect his opinions.
The article said nothing one way or the other about Christianity. Despite this, many of the posts have been "Oh Noes! the nasty awful Xians are oppressing us again!". It must be horrible to be so filled with hate and fear.
There's a Story about the Hashasshim (The original assassins). New potential assassins were recruited, and were given a strong dose of drugs (probably not just Hashish, but a special formula also incorporating such compounds as Belladonna and Stramonium). While under the influence, they awakened in the presence of beautiful 'houris', and had hours of kinky sex, while eating exotic foods such as ice cream. Eventually, they fell asleep and awakened back in the normal world.
Then they were told that the cult's leader had given them a taste of the paradise that awaited them if they died serving the cause. All this is pretty well documented history, with thanks to Robert Anton Wilson for the claim that the drug mixture used had to be more than just hashish.
Here's where this ties into your remarks about the Scientologists. By some sources, those people who believed the cult leaders uncritically were recruited as assassins. The ones who said, in effect "BS! You just got me stoned and laid, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna believe you have a direct pipeline to Allah." ended up becoming potential cult leaders. So maybe the people running Scientology were recruited from the ones who said "Thetans, eh? Roight, now pull the other one!" .
Finally - over 20 people posted to the header "When Wealthy Christians and Crackpots Attack!," without anyone save you apparently noticing there are no specifically Christian examples given in the first use. Either the parent poster thinks the Church of Scientology is a Christian sect, or that one of the Crackpot individuals mentioned is specifically a Wealthy Christian. I suppose the later could in fact be the case, but would like to see some proof rather than assumption. Am I missing something here, or did 20 or so supposedly rational individuals just jump on the bash Christians bandwagon with no reason?
I figured the poster meant a monster, not an item. The Shades of SCO got their butts kicked by Novell, before they ever had to face IBM's Nazghul.
The Carnot cycle determines the theoretical maximum efficency of heat transfer. There are basic topside limits (In a pipe that's uncapped at the end going into the river, water can't be hotter than 100 C or it's not water anymore). Practically, all the heat exchange systems, even ones with molten sodium and such, have absolute thermal upper limits. These are usually above the sensible ecological limits, so engineers normally design for the more restrictive, environmentally safe limits.
But, the difference between cold and hot determines maximum efficiency possible even for a theoretically perfect system. If the top stays fixed, and the low temperature base goes up, the cycle HAS to become less efficient. This applies to all power-plants, not just nuclear ones. A coal plant that uses a river for cooling, a sterling cycle solar engine, or the internal combustion engine under the hood of your car, all become less efficient from this effect. While this power-plant has to stay shut down, every single car driving across the south and southwest is running at lower efficiency than usual, and wasting more gasoline.
I totally quit going to Fark when the critical density of malicious idiots was reached (for my personal threshold). The only thing I miss is Caturdays.* So ordnarily, I don't reccomend Fark to people who don't know it already. In this case however, whoever modded you Troll is probably not malicious, but might want to go to Fark long enough so he understands what your post was about.
*If you think I'm fibbing, remember Foobies has been split off.
Now how do we get Slashdot to add a cat pics section?
The Website has been showing a link for submissions to the online versions of Dragon and Dungeon for about two weeks now. I would guess that link has gotten them a hundred or so pitches for articles, ALL from people doubtless planning at that time to write them to 3.5 standard formats. That means every single one of those prospective article writers is now wondering if they will need to first buy an unknown amount of new rules before they can submit what they offered to write, (assuming they get accepted, of course), or wondering if this will impose months of additional delays on acceptance or requests for revisions, or on actually seeing a check, or wondering if the online versions will still be publishing articles under the old rules for a time, and for how long.
This looks like WotC might have done something that will alienate not just its consumers, but its suppliers. Shades of SCO! I hope that at least the independent publishers that rely on the OGL (Open Gaming Licence) relationship to publish their own 3.5 related material, have been told what effects WotC thinks this will have. Maybe there has been some advance discussion with them under nondisclosure agreements or something - I really hope so. I also hope when the site becomes accessible, the legal issues are already being addressed for the general public, but given the way this timing has to be affecting independent contractors for the magazines, I won't be surprised if it takes months for WotC to clarify whether any parts of 4.0 will be under the OGL, whether there will be an available Systems Resource Document for download (and when) and other such issues.
Very roughly around 200 years ago, Bishop Berkely was able to argue against the very existence of Matter with some real conviction. After all, the properties we observed directly were never common to all matter. Watter was wet, but not all stuff was wet. Some things were hard, some brittle, some flexible, some red, some noisy, etc. You could say a whole group of things were solid, or liquid, but just how solid was another question when solid meant 'resisting being crushed' as much, maybe more than it meant 'not changing shape despite being on a slope', and you weren't sure yet which was more fundamental. The systemizable properties common to all matter weren't known, only the arbitrary, quirky ones.
Atoms were treated as a theoretical construct after Dalton. Many Chemists thought they were a nice mathematical trick that simplified calculations, but not necessarily real things. Einstein's paper on Brownian motion in 1905 is considered the first real proof that Dalton's atoms were real in the same sense macroscale stuff is real. Right now, the state vectors of Quantum Mechanics are still being treated as atoms were in the 1800's - very useful as math, but not necessarily real things. Will there soon be a paper that shows QM entities definitely can be regarded as physically real things? (Or that they definitely cannot?)
Trek plot-lines involved an awful lot of really big disaster scenarios. By the movies, something so big, so tragic that even very poorly understood time travel might look worth the risk was happening quite frequently. They traveled back in time to save the Earth from one alien probe (ST 4 -Quest for Whales), so why didn't they consider it with V'ger? (ST 1 - Quest for Boring Uniforms)? Or why not risk it to stop the Klingon moon from blowing up? (ST 6 - Quest for Shakespeare References) - Even if the Federation wouldn't, why didn't some Klingon commander risk it? Let me guess, there's something in the tech manuals about why the Klingon's warp drives don't allow time travel?
There's a difference between being punished because you did something wrong, and being punished because some goon five level down from you on the corporate chain made a dumb mistake.
Which is why the law calls for limited liability. Properly interpreted, that phrase means you (as a member of the board, say), have only some liability for what Goon did. You can be punished, but only to a limited extent. The point is, Goon can have done something seriously wrong (Drove a truckload of Dioxin away from the factory in the middle of the night, and poured it onto the ground where that new subdivision is being built). You can have done something much less blatantly wrong (Scrimped on budgeting background checks for your drivers, or telling the Dept Head "I don't care how you get rid of it, just do it."). There's still room for liability, and should be. In fact, you seem to be arguing from that perspective too, in your last paragraph.
But, there are areas you're not addressing, Particularly the law (frequently misinterpreted here on Slashdot) which says corporate management has a duty to maximize shareholder profits. This does not include committing even the most minor criminal acts to do so. Once somebody commits an actual crime, the only defense that should fully protect higher management and owners is full non-compliance. It's not enough to say "I never ordered Goon to actually commit that particular crime", the management and owners need to be able to show they didn't create an environment where people thought their jobs were threatened if they didn't break the law somewhere. What's commonly called the 'veil of corporate secrecy' makes that hard to determine.
This creates a set of alternatives society can live with. Either strip away much of the veil, (particularly for publicly traded corporations), or presume limited liability can by default extend pretty far for even fairly trivial errors so that somebody with deep pockets can be sued.
Partnerships, Sole Proprietorships, and variants on traditional incorporation, like S-Corps. All have differing liability standards. Plus the FDIC and banking structure is what lets most capital get raised, and the rest is affected chiefly by inheritance taxes, not corporation law - you're posting about how there can be things for capital to be applied to, not initially raised.
My Godfather's first PhD was in Nuclear Physics (Second was in Theology), and he once chaired the National Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, you insensitive clod.
Really, I learned some serious physics in church, listening to discussions of Dirac's Bra-Ket notation and Feynman Diagrams, even though a lot of it was probably way over my head in third grade.
There's way too much: The Doughnut in the City on the Edge of Forever, The library or whatever where Spock gets into Hot Cave Snogging with Mariette Hartley, Slingshotting around a Star at Warp 8, Screwing with the Matter/Antimatter intermix (to get away from the planet where the water makes Sulu take his shirt off, or something like that), etc.
This worked for the original series, where there were no extended plotlines and the audience was comfortable with a more anthology show-like structure. It made for flaws that really hurt all the sequels, even by Next Generation.
500 years ago, no one had even conceptualized atoms
Democritus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus
100 years ago they didn't think you could change one to another, or split or fuse them to gain energy
On this, you're actually being conservative. There were prominent physicists as late as the mid 1930's who didn't think there was any way to actually get a net gain of energy from nuclear reactions, and they included people who had specifically researched Uranium. Until the curve of binding energy became well known among them, most would have bet a week's pay that there was no possible natural radioactive compound that would exist in enough quantities to refine and could still be induced to give up that many neutrons.
Here's why Copyright Violation simply isn't Theft (whatever else it is, and without going into whether it's ever right or always wrong).
1. Copyright lasts for a limited time. If violation is theft, it would be immoral for someone to be able to avoid being charged only because the item stolen, while still quite valuable, had passed a certain age. Can you imagine if it was legal to take an antique chair because it had entered the public domain? To make Copyright violation = theft, it can't remain time limited.
2. Copyright violation is a federal issue only (in the U. S.). If copyright violation = theft, a 1978 Supreme Court decision has taken away the rights of the individual states to prosecute a type of theft, even where this theft is happening exclusively inside their borders. When the Supreme Court ruled that State Copyright laws were unconstitutional because the document didn't give Congress the right to delegate copyright enforcement down to the individual states, the decision specifically said that Copyright Violation did not equal Theft, and that this decision was therefore not based on the limitations which would have been imposed under the Interstate Commerce clause (which presumably would have applied if CV = Theft), and that argument did not apply.
3. Not all Copyright violation is criminal. Non-criminal Theft is an absurdity, Non-criminal Copyright Violation is a real, possible thing. Making CV = Theft means making all cases criminal. Even the pettiest violation would be a criminal offense, as is petty theft.
4. Copyright Violation was very carefully put in a completely different section of the U. S. code than theft. CV is all in title 17, Theft in Title 18 with all the other always criminal acts. That's deliberate.
So if you really, sincerely think Copyright Violation = Theft, you need to get up a petition to impeach several of the Supreme Court justices and much of the rest of the Federal Government. At a conservative estimate, at least 120 still serving congresscritters have been in long enough to have voted for the last major revisions of the U. S. code, and over 200 still serving members of congress ratified the Berne treaty. An actual majority of the current congress was in when the proposal to include some forms of CV as terrorism related theft in the USAPATRIOT act was floated by industry lobbyists, and roundly rejected. So, if you really believe, morally speaking, Copyright Violation = Theft, you are morally obligated to seek the impeachment of over half of Congress and much, maybe all, of the Supreme Court. If you don't, then you're talking the talk, but not walking the walk. If you believe it is true, legally speaking, the Supreme Court disagrees with you. Guess who wins that argument.
So yes, you're either a troll or a fool. You either don't mean a word of what you say (Troll), or you've decided that a lot of people who don't violate, but know at least some of these facts and are trying to apply them fairly are instead, all violating the law and just rationalizing their crimes, so you've falsely accused them (Fool, and Worse).
That's why I said Irwin? - parent poster probably meant Schrödinger too, but had Schrödinger's first name wrong. But your explanation of how it would work in this context is very clever, and you well deserved the +1 funny mod.
That has to be backwards.
In the end, you're just saying that because some proponents of abiogenesis made one assumption that turned out to be wrong, your ad-hoc, gut instinct guesses have to be more correct - which is silly.
There's one ad hoc, gut instinct guess between both our posts. Guess which person's it came from.
For the last time, Dawkins, Gould, Morris, and essentially all the most respected biologists writing for the popular press have said this. So have more scholarly authors such as Mark Ridley in college textbooks. If you have a problem with it, you're the one disagreeing with 99+% of all modern biologists.
You know, there is an explanation for your incorrect claim about viruses. I could tell you, and if a third party posts to this thread asking, I WILL GLADLY TELL THEM WHAT IT IS AND PROVE MY CLAIM. I won't tell you - you're a crackpot who disagrees with the established experts and because of that resorts to personal attacks - you can stay stupid as far as I'm concerned.
Artificial change cannot intrinsically be defined as better or worse than natural change.
So, by the same token, murder is no worse than someone falling off a ladder.
That metaphor would have been clearer if you'd just said 'by the same token, murder is no worse than accidental death.'. I had to parse your version quite a bit - "Is he saying ladders are natural and something else is artificial? Is he claiming that for non-lethal falls too or just lethal ones?".
Here's just one example of why (this) artificial change can clearly and intrinsically be defined as worse than natural change:
We have records from sources such as core samples of deep ice-packs that show how quickly natural changes have occurred. The speed is slow enough that various tree-lines only need to change at a speed trees can keep up with. Tree populations on hills and mountains can move by gradually seeding each new generation at slightly higher or lower altitudes, and if the change is gradual, the tree species will survive in that area.
The current changes are happening at a rate that is far faster than a tree population's very limited ability to move over many generations. To keep up with the changes, instead of preferential seeding, the individual trees would have to get up and walk. At this point, the people claiming that nature can deal with man-made climate changes just as it dealt with natural ones are essentially claiming 'trees got legs!', which is perhaps why many of us have lost patience debating this issue.