An easy way to picture this is a weight on the end of a string. Grab the opposite end of the string and swing the weight around. If you swing too slowly, the weight will fall out of orbit. You can also see how the speeds need to differ depending on the length of the string, but this isn't exactly accurate since a string's tension doesn't decrease with the inverse square rule.
I always like to describe orbit as falling at the Earth, but missing.
What gives God this right? Just because he's bigger and more powerful than we are? It's not like he doesn't have blood on his hands if you look in the old testament.
How about what God did in the Old Testament directly? There's none of this "in his name" crap to get in the way. He personally killed the firstborns in Egypt, for example. Not a nice guy and not a guy that I'd call "good."
And don't even start with all of this "evidence" crap. If what you call evidence was brought into a court of law today, it would all be thrown out as hearsay and/or tampered with. The only records that we have are nearly 2000 years old written by people who most likely didn't witness it first hand, translated many times from the original and embellished along the way to make sure those who are in charge of the religion get things their way.
This is not a matter of facts. This is a matter of faith. BTW, if you're going to have a religious discussion, threatening a person with implied damnation (as implied in your last paragraph) is a very poor way to do things.
The only problem is that divinity is relative and it's defined by man. Jesus is said to have been divine, but there's no real evidence, except for hearsay many decades after the fact, of his miracles. He is defined as divine.
Personally, as the agnostic deist that I am, I believe that Jesus was just a moral man who was a good leader. Divine? No more than anyone else I know.
I'm sure that some people could make an argument for Hitler's divinity; there's enough myth and speculation out there to piece together some kind of story.
When it comes to good and evil, they should be defined through logical arguments, not "God says so." I'm not sure I could agree with the Old testament God on most of this stuff. He seemed pretty willing to kill people on whim just to show his power or give power to one of his chosen to let them kill people. More or less there were a heck of a lot of exceptions to that pesky "Thou shalt not kill" rule. Maybe it should be considered more of a guideline.
Hm. It might be because you're a Brit. Though I don't have a degree, I can get by in French and I find it much easier to understand French Canadians than French natives, especially Parisians.
I find they more or less speak French with a North American accent and tend to use more local words for things, which is frowned upon in France.
Yes, in the US, if you have an emergency and can get to a hospital they will treat you. Of course, they will also charge you and if you don't have insurance and can't pay there's a good chance your credit will go down the tubes and you'll have to start living from paycheck to paycheck out of your car.
Leg breaking isn't the problem here. It's long term care. If you have a chest pain, but can't afford to just go see a doctor (yes, there are free clinics, but they are understaffed, etc.), you'll just have to wait for your first heart attack to actually see what that chest pain was all about.
And then there's prescription cost. Heck, there's a big hoopla here in the states about how we can import drugs from Canada for cheaper than we can buy them here.
Actually, I'm a kidney transplantee and thus continuously immunosuppressed to keep me from rejecting. We don't worry about surface bacteria any more than people with normal immune systems.
The fact that you're missing is how the bacteria get transmitted. Following your example, you basically couldn't go into any kitchen. Could never enter any public bathroom. Could never use any public doorknob. There's tons of bacteria everywhere.
I just make sure that if I've got an open cut on my hand, I don't start wiping it on everything. Oh, and I don't spend time licking shower curtains.
Oh, and the reason that most antibacterial soap doesn't work is that it uses an antibiotic to kill the bacteria. Bacteria will evolve beyond just about every regularly applied antibiotic out there in a fairly short time. You're just helping their evolution along by providing them with regular pressure, with nice breaks to allow for reproduction. This is also what's causing problems in hospitals, since for the longest time, doctors prescribed antibiotics for everything. Bacteria have moved on, but antibiotics haven't.
The biggest problems with this is the past tense. Yes, unions were truly important about 70 years ago. They were organized by the workers to give them enough power to get the rights that we have today as US workers. Things have changed since then.
These rights are now codified at the state and federals levels. So basic rights, such as working reasonable hours and getting a living wage (though there are cases where I'd argue that "minimum wage" is a bit too minimum) aren't something that unions fight for anymore.
I will also agree that for some jobs, unions are necessary still. Most of these seem to be in the public service sector, such as police, firefighters, etc. (People don't like to pay taxes and that's how these people are paid.)
My biggest problems are with big unions that have become parasitic. Auto workers come to mind immediately. If you already have controlled wages, controlled hours and quotas, why should union workers get profit sharing? When a shift completes quota, they literally just stand around without working until their shift is up, so it's not like they're working extra hard to help the company make those extra profits. But profit sharing they get.
Exactly, they're business and they know that an unhappy customer (patient)...
Actually, I'm not my doctor's customer, I'm the insurance company's customer. The doctor is also the insurance company's customer. I pay a small copay upon a visit to my doctor, then the doctor charges the insurance company. Every month, I pay my insurance company so that I can stay their customer.
Also, the insurance company has more power to set the rates than the doctor, since they're the one paying the bill and being supported by an insurance company is the only way to get patients in the US health care system. If my insurance doesn't support a doctor, I can't go to them.
It really gets hairy when the insurance changes. I was under one insurance and got a new job, switching my insurance. The specialist that I go to was covered under the new insurance (which at least meant I didn't have to find a new specialist), but I still couldn't see him; I had to get a referral for a doctor I was already seeing on a regular basis! I had to find a GP who was covered under the plan, make an appointment with him and then have him write a referral for a doctor I had already been going to regularly.
The reason I need to see the specialist is that I'm a kidney transplantee, which means that I cannot lose my health insurance or I can't afford to live. I currently pay out about $200 in drugs each month, which is only the copay cost. Drugs are a definite problem in the US, where they seem to cost more than anywhere else.
Usually, they use multiple, smaller flywheels counter-rotating. Small applications do need really high RPMs though. There are definite problems (that were never really overcome) when it comes to containment in car accidents. High RPM flywheels shatter and the pieces travel some distance with a lot of force. My guess is that the containment system added so much weight that the light flywheels weren't economical.
Come to think I can't name a single programming language that is less portable.
There's your problem. Think of java more as an executable than a programming language. C is exceedingly portable, but if I pass you my OSX executable compiled from C, your freebsd laptop won't run it. In fact, it'll only run on other OSX installs and that's if I didn't set my compiler flags to something so specific that it would only run on my particular processor generation.
But where computers aren't currently going to help, is in the actual creative side of things - a lot of important modern mathematics (and the related theorems and proofs) has come from very clever humans saying ``OK, what happens if we try this (utterly weird and counterintuitive) thing here'' and having the aesthetic sense to tell when something's actually interesting or just irrelevant. Until computers are capable of this kind of creative/intuitive/aesthetic/etc behaviour, I doubt they're going to be replacing human research mathematicians any time soon.
I don't see this as much of a problem. Computers have no "intuition" at all. In fact, modern automated provers basically just run down every path offered them whether it leads anywhere or not, which is how they've come up with novel proofs for things that have already been proven by another method. It comes down to a human not having thought of it, but the computer stumbled into it.
Computers have the advantage of speed. They can go through some huge number of completely useless proofs in a reasonably short time. Given enough time and horsepower, they can find all of the "utterly weird and counterintuitive" things that lead to great discoveries. Their current state isn't very good, but, as everyone here knows, they keep getting faster, even if we don't know what to do with them.
It'll be far more than a light gray pixel. I work with USGS Digital Orthoquads on a daily basis. The vast majority of the country is covered by through aerial photographs. For free, you can get grayscale 1 meter/pixel resolution images.
http://www.terraservice.net/ (Sadly, it's run by Microsoft, who doesn't do a very good job with them, but they're free. They're also about 3 to 7 years old.)
1 meter resolution doesn't sound like much (it isn't compared to recent color aerials which have about a foot resolution), but you can make out the shape of your house, the cars parked nearby, the layout of the property and any trees, etc. of reasonable size. It easily allows you to follow any street, etc., through the area.
It's a bit like having a dictionary in a spelling contest, IMO. Cheating.
It's only cheating because you can't memorize the dictionary. What if someone did memorize the dictionary, would you eliminate him because he was cheating?
I'm sure that grandmasters remember more opening moves than you do, are they cheating?
Computers don't play chess like humans. Internally, they're very different, but they still play chess. Lookups may be hard for you, but they're easy for computers.
Let's assume that the US Government bans the offshoring of tech work. Would the company you work for change internally? No, the CEO would still give himself (and anyone on the board) fat raises, and abuse corporate spending privileges. The product your company makes continues to go up in price, and then someone who simply formed an entirely new corporation in India starts selling a similar product for half the price.
I disagree here. Corporations are already multinational. That Indian company won't be truly Indian. It'll be completely owned by the company that is no longer allowed to outsource. Nope, they aren't outsourcing labor anymore, they're just buying a product from a company based in another country. And if that proves to be the problem, it's a simple thing to say that a company is based in another company completely and the US company is just one of it's multinational arms.
I'm sure there are plenty of countries out there that would be very willing to have a large, well-known company put their headquarters in one of their major cities.
Actually, I don't think the problem is that OSX is less useable, more that your old "intuitive skills" don't work anymore. I've been using OSX since 10.0 and have never gone back. Now, I have trouble finding my way around in OS9 when I have to use it.
I also wouldn't complain about the company reinventing OSX with every release. I remember it being just as bad until the OS7-9 releases. I remember about three different ways to set up your network because the control panels not only changed options, but changed names. This was also true when setting your monitor resolution and whether or not the sound control panel was integrated with the monitor control panel or not.
I recently had to help my parents (by phone of course) set up an older desktop running OS9 with an airport. I couldn't remember what the control panel names where for networking, not because I didn't know them, but I couldn't remember which went with which MacOS version. "Look for something called Networking. Or maybe TCP/IP. Or possibly Ethernet." (I think the last name died around OS7.)
Mon conseil:
- marrie toi a une americaine
- prends la citoyennete US
- ne retourne jamais en France
(ou la meme chose avec une Canadienne si tu aimes la neige).
Quick translation (I hope my high school French can handle this):
My advice:
- Marry an American (yes, it's feminine)
- Take US citizenship
- Never return to france.
(Or the same thing except with a Canadian (again feminine) if you like snow.)
Coal is also a finite resource and, from what I've gathered, much more environmentally destructive, both from a mining perspective to a burning perspective.
They definitely could've done better, but not with the current infrastructure and driver view of cars. Cars have to have a certain amount of performance for a driver to want one and still be able to get around in traffic.
My wife regularly drives a Honda Insight. We've owned it for three years with no problems.
You also might like to know that the starter and the alternator are the same part in all hybrids I've heard about -- it's also the electric motor that runs the car under a variety of circumstances, so you could say that it does triple duty. The Insight is completely push startable (probably a bit easier than some cars since it weighs nothing) and will drive completely off of it's internal combustion engine. Of course, the performance will be degraded without the electric assist, but it will definitely get you where you need to go to get it fixed.
Mackinac really doesn't apply here. The total circumference of the island is 7 miles; cars aren't much better than bikes. Also, you have to remember that it's a tourist community, the horses are really there for the tourists.
If I remember correctly, it does have motor vehicles in the form of emergency vehicles, such as fire engines. Also, as you've noted it has roads. Not that they're four lane highways, but they're definitely plenty wide enough for cars.
It's an incredibly small community based on an island, for the most part only accessible by ferry and geared toward tourism.
How can people live in a place where even to buy a carton of milk is a major undertaking in logistics? (unlike my neighbours I don't quite drink enough milk to get it delivered each day).
I think this is more characteristic of European cities than American cities. It seems like European cities have a much more heterogeneous environment throughout than American cities, where there are definite divisions between residential and commercial areas.
I remember when I first visited Europe that I was surprised to see a small grocer or bread shop, etc. every couple of blocks, even in reasonably small cities. In the US, there are huge sections of neighborhoods with a reasonably nearby commercial district to handle purchases for those neighborhoods.
To just buy some milk, I have to go about a mile along a road without sidewalks. Driving is not impossible to avoid, but nearly so. Also, possibly from this problem, we also don't do daily shopping and keep much more stuff onhand than most Europeans.
And milk delivery? I don't know anywhere in the US that actually still does that. I think that practice went out in the 1950s. Occasionally, you'll find an older house (1930s/40s era) with a milk door for the delivery, but it's considered an anachronism over here.
Most likely it was GM. GM gutted just about every non-automotive public transportation system in the 50s and 60s. It wasn't just to encourage car buying, GM also replaced all the varying trolley and other light rail systems with buses, which, not surprisingly, they also made.
GM was probably the worst when it comes to monopoly-like abuses about 50 years ago. In fact, they rode those profits for decades, it's only been recently that they've actually fallen from the number one spot on the Fortune 500. I personally think that they only survived the 80s because they had huge amounts of prior profit.
In the past, I've done prototyping OO in both NewtonScript and JavaScript and in both cases I found it to be difficult to use on anything but small applications.
NewtonScript actually had a pseudo-multiple inheritance where you would "inherit" both from your ancestor instances and the UI view you were currently working in. Thus, if you references a variable in your current instance, it would first search the current instance, followed by the prototype ancestors, followed by the view ancestors. (It might have been view first then prototype, my memory fails me.) I will admit that this was very useful for simple GUIs as you could share a variety of variables at different levels of the application from both a type of widget level (the prototype ancestors) and a location of widget level (all widgets in a certain container).
JavaScript is a weaker version of all of this. Not only does it only support prototype inheritance, but it does not update ancestor variables when they are change, but makes a local copy. In some ways, this does emulate class-like behavior, as you cannot just randomly change your shared "class"-level variables, but it also makes it much harder to change them if you do need to make something global for a data type.
In any case, prototype style OO eliminates the distinction between class and instance, making any change to any instance up the line propagate downwards. This isn't so bad when you are in a single threaded, single user, event driven environment, which basically describes the major use of JavaScript and the sole use of NewtonScript, but for any larger system, things get very unwieldy.
Yep, they did and then along came the XBox2. I find it especially strange that it seems all three of the major consoles will be buying their PowerPC architecture based chips from IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
I always like to describe orbit as falling at the Earth, but missing.
What gives God this right? Just because he's bigger and more powerful than we are? It's not like he doesn't have blood on his hands if you look in the old testament.
And don't even start with all of this "evidence" crap. If what you call evidence was brought into a court of law today, it would all be thrown out as hearsay and/or tampered with. The only records that we have are nearly 2000 years old written by people who most likely didn't witness it first hand, translated many times from the original and embellished along the way to make sure those who are in charge of the religion get things their way. This is not a matter of facts. This is a matter of faith. BTW, if you're going to have a religious discussion, threatening a person with implied damnation (as implied in your last paragraph) is a very poor way to do things.
Personally, as the agnostic deist that I am, I believe that Jesus was just a moral man who was a good leader. Divine? No more than anyone else I know.
I'm sure that some people could make an argument for Hitler's divinity; there's enough myth and speculation out there to piece together some kind of story.
When it comes to good and evil, they should be defined through logical arguments, not "God says so." I'm not sure I could agree with the Old testament God on most of this stuff. He seemed pretty willing to kill people on whim just to show his power or give power to one of his chosen to let them kill people. More or less there were a heck of a lot of exceptions to that pesky "Thou shalt not kill" rule. Maybe it should be considered more of a guideline.
I find they more or less speak French with a North American accent and tend to use more local words for things, which is frowned upon in France.
Leg breaking isn't the problem here. It's long term care. If you have a chest pain, but can't afford to just go see a doctor (yes, there are free clinics, but they are understaffed, etc.), you'll just have to wait for your first heart attack to actually see what that chest pain was all about.
And then there's prescription cost. Heck, there's a big hoopla here in the states about how we can import drugs from Canada for cheaper than we can buy them here.
The fact that you're missing is how the bacteria get transmitted. Following your example, you basically couldn't go into any kitchen. Could never enter any public bathroom. Could never use any public doorknob. There's tons of bacteria everywhere.
I just make sure that if I've got an open cut on my hand, I don't start wiping it on everything. Oh, and I don't spend time licking shower curtains.
Oh, and the reason that most antibacterial soap doesn't work is that it uses an antibiotic to kill the bacteria. Bacteria will evolve beyond just about every regularly applied antibiotic out there in a fairly short time. You're just helping their evolution along by providing them with regular pressure, with nice breaks to allow for reproduction. This is also what's causing problems in hospitals, since for the longest time, doctors prescribed antibiotics for everything. Bacteria have moved on, but antibiotics haven't.
The biggest problems with this is the past tense. Yes, unions were truly important about 70 years ago. They were organized by the workers to give them enough power to get the rights that we have today as US workers. Things have changed since then.
These rights are now codified at the state and federals levels. So basic rights, such as working reasonable hours and getting a living wage (though there are cases where I'd argue that "minimum wage" is a bit too minimum) aren't something that unions fight for anymore.
I will also agree that for some jobs, unions are necessary still. Most of these seem to be in the public service sector, such as police, firefighters, etc. (People don't like to pay taxes and that's how these people are paid.)
My biggest problems are with big unions that have become parasitic. Auto workers come to mind immediately. If you already have controlled wages, controlled hours and quotas, why should union workers get profit sharing? When a shift completes quota, they literally just stand around without working until their shift is up, so it's not like they're working extra hard to help the company make those extra profits. But profit sharing they get.
Actually, I'm not my doctor's customer, I'm the insurance company's customer. The doctor is also the insurance company's customer. I pay a small copay upon a visit to my doctor, then the doctor charges the insurance company. Every month, I pay my insurance company so that I can stay their customer.
Also, the insurance company has more power to set the rates than the doctor, since they're the one paying the bill and being supported by an insurance company is the only way to get patients in the US health care system. If my insurance doesn't support a doctor, I can't go to them.
It really gets hairy when the insurance changes. I was under one insurance and got a new job, switching my insurance. The specialist that I go to was covered under the new insurance (which at least meant I didn't have to find a new specialist), but I still couldn't see him; I had to get a referral for a doctor I was already seeing on a regular basis! I had to find a GP who was covered under the plan, make an appointment with him and then have him write a referral for a doctor I had already been going to regularly.
The reason I need to see the specialist is that I'm a kidney transplantee, which means that I cannot lose my health insurance or I can't afford to live. I currently pay out about $200 in drugs each month, which is only the copay cost. Drugs are a definite problem in the US, where they seem to cost more than anywhere else.
Usually, they use multiple, smaller flywheels counter-rotating. Small applications do need really high RPMs though. There are definite problems (that were never really overcome) when it comes to containment in car accidents. High RPM flywheels shatter and the pieces travel some distance with a lot of force. My guess is that the containment system added so much weight that the light flywheels weren't economical.
There's your problem. Think of java more as an executable than a programming language. C is exceedingly portable, but if I pass you my OSX executable compiled from C, your freebsd laptop won't run it. In fact, it'll only run on other OSX installs and that's if I didn't set my compiler flags to something so specific that it would only run on my particular processor generation.
Probably muskrats. They swim like beavers and have similar fur, but thin tails. They don't get to be as big as beavers either.
They seem to be pretty common in smaller cities surrounded by country. They were all over the Lansing, Michigan area when I lived there.
I don't see this as much of a problem. Computers have no "intuition" at all. In fact, modern automated provers basically just run down every path offered them whether it leads anywhere or not, which is how they've come up with novel proofs for things that have already been proven by another method. It comes down to a human not having thought of it, but the computer stumbled into it.
Computers have the advantage of speed. They can go through some huge number of completely useless proofs in a reasonably short time. Given enough time and horsepower, they can find all of the "utterly weird and counterintuitive" things that lead to great discoveries. Their current state isn't very good, but, as everyone here knows, they keep getting faster, even if we don't know what to do with them.
http://www.terraservice.net/ (Sadly, it's run by Microsoft, who doesn't do a very good job with them, but they're free. They're also about 3 to 7 years old.)
1 meter resolution doesn't sound like much (it isn't compared to recent color aerials which have about a foot resolution), but you can make out the shape of your house, the cars parked nearby, the layout of the property and any trees, etc. of reasonable size. It easily allows you to follow any street, etc., through the area.
It's only cheating because you can't memorize the dictionary. What if someone did memorize the dictionary, would you eliminate him because he was cheating?
I'm sure that grandmasters remember more opening moves than you do, are they cheating?
Computers don't play chess like humans. Internally, they're very different, but they still play chess. Lookups may be hard for you, but they're easy for computers.
I disagree here. Corporations are already multinational. That Indian company won't be truly Indian. It'll be completely owned by the company that is no longer allowed to outsource. Nope, they aren't outsourcing labor anymore, they're just buying a product from a company based in another country. And if that proves to be the problem, it's a simple thing to say that a company is based in another company completely and the US company is just one of it's multinational arms.
I'm sure there are plenty of countries out there that would be very willing to have a large, well-known company put their headquarters in one of their major cities.
I also wouldn't complain about the company reinventing OSX with every release. I remember it being just as bad until the OS7-9 releases. I remember about three different ways to set up your network because the control panels not only changed options, but changed names. This was also true when setting your monitor resolution and whether or not the sound control panel was integrated with the monitor control panel or not.
I recently had to help my parents (by phone of course) set up an older desktop running OS9 with an airport. I couldn't remember what the control panel names where for networking, not because I didn't know them, but I couldn't remember which went with which MacOS version. "Look for something called Networking. Or maybe TCP/IP. Or possibly Ethernet." (I think the last name died around OS7.)
- marrie toi a une americaine
- prends la citoyennete US
- ne retourne jamais en France
(ou la meme chose avec une Canadienne si tu aimes la neige).
Quick translation (I hope my high school French can handle this): My advice: - Marry an American (yes, it's feminine) - Take US citizenship - Never return to france. (Or the same thing except with a Canadian (again feminine) if you like snow.)
Coal is also a finite resource and, from what I've gathered, much more environmentally destructive, both from a mining perspective to a burning perspective.
My wife regularly drives a Honda Insight. We've owned it for three years with no problems.
You also might like to know that the starter and the alternator are the same part in all hybrids I've heard about -- it's also the electric motor that runs the car under a variety of circumstances, so you could say that it does triple duty. The Insight is completely push startable (probably a bit easier than some cars since it weighs nothing) and will drive completely off of it's internal combustion engine. Of course, the performance will be degraded without the electric assist, but it will definitely get you where you need to go to get it fixed.
If I remember correctly, it does have motor vehicles in the form of emergency vehicles, such as fire engines. Also, as you've noted it has roads. Not that they're four lane highways, but they're definitely plenty wide enough for cars.
It's an incredibly small community based on an island, for the most part only accessible by ferry and geared toward tourism.
I think this is more characteristic of European cities than American cities. It seems like European cities have a much more heterogeneous environment throughout than American cities, where there are definite divisions between residential and commercial areas.
I remember when I first visited Europe that I was surprised to see a small grocer or bread shop, etc. every couple of blocks, even in reasonably small cities. In the US, there are huge sections of neighborhoods with a reasonably nearby commercial district to handle purchases for those neighborhoods.
To just buy some milk, I have to go about a mile along a road without sidewalks. Driving is not impossible to avoid, but nearly so. Also, possibly from this problem, we also don't do daily shopping and keep much more stuff onhand than most Europeans.
And milk delivery? I don't know anywhere in the US that actually still does that. I think that practice went out in the 1950s. Occasionally, you'll find an older house (1930s/40s era) with a milk door for the delivery, but it's considered an anachronism over here.
GM was probably the worst when it comes to monopoly-like abuses about 50 years ago. In fact, they rode those profits for decades, it's only been recently that they've actually fallen from the number one spot on the Fortune 500. I personally think that they only survived the 80s because they had huge amounts of prior profit.
NewtonScript actually had a pseudo-multiple inheritance where you would "inherit" both from your ancestor instances and the UI view you were currently working in. Thus, if you references a variable in your current instance, it would first search the current instance, followed by the prototype ancestors, followed by the view ancestors. (It might have been view first then prototype, my memory fails me.) I will admit that this was very useful for simple GUIs as you could share a variety of variables at different levels of the application from both a type of widget level (the prototype ancestors) and a location of widget level (all widgets in a certain container).
JavaScript is a weaker version of all of this. Not only does it only support prototype inheritance, but it does not update ancestor variables when they are change, but makes a local copy. In some ways, this does emulate class-like behavior, as you cannot just randomly change your shared "class"-level variables, but it also makes it much harder to change them if you do need to make something global for a data type.
In any case, prototype style OO eliminates the distinction between class and instance, making any change to any instance up the line propagate downwards. This isn't so bad when you are in a single threaded, single user, event driven environment, which basically describes the major use of JavaScript and the sole use of NewtonScript, but for any larger system, things get very unwieldy.
Yep, they did and then along came the XBox2. I find it especially strange that it seems all three of the major consoles will be buying their PowerPC architecture based chips from IBM.