There are a lot of sticking points here. They say it's reasonable to assume he did it, that it's reasonable to assume he planted a trojan to generate a winning number, and that it's reasonable to assume he messed with the camera when nobody else did. That's an awful lot of narrative, and needs some evidence backing it up; not a lot, but enough to show the trails leading in and out.
I'm most interested in how he knew the numbers on the ticket. Did he specify what lotto numbers he wanted, or did he ask for a random ticket? If he asked for just a ticket, he'd need to hack the lotto computer after getting the ticket; the case rests on him hacking the machine at a specified time, before he bought a ticket, so they have to prove he self-selected the numbers at retail.
Well good. Net Neutrality needs to be overturned. What idiot thought it was a good idea to ban ISPs from selectively throttling traffic? They should be REQUIRED to throttle traffic; if they allow any child pornography to pass through their tubes, their senior executive staff should be arrested on distribution charges, filed on the sex offender registry, and imprisoned for 40 years. They can't do that if we don't let them throttle traffic!
I don't see why he's still doing the automaton thing going to college, though, when he now has a career offer. I dropped out of college because having a career was better, and I had a career; it wasn't worth dropping out of my career for college.
You'd be surprised how well the ability to negotiate helps me as a sysadmin. Management wants to block all the not-stupid stuff and do all the stupid stuff; I am the puppetmaster pulling their strings, so they concede to my requests.
Empirically, we have fewer wildfires than historically; those we do have are less severe than historical wildfires. The worst wildfires come after a wet season, as there's more vegetative growth to dry out and catch fire. These are known.
Your argument is that some theoretical connection between dryness and fire exists, and so there must be more fires now because there's a drought. You're ignoring the real facts, including counts of wildfires and the severity of those wildfires, as well as wildfire behavior.
Someone also mentioned tree ring cores indicate a major drought every 500-ish years, so the current drought is probably the worst in about 500 years, but not necessarily the worst drought ever. 500 years is a long time, though.
Well, yes, the argument is ludicrous; but I have a purely speculative idea of where it might come from.
I've often argued strictly against government support of college education. This is a complex and confusing concept that's difficult to understand even when explained well, and I don't intend for you to understand it implicitly from a few quick sentences; but, in brief, providing government-backed loans or tax-funded college places an enormous amount of risk and responsibility on the individual, while doing no such thing leaves businesses suffering for skilled labor unless they take on a minuscule amount of risk and shoulder the responsibility of building the workforce. I'll expand on this briefly, although, again, not in great economic detail, so you might not find that argument in and of itself convincing; however, I'm sure you'll get the framework, and you'll see easily how it could lead to such backwards beliefs as businesses requiring foreign workers to create jobs for Americans.
I'm sure you understand what it's like being a self-propelled student. Through government loan programs and tax-funded college, you get to select a career and put yourself through school. You probably didn't have a guaranteed job lined up in 4 years: you had to look at the market, guess what would be a popular job when you graduate, and take that career. You might have taken a career in something you already enjoyed, instead of bothering with something you had a solid plan to make money from--liberal arts majors and computer programmers both do this, albeit programmers and engineers and scientists are more inclined to think themselves more hireable than liberal arts majors. Through all of this, you faced great risks: what if the market didn't expand, or if everyone else took the same degree you did? 74% of STEM degree holders don't work in STEM fields at all, and there's plenty of unemployment and long months or years from graduation to employment.
As a self-propelled student, you are a tool. If you don't go to college, a bunch of other tools get degrees, and you get passed over by businesses. You don't get hired, and you don't get a job. Because you could put yourself through college, you are expected to; and then you face the hiring process by which businesses put up an urgent need for a candidate, interview 30 or 50 people, grind down the salaries, fire anyone they hire and decide isn't enough of a cog in the machine, and so forth. You are given the greatest responsibility, the highest demands, and the lowest chance of success.
My argument against this, and the key to understanding where this confusion of ideas about needing foreign workers to create American jobs may have honestly come from, is in the alternative: We supply zero college education support, and only focus on K-12 education. If that were done, we'd quickly run out of educated, skilled professionals: businesses would run out of candidates to hire. This paralyzes businesses, preventing them from achieving strategic goals by constricting their staffing. Because you, the individual, can't put yourself through college, all the employers seeking to hire someone in some field you'd like to enter are experiencing the great pain of needing you, but not being able to hire you.
There's one way out of this. The business naturally projects 2-3 years ahead and budgets which positions it will fill well before they start the application process; instead, they would have to project 2-3 years ahead and start hiring entrants. The moment you hire a new entrant, a high-school graduate most likely, you start training them. Menial, easy, low-skill work--fetching legal briefs, assembling prototypes, writing down measurements, source code bug hunting--can propagate down to these cheap entrants as a means of moving time-intensive, skill-non-intensive work from expensive, highly-skilled professionals. This provides immediate returns to the business, who meanwhile augments your paltry $40,000/year salary with $20,000/year of college
Actually, I make $75k/year and have a broad array of skills ranging from multiple IT disciplines to diplomatic, scientific, and psychiatric disciplines, so I'm definitely more qualified than politicians to comment on what climate scientists know.
It means it's a made-up problem. "Climate change is causing wildfires" is a red-herring: a lot of wildlife depends on fires to survive. Some tree seeds don't grow if they're not set fire to first; and the growth and spread of various species of underbrush rely on underbrush clearing every few years, historically done by wildfires.
We have fewer wildfires now due to suppression efforts, which we've scaled back massively because we realized suppressing wildfires is a really fucking bad idea. Global Wargarbling isn't causing wildfires, isn't increasing the amount of wildfire pollution in the air, and isn't threatening people by mechanisms spawned from wildfires.
This kind of spouting makes the President sound dangerously uneducated. We're lead to question more things: what is this lengthening of the allergy season, and how is it different from living in the South? Are we only concerned about half of the United States?
No energy is required to keep ME moving--for a while. I have momentum when I take ONE STEP.
You're making a distinction between "it rolls for a while once you push it" and "it only rolls like, half an inch." In both of these situations, the thing stops; it requires additional energy to keep moving. To state that a pendulum doesn't need additional energy to keep moving is to state that a pendulum will carry its full swing FOREVER, not FOR A LITTLE WHILE or FOR A THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE FINALLY WEARING DOWN. If it ceases to move, ever, by any mechanism other than mechanical breakdown, then it needs additional energy to keep moving; that doesn't change just because it keeps moving for a long time instead of for just a fraction of a second.
In theory, you can set up a set of mechanical levers and springs so that the human legs place the feet flatly on the ground one after the other in the same way that a wheel places rubber on the ground in front of rubber, albeit in wide steps instead of a continuous roll; but the legs would be attached to a rotational system, such that the energy delivery is done like a wheel.
Think like a bicycle with shoes tied to the wheels. Then think like a system that abstracts that away, using the wheels to power a system of springs and levers that just places shoes on the ground as the wheels turn. Then think of a system that converts reciprocating energy into rotational energy to power that--walking is reciprocating--and then attach that to the legs, and bam: you've got something substantially close to a bicycle, except you're going trot trot trot.
Springs can be replaced by elastic ligaments, which the human body uses.
You're telling me that the statement was that a center of mass continues to move forever when walking and requires no energy to keep it moving? That a person with more weight strapped to him--50 pounds strapped to his chest--won't have to work any harder to walk down the street than a person who has nothing attached? That's what the statement indicated?
... it did apparently indicate that yes; just like it indicated that a pendulum, once set in motion, continues to rise and fall with no external power. No energy is required to keep a pendulum moving.
Energy must come from somewhere to keep a pendulum moving. Pendulums that move forever are gaining their momentum from the rotation of the earth.
It's like suggesting that you should be able to get just as much energy out of a coal furnace as a nuclear one of the same size.
There's more actual energy in a nuclear pile than in a lump of coal. You should, in theory, be able to get just as much energy out of an 1100 degree coal furnace deriving 500kW of chemical energy from the coal as you can out of an 1100 degree nuclear reactor deriving 500kW of nuclear energy from the fuel.
Again: we know we use as much energy to bicycle some distance as we use to walk some shorter distance in a longer time. That tells us walking is inefficient, and thus that the mechanism of walking has systemic losses, and thus that there are systemic losses to target. Bicycling and walking are not greatly different: bicycling suspends a mass on a frame supported by a rotating surface, laying ground contact surface in front of ground contact surface by rotation; walking suspends a mass on a frame supported by a moving part, but still relies on moving that frame forward by placing material more forward, albeit in a reciprocating instead of a rotating manner. You're, thus, looking at reciprocation losses, losses in friction, and so forth, which means mechanisms such as flywheels and springs should make your energy consumption substantially similar to that of bicycling.
The power stack is the same in both. We're not arguing about the efficiency of the power stack; we're arguing about the efficiency of transferring the power. The only differences are the rigid frame suspension and the movement of the frame itself; a bicycle and your legs are both acting as the vertical support. The theoretical difference is, thus, the difference in loss between converting between gravity (i.e. bouncing on a spring versus sitting atop a rigid steel frame) and in the mechanical differences (levers and hinges versus axles and bearings).
You'll notice a bicycle suffers spring loss in suspensions, while humans suffer complete loss when they allow their legs to flex and lower their weight--they need to expend energy to lift, rather than use an elastic ligament (a spring) to store that potential energy. You'll notice wheels rotate with forward momentum, while a human's gait may cause braking--we know Nike's original theory of running faster by cushioning heel strike was a mistake, and now runners try to land on the balls of their feet to prevent the braking effect. You'll notice many things which are similar, but suffer various improvable forms of mechanical loss. You'll also, undoubtedly, notice the only real difference is what holds up the human's weight and what provides the ground surface contact for propulsion.
We're not comparing a diesel versus an otto engine; the engine is the same. We're comparing wheels versus reciprocating pods at the ground contact point.
The original discussion was on the claim that a pendulum swings forever without input energy, which is only true for certain pendulums, and so these are the pendulums being discussed.
The pendulum is carried by the rotation of the Earth; it's not in a fixed location, swinging in the same spot while the Earth moves under it. It changes its trajectory because the Earth passes some of its momentum to the pendulum.
but is there much room for improvement for the practice of walking itself?
Of course there is. If it's less efficient than cycling, then energy is lost somewhere in the system. Walking carries a stop effect that brings a mass to rest by dissipating the motion energy from heat; it carries friction and deformation effects from elastic pressure on joints and tendons; it carries loss in the form of inelastic muscle movements, pulling one way and then the other; it even carries a loss from fighting against gravity to lift the leg, and then not storing the gravitational potential when dropping the leg (e.g. in a spring system or elastic tendon). All of these offer potential efficiency improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a lot of sticking points here. They say it's reasonable to assume he did it, that it's reasonable to assume he planted a trojan to generate a winning number, and that it's reasonable to assume he messed with the camera when nobody else did. That's an awful lot of narrative, and needs some evidence backing it up; not a lot, but enough to show the trails leading in and out.
I'm most interested in how he knew the numbers on the ticket. Did he specify what lotto numbers he wanted, or did he ask for a random ticket? If he asked for just a ticket, he'd need to hack the lotto computer after getting the ticket; the case rests on him hacking the machine at a specified time, before he bought a ticket, so they have to prove he self-selected the numbers at retail.
Well good. Net Neutrality needs to be overturned. What idiot thought it was a good idea to ban ISPs from selectively throttling traffic? They should be REQUIRED to throttle traffic; if they allow any child pornography to pass through their tubes, their senior executive staff should be arrested on distribution charges, filed on the sex offender registry, and imprisoned for 40 years. They can't do that if we don't let them throttle traffic!
That misuse of "it's" is disturbing.
I would bet money she expressed curiosity and interest in his job.
I don't see why he's still doing the automaton thing going to college, though, when he now has a career offer. I dropped out of college because having a career was better, and I had a career; it wasn't worth dropping out of my career for college.
Even if the claims are perfectly valid and correct, this writing will just entrench people harder, not switch their point of view.
You'd be surprised how well the ability to negotiate helps me as a sysadmin. Management wants to block all the not-stupid stuff and do all the stupid stuff; I am the puppetmaster pulling their strings, so they concede to my requests.
Dammit, Jim! I'm a risk management professional, not a climate scientist!
The assertion is that is has and is. It hasn't and isn't.
Your mom could buttfuck you with a dildo she used on a hooker and give you HIV.
Empirically, we have fewer wildfires than historically; those we do have are less severe than historical wildfires. The worst wildfires come after a wet season, as there's more vegetative growth to dry out and catch fire. These are known.
Your argument is that some theoretical connection between dryness and fire exists, and so there must be more fires now because there's a drought. You're ignoring the real facts, including counts of wildfires and the severity of those wildfires, as well as wildfire behavior.
Someone also mentioned tree ring cores indicate a major drought every 500-ish years, so the current drought is probably the worst in about 500 years, but not necessarily the worst drought ever. 500 years is a long time, though.
It could give them the gift of a comma after the last item and before the conjunction in a list of three or more items.
Or they could just go fuck off.
Well, yes, the argument is ludicrous; but I have a purely speculative idea of where it might come from.
I've often argued strictly against government support of college education. This is a complex and confusing concept that's difficult to understand even when explained well, and I don't intend for you to understand it implicitly from a few quick sentences; but, in brief, providing government-backed loans or tax-funded college places an enormous amount of risk and responsibility on the individual, while doing no such thing leaves businesses suffering for skilled labor unless they take on a minuscule amount of risk and shoulder the responsibility of building the workforce. I'll expand on this briefly, although, again, not in great economic detail, so you might not find that argument in and of itself convincing; however, I'm sure you'll get the framework, and you'll see easily how it could lead to such backwards beliefs as businesses requiring foreign workers to create jobs for Americans.
I'm sure you understand what it's like being a self-propelled student. Through government loan programs and tax-funded college, you get to select a career and put yourself through school. You probably didn't have a guaranteed job lined up in 4 years: you had to look at the market, guess what would be a popular job when you graduate, and take that career. You might have taken a career in something you already enjoyed, instead of bothering with something you had a solid plan to make money from--liberal arts majors and computer programmers both do this, albeit programmers and engineers and scientists are more inclined to think themselves more hireable than liberal arts majors. Through all of this, you faced great risks: what if the market didn't expand, or if everyone else took the same degree you did? 74% of STEM degree holders don't work in STEM fields at all, and there's plenty of unemployment and long months or years from graduation to employment.
As a self-propelled student, you are a tool. If you don't go to college, a bunch of other tools get degrees, and you get passed over by businesses. You don't get hired, and you don't get a job. Because you could put yourself through college, you are expected to; and then you face the hiring process by which businesses put up an urgent need for a candidate, interview 30 or 50 people, grind down the salaries, fire anyone they hire and decide isn't enough of a cog in the machine, and so forth. You are given the greatest responsibility, the highest demands, and the lowest chance of success.
My argument against this, and the key to understanding where this confusion of ideas about needing foreign workers to create American jobs may have honestly come from, is in the alternative: We supply zero college education support, and only focus on K-12 education. If that were done, we'd quickly run out of educated, skilled professionals: businesses would run out of candidates to hire. This paralyzes businesses, preventing them from achieving strategic goals by constricting their staffing. Because you, the individual, can't put yourself through college, all the employers seeking to hire someone in some field you'd like to enter are experiencing the great pain of needing you, but not being able to hire you.
There's one way out of this. The business naturally projects 2-3 years ahead and budgets which positions it will fill well before they start the application process; instead, they would have to project 2-3 years ahead and start hiring entrants. The moment you hire a new entrant, a high-school graduate most likely, you start training them. Menial, easy, low-skill work--fetching legal briefs, assembling prototypes, writing down measurements, source code bug hunting--can propagate down to these cheap entrants as a means of moving time-intensive, skill-non-intensive work from expensive, highly-skilled professionals. This provides immediate returns to the business, who meanwhile augments your paltry $40,000/year salary with $20,000/year of college
Adaptation is a form of mitigation.
Well, not bombing their country is a start. That's how America works, right?
Actually, I make $75k/year and have a broad array of skills ranging from multiple IT disciplines to diplomatic, scientific, and psychiatric disciplines, so I'm definitely more qualified than politicians to comment on what climate scientists know.
Hey I like almonds.
It means it's a made-up problem. "Climate change is causing wildfires" is a red-herring: a lot of wildlife depends on fires to survive. Some tree seeds don't grow if they're not set fire to first; and the growth and spread of various species of underbrush rely on underbrush clearing every few years, historically done by wildfires.
We have fewer wildfires now due to suppression efforts, which we've scaled back massively because we realized suppressing wildfires is a really fucking bad idea. Global Wargarbling isn't causing wildfires, isn't increasing the amount of wildfire pollution in the air, and isn't threatening people by mechanisms spawned from wildfires.
This kind of spouting makes the President sound dangerously uneducated. We're lead to question more things: what is this lengthening of the allergy season, and how is it different from living in the South? Are we only concerned about half of the United States?
No energy is required to keep ME moving--for a while. I have momentum when I take ONE STEP.
You're making a distinction between "it rolls for a while once you push it" and "it only rolls like, half an inch." In both of these situations, the thing stops; it requires additional energy to keep moving. To state that a pendulum doesn't need additional energy to keep moving is to state that a pendulum will carry its full swing FOREVER, not FOR A LITTLE WHILE or FOR A THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE FINALLY WEARING DOWN. If it ceases to move, ever, by any mechanism other than mechanical breakdown, then it needs additional energy to keep moving; that doesn't change just because it keeps moving for a long time instead of for just a fraction of a second.
In theory, you can set up a set of mechanical levers and springs so that the human legs place the feet flatly on the ground one after the other in the same way that a wheel places rubber on the ground in front of rubber, albeit in wide steps instead of a continuous roll; but the legs would be attached to a rotational system, such that the energy delivery is done like a wheel.
Think like a bicycle with shoes tied to the wheels. Then think like a system that abstracts that away, using the wheels to power a system of springs and levers that just places shoes on the ground as the wheels turn. Then think of a system that converts reciprocating energy into rotational energy to power that--walking is reciprocating--and then attach that to the legs, and bam: you've got something substantially close to a bicycle, except you're going trot trot trot.
Springs can be replaced by elastic ligaments, which the human body uses.
You're telling me that the statement was that a center of mass continues to move forever when walking and requires no energy to keep it moving? That a person with more weight strapped to him--50 pounds strapped to his chest--won't have to work any harder to walk down the street than a person who has nothing attached? That's what the statement indicated?
Energy must come from somewhere to keep a pendulum moving. Pendulums that move forever are gaining their momentum from the rotation of the earth.
It's like suggesting that you should be able to get just as much energy out of a coal furnace as a nuclear one of the same size.
There's more actual energy in a nuclear pile than in a lump of coal. You should, in theory, be able to get just as much energy out of an 1100 degree coal furnace deriving 500kW of chemical energy from the coal as you can out of an 1100 degree nuclear reactor deriving 500kW of nuclear energy from the fuel.
Again: we know we use as much energy to bicycle some distance as we use to walk some shorter distance in a longer time. That tells us walking is inefficient, and thus that the mechanism of walking has systemic losses, and thus that there are systemic losses to target. Bicycling and walking are not greatly different: bicycling suspends a mass on a frame supported by a rotating surface, laying ground contact surface in front of ground contact surface by rotation; walking suspends a mass on a frame supported by a moving part, but still relies on moving that frame forward by placing material more forward, albeit in a reciprocating instead of a rotating manner. You're, thus, looking at reciprocation losses, losses in friction, and so forth, which means mechanisms such as flywheels and springs should make your energy consumption substantially similar to that of bicycling.
The power stack is the same in both. We're not arguing about the efficiency of the power stack; we're arguing about the efficiency of transferring the power. The only differences are the rigid frame suspension and the movement of the frame itself; a bicycle and your legs are both acting as the vertical support. The theoretical difference is, thus, the difference in loss between converting between gravity (i.e. bouncing on a spring versus sitting atop a rigid steel frame) and in the mechanical differences (levers and hinges versus axles and bearings).
You'll notice a bicycle suffers spring loss in suspensions, while humans suffer complete loss when they allow their legs to flex and lower their weight--they need to expend energy to lift, rather than use an elastic ligament (a spring) to store that potential energy. You'll notice wheels rotate with forward momentum, while a human's gait may cause braking--we know Nike's original theory of running faster by cushioning heel strike was a mistake, and now runners try to land on the balls of their feet to prevent the braking effect. You'll notice many things which are similar, but suffer various improvable forms of mechanical loss. You'll also, undoubtedly, notice the only real difference is what holds up the human's weight and what provides the ground surface contact for propulsion.
We're not comparing a diesel versus an otto engine; the engine is the same. We're comparing wheels versus reciprocating pods at the ground contact point.
The motion of the center of mass is not where the metabolic power of walking goes, any more than the rise and fall of the mass of a pendulum requires external power.
The original discussion was on the claim that a pendulum swings forever without input energy, which is only true for certain pendulums, and so these are the pendulums being discussed.
The pendulum is carried by the rotation of the Earth; it's not in a fixed location, swinging in the same spot while the Earth moves under it. It changes its trajectory because the Earth passes some of its momentum to the pendulum.
Am I going to have to get Randall Monroe on this?
but is there much room for improvement for the practice of walking itself?
Of course there is. If it's less efficient than cycling, then energy is lost somewhere in the system. Walking carries a stop effect that brings a mass to rest by dissipating the motion energy from heat; it carries friction and deformation effects from elastic pressure on joints and tendons; it carries loss in the form of inelastic muscle movements, pulling one way and then the other; it even carries a loss from fighting against gravity to lift the leg, and then not storing the gravitational potential when dropping the leg (e.g. in a spring system or elastic tendon). All of these offer potential efficiency improvements.