I think I'm going to have to head down to that next meeting with a clue-by-four and lay down some science on their asses. Specifically, I recommend Newton's Third Law and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The CIA might even let you use the Navier-Stokes Equations.
Actually, a far more fun to deal with the situation would be to refuse these people any medical treatment which was developed based on an understanding of evolution, and let natural selection take its course. It takes a bit longer, though.
The production of fuel from dead dinosaurs pulls carbon from the ground. The production of fuel from plants pulls carbon from the air. ...which is then put right back into the air when burned in cars.
Creation of ethanol also requires a great deal of heat and electricity. Most of that electricity is from coal-powered plants, and the heat comes from burning excess material, which continue to put carbon back in the air and pull carbon from the ground.
Check out this graphic for a comparison of the various biofuels. Click the Energy Balance tab to see input vs. output of carbon.
Ethanol is better than straight-up gasoline, but it's not great yet.
If your potential programmer didn't do any programming before university, and all his experience starts when she got her first job, she's probably not a good programmer. Apparently, a lot happened between university and that first job.
My only problem with NoScript is the disturbing number of sites that use JavaScript-only links, or use JavaScript to write content to the page. It seems that when I have it enabled, 9 times out of 10 I'm clicking either "Enable on foo.com" or "Temporarily enable on foo.com", just to be able to click a link or see the page.
Is there another NoScript-like extension that will allow me finer grain control than just "No JavaScript! Lockdown!" vs. "All JavaScript! Unsafe!"? I'd love to disable things like popup windows, loops, status bar changes, right click blocking, and other annoyances, but I'd like to keep onload document.writes, JS links, rollovers, and other things that are required for navigation by the clueless webmonkeys that wrote the site.
Unfortunately, there is ample proof that you are wrong. Not that you bothered to cite any of it. I'm not sure what your point is. Mine was that speed limits do not reduce fatalities, and in fact create problems because of the differential between the speeds of the law-abiders and the law-breakers.
If you look at Montana's fatal accident rate, with and without speed limits, you find something peculiar... Fatalities went up when speed limits were imposed. Ok, I did look at it, since you didn't cite any of it. What you said was true, but I still don't know what point you're trying to make. Here are some results compiled from Montana's Department of Transportation. The 4 years with no daytime speed limits were the lowest recorded years of automobile fatalities in Montana's recent history. Additionally, fatalities doubled when the speed limits were put back in place.
And when the maximum interstate speed was finally increased from 55 mph? Fatalities increased dramatically. No citation here, because it's wrong. The repeal of the national maximum speed limit did almost nothing to change motorists' speed; it just made it legal to drive the speed they were already driving. And, the number of fatalities in absolute terms dropped significantly, even though the number of vehicles on the road increased! Here's a column from the Boston Globe about it with lots of juicy data and statistics (I also linked the version from the Boston Globe Archive, if you're willing to pay the fee to get it), and here's some more data from the Wall Street Journal. Our highways are getting safer all the time, and speed limits have nothing to do with it.
I never knew anyone to drive 80MPH when the limit was 55, but now they do. The roads haven't changed, yet people are now comfortable driving far, far faster. These days, I don't see anyone driving 55 on the freeway. Except the roads have changed significantly, and so have the cars. But I will be sure to add your single anecdotal data point to the vast piles of statistical data the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration uses to generate their reports.
Talk about your double standards. Everyone in your city is going from 50% to 100% in excess of the speed limit but if the cops give any of them a ticket it's a 'revenue generation stakeout'? It's only a double standard if you assume the speed limits are correctly set, and that people are driving unsafely. Many times this is not the case, and the speed limits are set arbitrarily low, sometimes as revenue generation mechanisms, sometimes as misguided attempts to save lives. I've found that aside from the occasional nut, the majority of people do not drive any faster than they are comfortable with (hazardous conditions aside), and if traffic is consistently faster than the posted limits then the limits are too low.
In either case, making certain sections of roadway significantly slower than other sections will often cause more accidents as people slam on their brakes to avoid a ticket. Setting large areas of a roadway to a too-slow limit will cause larger numbers of traffic jams as the "good citizens" who insist on driving what it says on the sign slow down everyone else who is driving what the road can safely handle (this happens a lot here in Seattle, where the freeways have a 60 mph limit but free-flow traffic routinely does 65 or 70).
I really do not see the Republican controlled FCC doing anything about this... You say that as if you think a Democrat controlled FCC would be any better.
Agreed, the beer he is brewing will be absolutely disgusting. Probably far too malty, with no smoothness.
I am a homebrewer, and the method you described is just one of many different ways. The temperature for boiling the mash, the times for addition of the hops, the types of barley and hops used, even the type of yeast will all affect the quality and flavor of your beer.
If someone on Slashdot is interested in starting a homebrew project the best place to start is with this book. It gives basic instructions for creating a basic beer, but it also dives into the science behind beer and allows the hackerish among us to experiment and understand what's going on in the fermenter. The entire book is available for free online, but I bought a hard copy as well to have handy during brewing sessions.
I always said that as soon as customers started loosing legally purchased media and having real difficulties with brand new hardware that the days or DRM would be over. But that's exactly the point of DRM: the media companies believe it will prevent customers from loosing their legally purchased media onto the internet as a torrent.
And this is why I think it should be illegal to change lanes in traffic, unless justified by a turn in the next few meters. Yes, because making an activity illegal automatically stops the activity, and never puts an enforcement strain on the already overworked police force.
How about we build better roads and public transportation systems so we don't have traffic problems in the first place?
They just worked out how much it would cost per gallon based on how much ink is in a cartridge, and how much the cartridge costs. $8000 a gallon works out to about $57 a cartridge, assuming a 27mL cartridge. That seems about right.
They did this because it made the number really big, and it looks impressive in an article. So I propose that we say it costs $440,000 per barrel! (standard 55-gallon barrel) That'll look impressive in a headline.
Research is showing that fructose short circuits the body's normal hunger response. Where it would normally say, "That's enough" it instead makes you continue to be hungry. No one can say that the food manufacturers knowingly did this but if you were a large company that is only worried about your stock value and you could add a completely legal and unregulated ingredient that makes things sweeter while insuring that people stayed hungry while they were stuffing their pie holes, would you do it? Hmmmm... Nope, that's not right. Stop spewing this crap.
High fructose corn syrup is just sugar. Standard cane sugar (such as the stuff we import from Puerto Rico) is sucrose: each molecule of sucrose has one molecule of fructose and one molecule of glucose. The molecule is broken down in the stomach to fructose and glucose, resulting in a 50% mixture of each during absorption into the bloodstream, which happens in the small intestine. High fructose corn syrup comes in several forms, the two most common of which are HFCS 55 (55% fructose and 45% glucose - used in soft drinks) and HFCS 42 (42% fructose and 58% glucose - used in baked goods). In HFCS, the fructose and glucose exist as separate molecules, so the breakdown step in the stomach is not necessary.
The obesity epidemic started around the same time as the soft drink explosion not because the drinks contained HCFS, but because the drinks added extra calories per day to the average American diet. This caloric increase accounts for the vast majority of the obesity trend, and would have occurred whether those extra calories were from HFCS or from standard sugar.
A high concentration of sugar in your diet will mess with your metabolism, but not because fructose "short circuits the body's normal hunger response." That's pseudoscience. Sugar does not provide any nutrients, so a diet high in sugar will not leave you feeling sated for as long, thus causing you to eat more and more often.
Fructose is not evil--in fact, it is present in every piece of fruit you eat. Place the blame for the obesity epidemic where it belongs: on the extra empty calories we eat every day. It doesn't matter whether those calories are from HFCS or from cane sugar.
----
As a footnote: using terms such as "hmmmm...." or "think about it" at the conclusion of an argument should always be translated as "I have absolutely no proof to back up my claim and will thus allow your imagination to create proof out of nothingness for me."
Slashdot Mirror
It is properly pronounced with the 'e'.
When in doubt, watch a commercial for the product. The manufacturer rarely pronounces their own product's name incorrectly.
Pix pls.
You can still take pictures of yourself*, just without clothes.
*Please be hot, and female.
...and the "molecular composition theory" in Chemistry classes...
Actually, a far more fun to deal with the situation would be to refuse these people any medical treatment which was developed based on an understanding of evolution, and let natural selection take its course. It takes a bit longer, though.
Creation of ethanol also requires a great deal of heat and electricity. Most of that electricity is from coal-powered plants, and the heat comes from burning excess material, which continue to put carbon back in the air and pull carbon from the ground.
Check out this graphic for a comparison of the various biofuels. Click the Energy Balance tab to see input vs. output of carbon.
Ethanol is better than straight-up gasoline, but it's not great yet.
My only problem with NoScript is the disturbing number of sites that use JavaScript-only links, or use JavaScript to write content to the page. It seems that when I have it enabled, 9 times out of 10 I'm clicking either "Enable on foo.com" or "Temporarily enable on foo.com", just to be able to click a link or see the page.
Is there another NoScript-like extension that will allow me finer grain control than just "No JavaScript! Lockdown!" vs. "All JavaScript! Unsafe!"? I'd love to disable things like popup windows, loops, status bar changes, right click blocking, and other annoyances, but I'd like to keep onload document.writes, JS links, rollovers, and other things that are required for navigation by the clueless webmonkeys that wrote the site.
In either case, making certain sections of roadway significantly slower than other sections will often cause more accidents as people slam on their brakes to avoid a ticket. Setting large areas of a roadway to a too-slow limit will cause larger numbers of traffic jams as the "good citizens" who insist on driving what it says on the sign slow down everyone else who is driving what the road can safely handle (this happens a lot here in Seattle, where the freeways have a 60 mph limit but free-flow traffic routinely does 65 or 70).
Agreed, the beer he is brewing will be absolutely disgusting. Probably far too malty, with no smoothness.
I am a homebrewer, and the method you described is just one of many different ways. The temperature for boiling the mash, the times for addition of the hops, the types of barley and hops used, even the type of yeast will all affect the quality and flavor of your beer.
If someone on Slashdot is interested in starting a homebrew project the best place to start is with this book. It gives basic instructions for creating a basic beer, but it also dives into the science behind beer and allows the hackerish among us to experiment and understand what's going on in the fermenter. The entire book is available for free online, but I bought a hard copy as well to have handy during brewing sessions.
</pedant>
An awful lot of stuff could be a "national security issue."
For reference, see: The Commerce Clause.
Amazing how many Slashdotters are driving broken cars around. In every post, they talk about how their cars are BREAKING.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/braking
Incidentally, breaking cars cause traffic jams just as much as braking cars, but for different reasons.
How about we build better roads and public transportation systems so we don't have traffic problems in the first place?
They just worked out how much it would cost per gallon based on how much ink is in a cartridge, and how much the cartridge costs. $8000 a gallon works out to about $57 a cartridge, assuming a 27mL cartridge. That seems about right.
They did this because it made the number really big, and it looks impressive in an article. So I propose that we say it costs $440,000 per barrel! (standard 55-gallon barrel) That'll look impressive in a headline.
Hmmmm... Nope, that's not right. Stop spewing this crap.
High fructose corn syrup is just sugar. Standard cane sugar (such as the stuff we import from Puerto Rico) is sucrose: each molecule of sucrose has one molecule of fructose and one molecule of glucose. The molecule is broken down in the stomach to fructose and glucose, resulting in a 50% mixture of each during absorption into the bloodstream, which happens in the small intestine. High fructose corn syrup comes in several forms, the two most common of which are HFCS 55 (55% fructose and 45% glucose - used in soft drinks) and HFCS 42 (42% fructose and 58% glucose - used in baked goods). In HFCS, the fructose and glucose exist as separate molecules, so the breakdown step in the stomach is not necessary.
The obesity epidemic started around the same time as the soft drink explosion not because the drinks contained HCFS, but because the drinks added extra calories per day to the average American diet. This caloric increase accounts for the vast majority of the obesity trend, and would have occurred whether those extra calories were from HFCS or from standard sugar.
A high concentration of sugar in your diet will mess with your metabolism, but not because fructose "short circuits the body's normal hunger response." That's pseudoscience. Sugar does not provide any nutrients, so a diet high in sugar will not leave you feeling sated for as long, thus causing you to eat more and more often.
Fructose is not evil--in fact, it is present in every piece of fruit you eat. Place the blame for the obesity epidemic where it belongs: on the extra empty calories we eat every day. It doesn't matter whether those calories are from HFCS or from cane sugar.
----
As a footnote: using terms such as "hmmmm...." or "think about it" at the conclusion of an argument should always be translated as "I have absolutely no proof to back up my claim and will thus allow your imagination to create proof out of nothingness for me."
NO!!
The filthy userses will see our precious code, they will. Tricksy and false!
Our precious code... our precious...
The biggest threat to the television industry is not piracy.
The biggest threat is that during the writers' strike, Americans will turn off the TV... and discover they don't miss it.
No, you have that wrong.
Absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence.
However, absence of proof is not proof of absence.
No wonder Apollo was over budget! There were two extra letters at the end of the word 'Program'!
It's just like wandering the dark lair of a deranged monster/killer/demon/alien civilization saying "Hello? Anyone there?" around every corner.
Just don't turn around to see what's sneaking up behind you, and you'll never get eaten/stabbed/possessed/enslaved.
Forced breeding programs?
Hooray! The population of Slashdot will finally get some tail!
Not when empathy and cooperation are what make us strong.
For reference, please see: modern civilization.