I am not an astrophysisist, so it's possible there is more recent information I'm unaware of that makes this assertation out of date. But it's what I was taught, and there are still sources around to support it, so if you are going to declare it wrong, a source would be helpful.
You are correct abuot my spelling errors. It's true that I was focued more on getting back to my real job quickly, rahter than proofreading for typos and grammer.
You're question's already been answered by others, but I just wanted to add a tangental thought.
In 1056, there was a supernova bright enough and close enough that it was visible in the daytime sky. This was also a time when alchemists were still trying to learn how to turn lead into gold.
I wonder how many alchemists saw the "new star"-- not realizing that they were witnessing the very transformation they were seeking: since lead CAN be changed into gold-- it just requires (much, much) higher temperatures and pressures than the alchemists were able to reproduce in the lab.
I'm impressed by the survival of this genre, especially with electronic and internet-enabled versions available. You don't have to go out looking for some friends to get together and play for hours and hours. You just turn on the PC and fire up text MUDs or MMORPGs. And with all of the challenges of the old and the advantages of the new, this still survives? Impressive indeed.
Yeah. Glad they invented a way to remove the "spending time with your friends" aspect of gaming-- that was the most odious part of an otherwise enjoyable passtime.
"Sodium in the lake party"-- wait-- I think our pyromaniac honors high school chemestry teacher showed that to us back in-- 1989? somewhere around there? Is it a video of you taking a class out to a strip mine and throwing a big 'ol block of sodium in? my class thought that was pretty darn cool =^). (In class, our teacher was only able to demonstrate will small peices in a large garbage can of water...)
The only part of that class that was more memorable was when a tin-foil trough of flaming chemicals started to leak and run off the desk, causing the first row of students to need to retreat from the approching lake of colored flame-- but the fire didn't spread to anything other than the chemicals, which burned away, so it was all good.
You know the problem of voter fraud/rigging machines could be greatly simplified if we just did away with the ballot being secret.
I wish I had the cite now, but I remember hearing about a factory owner back before the vote was made secret. As a show of power, he would march his employees out to the ballots, they would all vote for his favored candidate, and then they'd be marched back to work.
after all, if you don't want to keep this job, there's a dozen other guys out there whou would love to have it...
Even if there were laws preventing one from being so blatent about it-- how do you prove that you missed the promotion or were first in line for the lay-offs because your boss didn't like the way you voted. Or that the discretionary portion of your grade was because the prof didn't like how you voted. Or that when you came up for tenure, the reason you didn't make it was because a powerful person or two on the commitee didn't like how you voted. Or that the reason you didn't get that great job was because the search commitee looked up your record and... etc. etc.
The company I work for maintains large databases, and sells institutional subscriptions to them. If we lost internet access, none of our customers would be able to connect, and we'd have to go back to mailing them digital media. Unless all our would-be competitors lost internet access at the same time--I wager we'd be in a wee spot of bother.
Hence, the company I work for does not get our Internet connection via Comcast... that would be suicide.
It is said: Power corrupts, while absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I would argue that a more accurate saying would be: "power attracts the corrupt. Absolute power attracts the corrupt irresistably".
The longer any party or group remains in power the closer they come to corrupt.
...because that means the corrupt have had that much longer to maneuver their way into power within the party or group. Changing ruling parties/groups frequently means a lot of corrupt power-brokering ends up being wasted maneuvering to power within a group that no longer has any externally.
Or as my great grandfather liked to say, "political parties are like old socks: if you don't change them often enough, they get so they smell"
Having just two isn't that much better. Because "the corrupt" can do well for themselves by maneuvering to power within either one of them.
That said... a megacorp has a "one month low"? What kind of news is that? Sounds like someone trying to make a story where there isn't one.
I'm glad someone else caught that. What's next: "Breaking news-- thanks to a comment on Slashdot, MegaCorp's stock is the lowest it's been ALL AFTERNOON!"
I should probably clarify my Parent post, because it could be misconstured.
We as geeks (and I definitely include myself in this-- why do you think I'm so familiar with it?) tend to have slight (or not so slight) cases of Aspergers, or Apserger's-like manner of brain functioning.
It's more natural for us to take things literally than metaphoricly or rhetorically. Therefore, that's the meaning that occurs to us first, the "real" meaning kicks in a fraction of a second later. We see the humor between our natural interpretation of what was said, and what the speaker really meant, and we comment on it.
Nothing gaurentees that the voucher by itself will be sufficient to cover the tuition at a good private school. In fact, it probably won't-- And that's before considering it would be in any good private school's best interest to raise their tuition considerably if a widespread voucher program went into effect.
If you can cough up the extra on top of the voucher to send your kids to the good public school, it works well for you. If you can't, then you are forced to send your kid to the (now horribly underfunded) public school. Thus, those who had the least oppertunities to start with have even fewer oppertunities than they do in the current system. It gets even harder to pull yourself out of poverty. The and the distribution of wealth grows even more uneven.
For those of you who don't care about the spread of poverty (as long as you're not poor) and maldistribution of wealth that increases over time (as long as you're OK), you should-- crime and quality of life issues are the primary reason. But at the extreme end, history shows that the greater the maldistribution of wealth is in a civilization the more likely it is to collapse, and the more violent that collapse is likely to be. I don't think that's an immediate danger, but education is an area that requires multi-generational thinking.
The purpose of public education is the public good. It's in the public's best interest that there be as easy a road for people to better themselves as possible, and a decent education is a key part of that. It is also in the publics best interest that the general populace be educated.
There are substantial problems with our current educational system, most definitely. And they need to be addressed. My thoughts on the best way to address them are beyond the scope of this post. But I think that "moving them to the private sector" (as many suggest) is not an effective strategy, because while the market is excellent at determining some things (and more things than people might expect) it's not a magic wand that can fix everything. Long-term, public-good, infastructure issues often fly contrary to, rather than in alignment with, the private profit of those providing the services. So trying to use the market to inject accountability is using the wrong tool for the job.
Most of this post has been general, not all of it a direct response to Parent. But from Parent's post:
I'm pretty libertarian, but I think taxes to fund education are a fundamentally Good Thing. There's not much I think government should do in the way of social programs, but that's one of them. However, I also think it would do both public and private schools, not to mention students, a world of good, to introduce some real competition between them.
I would agree, if this could be done in such a matter that those with the fewest oppertunities to begin with didn't end up in the schools too lousy to compete.
What are people's thoughts on a modification of the voucher program, where in order to participate, a private school would be required to charge a tuition no higher than (regional?) voucher amount?
NASA: Houston, we have a problem. We seem to have, um, lost the moon landing footage...
Media: you lost the WHAT?
NASA: You know the "one small step for man" bit? Yeah. Well, it's gotta be around here somewhere...
Tinfoil Hat Guy: Ha! See! See! it WAS faked! "Lost" the footage. Mmmm hmm, how convenient.
Media: How could you loos the footage of the FIRST MOON LANDING?!?!
NASA: We could have sworn it was right here! It's gota be here somewhere---( *rustle* *rustle* damn.).
Peter Clifton: (now waita second, I couldn't possibly have.... *rustle* *rustle*) Oh whoops, HERE it is! I completely forgot you lent it to me when I was working on the Dark Side of the Moon Film! Silly me, I guess I forgot to return some of the most significant film in history for over 30 years. Whoops. Theres not a late fine on that, is there?
Tinfoil Hat Guy: Umm hmm... interesting that a film-producer is the one that came up with it, isn't it?
I would have loved to have a mobil phone when I was five.
I'd have taken it apart to try to figure out how it worked. And when I couldn't get the peices working together again, I'd have thrown them in with my lego set to use as parts of spaceships.
My point wasn't whether or not terrorism is a threat to this country (that debate is WAY beyond the scope of this thread, so I wasn't posting an opinion one way or another. The bird flu thing is more than enough of a tangent!)
My point is that determining that two particular individuals were not terrorists would not, BY ITSELF, be strong evidence that terrorism is not a threat-- to emphasise that the fact that two individual swans do not have bird flu is not BY ITSELF evidence that bird flu is not a danger.
You don't seem to disagree with my primary point-- since you have offered more evidence to your claim that terrorism isn't a threat than "Jhon Smith and John Doe here aren't terrorists, therefore it's not a problem"
You know, when I saw this headline, I thought it was metaphorical.
I have a vauge memory of a story where AOL was going "fight spam" by disallowing any bulk mail to come to their subscribers unless the sender paid AOL a fee. I thought this is what the headline was referring to-- that AOL was "digging up [it's own] yard" (i.e. pissing off it's customers by blocking legitimate newsletters, while letting spammers through if they paid) for "spam[mers] gold" (the gate-fee paid by bulk e-mailers.)
I didn't even consider the possibility that the headline was literal, until I read the write-up...
One idea I heard was to boycott a specific slice of RIAA record labels but to continue buying for others. That way it would be clearer.
But in that case, no one would agree on which "slice" to boycott-- everyone would want to "boycott" the slice they don't listen to anyway.
Better to just buy through distribution chaneles who's models you approve of,f from independant artists, etc. Sure, they'll think it's just piracy at first but 1) They'll have a hard time finding anyone to sue 2)if the independant chanels start gaining market share, it will demonstrate that their model actually works
I'm missing how what you just said is different from what I said in the post you are replying to? I'm assuming there must be some sort of difference, since you begin your post with "no", but it's too subtle for me to catch. Your post just looks like a re-wording of mine.
Absolutely, you should be freed of the taboo that keeps you from eating the kids in your family. They are yours and you and your mate made them. If you don't subscribe to that view, you should still not have problems with those that hold that view.
If the only thing keeping someone from "eating their kids" or some other heinous act is a religious prohibition, then the person in question is a psychopath, and should be treated as such.
I am not a moral relativist. But true moral issues can be discussed, and their virtue seen, without invoking the supernatural, whether one beleives in a deity or dieties or not.
A belief system that tries to preclude all others (you shall have no other gods) it seems will be threatened by any way of thinking that doesn't fit in its framework. "One religion to rule them all..."
That's exactly the problem. Christianity doesn't just want to impose it's point of view on it's own practitioners (which would be understandable) but on everyone, whether they are Christians or not. They seem to think that it's perfectly OK to impose religious dogma on people who don't even share their religion!
They can beleive whatever they want to beleive, and set whatever arbitrary rules about marriage and such-not that they want to set: for themselves. It's when they try to impose their beleif system, dogma, and archaic religious taboos onto me, and kids in my family that I have a problem.
I buy into what you're saying, but it seems to mean there must be fewer and fewer nitches for a new species to develop and become sucessful... Then evolution should essentialy stop at some point. Is that what happens?
In addition to the enviornmental change mentioned by the poster above, life also creates more nices. The growth of clusters of giant trees to form rainforests created canopy niches and undergrowth niches and all sorts of niches that didn't exist before rainforests came into being. There are fish that find a niche eating the parasites off of larger sea-creatures. Large animals eat up one kind of plant and create a niche for another. You don't run out of niches, becase changing the system in any way (even to fill a niche) just creates more niches.
By that logic, say they found two people who they thought were terrorists, but further investigation revealed that they were not terrorists after all. By your logic, this would be evidence that terrorism isn't really a threat to the country, since all evidence shows that these two individuals are not a threat.
Once you get on the right side of the decimal point, things get REALL fuzzy in binary. Floats are represented in binary in terms of x(1/2) + y(1/4) + z(1/8), etc, etc, etc. Any number that isn't a fraction of a power of two (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc) needs a LOT of decimal places to be represented with any degree of accuracy-- and even then it's an approximation.
A fixed decimal system, on the other hand, is exact to a certain (known) number of decimal spaces. It's still a limited precision: but the limit can be to a very small fraction of a penny, and is known and predictable-- thus much more reliable for finantial transactions (since the known, limited, precision can be to a very, very small fraction of a penny).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if I measured intelligence in terms of snark, then I'd be forced to bow to your superior intellect.
However, it would seem that some sources disagree with you (search for "gold" on these pages):
I am not an astrophysisist, so it's possible there is more recent information I'm unaware of that makes this assertation out of date. But it's what I was taught, and there are still sources around to support it, so if you are going to declare it wrong, a source would be helpful.
You are correct abuot my spelling errors. It's true that I was focued more on getting back to my real job quickly, rahter than proofreading for typos and grammer.
You're question's already been answered by others, but I just wanted to add a tangental thought.
In 1056, there was a supernova bright enough and close enough that it was visible in the daytime sky. This was also a time when alchemists were still trying to learn how to turn lead into gold.
I wonder how many alchemists saw the "new star"-- not realizing that they were witnessing the very transformation they were seeking: since lead CAN be changed into gold-- it just requires (much, much) higher temperatures and pressures than the alchemists were able to reproduce in the lab.
I'm impressed by the survival of this genre, especially with electronic and internet-enabled versions available. You don't have to go out looking for some friends to get together and play for hours and hours. You just turn on the PC and fire up text MUDs or MMORPGs. And with all of the challenges of the old and the advantages of the new, this still survives? Impressive indeed.
Yeah. Glad they invented a way to remove the "spending time with your friends" aspect of gaming-- that was the most odious part of an otherwise enjoyable passtime.
"Sodium in the lake party"-- wait-- I think our pyromaniac honors high school chemestry teacher showed that to us back in-- 1989? somewhere around there? Is it a video of you taking a class out to a strip mine and throwing a big 'ol block of sodium in? my class thought that was pretty darn cool =^). (In class, our teacher was only able to demonstrate will small peices in a large garbage can of water...) The only part of that class that was more memorable was when a tin-foil trough of flaming chemicals started to leak and run off the desk, causing the first row of students to need to retreat from the approching lake of colored flame-- but the fire didn't spread to anything other than the chemicals, which burned away, so it was all good.
You know the problem of voter fraud/rigging machines could be greatly simplified if we just did away with the ballot being secret.
I wish I had the cite now, but I remember hearing about a factory owner back before the vote was made secret. As a show of power, he would march his employees out to the ballots, they would all vote for his favored candidate, and then they'd be marched back to work.
after all, if you don't want to keep this job, there's a dozen other guys out there whou would love to have it...
Even if there were laws preventing one from being so blatent about it-- how do you prove that you missed the promotion or were first in line for the lay-offs because your boss didn't like the way you voted. Or that the discretionary portion of your grade was because the prof didn't like how you voted. Or that when you came up for tenure, the reason you didn't make it was because a powerful person or two on the commitee didn't like how you voted. Or that the reason you didn't get that great job was because the search commitee looked up your record and... etc. etc.
The company I work for maintains large databases, and sells institutional subscriptions to them. If we lost internet access, none of our customers would be able to connect, and we'd have to go back to mailing them digital media. Unless all our would-be competitors lost internet access at the same time--I wager we'd be in a wee spot of bother.
Hence, the company I work for does not get our Internet connection via Comcast... that would be suicide.
Wait-- so you're claiming that when a child gets lukemia, it's generally the parent's fault?
That's cold, man.
brrrrr.
(At first I thought you were making a tasteless joke, but by the time I got to the end of your post, it sounds like you're actually serious.)
It is said: Power corrupts, while absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I would argue that a more accurate saying would be: "power attracts the corrupt. Absolute power attracts the corrupt irresistably".
The longer any party or group remains in power the closer they come to corrupt.
...because that means the corrupt have had that much longer to maneuver their way into power within the party or group. Changing ruling parties/groups frequently means a lot of corrupt power-brokering ends up being wasted maneuvering to power within a group that no longer has any externally.
Or as my great grandfather liked to say, "political parties are like old socks: if you don't change them often enough, they get so they smell"
Having just two isn't that much better. Because "the corrupt" can do well for themselves by maneuvering to power within either one of them.
Why is this moderated as "-1 flamebait"? -1 offtopic would be fair, but flamebait? Just not seeing it.
That said... a megacorp has a "one month low"? What kind of news is that? Sounds like someone trying to make a story where there isn't one.
I'm glad someone else caught that. What's next: "Breaking news-- thanks to a comment on Slashdot, MegaCorp's stock is the lowest it's been ALL AFTERNOON!"
I should probably clarify my Parent post, because it could be misconstured.
We as geeks (and I definitely include myself in this-- why do you think I'm so familiar with it?) tend to have slight (or not so slight) cases of Aspergers, or Apserger's-like manner of brain functioning.
It's more natural for us to take things literally than metaphoricly or rhetorically. Therefore, that's the meaning that occurs to us first, the "real" meaning kicks in a fraction of a second later. We see the humor between our natural interpretation of what was said, and what the speaker really meant, and we comment on it.
Aspergers.
Nothing gaurentees that the voucher by itself will be sufficient to cover the tuition at a good private school. In fact, it probably won't-- And that's before considering it would be in any good private school's best interest to raise their tuition considerably if a widespread voucher program went into effect.
If you can cough up the extra on top of the voucher to send your kids to the good public school, it works well for you. If you can't, then you are forced to send your kid to the (now horribly underfunded) public school. Thus, those who had the least oppertunities to start with have even fewer oppertunities than they do in the current system. It gets even harder to pull yourself out of poverty. The and the distribution of wealth grows even more uneven.
For those of you who don't care about the spread of poverty (as long as you're not poor) and maldistribution of wealth that increases over time (as long as you're OK), you should-- crime and quality of life issues are the primary reason. But at the extreme end, history shows that the greater the maldistribution of wealth is in a civilization the more likely it is to collapse, and the more violent that collapse is likely to be. I don't think that's an immediate danger, but education is an area that requires multi-generational thinking.
The purpose of public education is the public good. It's in the public's best interest that there be as easy a road for people to better themselves as possible, and a decent education is a key part of that. It is also in the publics best interest that the general populace be educated.
There are substantial problems with our current educational system, most definitely. And they need to be addressed. My thoughts on the best way to address them are beyond the scope of this post. But I think that "moving them to the private sector" (as many suggest) is not an effective strategy, because while the market is excellent at determining some things (and more things than people might expect) it's not a magic wand that can fix everything. Long-term, public-good, infastructure issues often fly contrary to, rather than in alignment with, the private profit of those providing the services. So trying to use the market to inject accountability is using the wrong tool for the job.
Most of this post has been general, not all of it a direct response to Parent. But from Parent's post:
I'm pretty libertarian, but I think taxes to fund education are a fundamentally Good Thing. There's not much I think government should do in the way of social programs, but that's one of them. However, I also think it would do both public and private schools, not to mention students, a world of good, to introduce some real competition between them.
I would agree, if this could be done in such a matter that those with the fewest oppertunities to begin with didn't end up in the schools too lousy to compete.
What are people's thoughts on a modification of the voucher program, where in order to participate, a private school would be required to charge a tuition no higher than (regional?) voucher amount?
That makes a heck of a lot more sense.
NASA: Houston, we have a problem. We seem to have, um, lost the moon landing footage...
Media: you lost the WHAT?
NASA: You know the "one small step for man" bit? Yeah. Well, it's gotta be around here somewhere...
Tinfoil Hat Guy: Ha! See! See! it WAS faked! "Lost" the footage. Mmmm hmm, how convenient.
Media: How could you loos the footage of the FIRST MOON LANDING?!?!
NASA: We could have sworn it was right here! It's gota be here somewhere---( *rustle* *rustle* damn.).
Peter Clifton: (now waita second, I couldn't possibly have.... *rustle* *rustle*) Oh whoops, HERE it is! I completely forgot you lent it to me when I was working on the Dark Side of the Moon Film! Silly me, I guess I forgot to return some of the most significant film in history for over 30 years. Whoops. Theres not a late fine on that, is there?
Tinfoil Hat Guy: Umm hmm... interesting that a film-producer is the one that came up with it, isn't it?
I would have loved to have a mobil phone when I was five.
I'd have taken it apart to try to figure out how it worked. And when I couldn't get the peices working together again, I'd have thrown them in with my lego set to use as parts of spaceships.
My point wasn't whether or not terrorism is a threat to this country (that debate is WAY beyond the scope of this thread, so I wasn't posting an opinion one way or another. The bird flu thing is more than enough of a tangent!)
My point is that determining that two particular individuals were not terrorists would not, BY ITSELF, be strong evidence that terrorism is not a threat-- to emphasise that the fact that two individual swans do not have bird flu is not BY ITSELF evidence that bird flu is not a danger.
You don't seem to disagree with my primary point-- since you have offered more evidence to your claim that terrorism isn't a threat than "Jhon Smith and John Doe here aren't terrorists, therefore it's not a problem"
You know, when I saw this headline, I thought it was metaphorical.
I have a vauge memory of a story where AOL was going "fight spam" by disallowing any bulk mail to come to their subscribers unless the sender paid AOL a fee. I thought this is what the headline was referring to-- that AOL was "digging up [it's own] yard" (i.e. pissing off it's customers by blocking legitimate newsletters, while letting spammers through if they paid) for "spam[mers] gold" (the gate-fee paid by bulk e-mailers.)
I didn't even consider the possibility that the headline was literal, until I read the write-up...
One idea I heard was to boycott a specific slice of RIAA record labels but to continue buying for others. That way it would be clearer.
But in that case, no one would agree on which "slice" to boycott-- everyone would want to "boycott" the slice they don't listen to anyway.
Better to just buy through distribution chaneles who's models you approve of,f from independant artists, etc. Sure, they'll think it's just piracy at first but 1) They'll have a hard time finding anyone to sue 2)if the independant chanels start gaining market share, it will demonstrate that their model actually works
I'm missing how what you just said is different from what I said in the post you are replying to? I'm assuming there must be some sort of difference, since you begin your post with "no", but it's too subtle for me to catch. Your post just looks like a re-wording of mine.
Absolutely, you should be freed of the taboo that keeps you from eating the kids in your family. They are yours and you and your mate made them. If you don't subscribe to that view, you should still not have problems with those that hold that view.
If the only thing keeping someone from "eating their kids" or some other heinous act is a religious prohibition, then the person in question is a psychopath, and should be treated as such.
I am not a moral relativist. But true moral issues can be discussed, and their virtue seen, without invoking the supernatural, whether one beleives in a deity or dieties or not.
A belief system that tries to preclude all others (you shall have no other gods) it seems will be threatened by any way of thinking that doesn't fit in its framework. "One religion to rule them all..."
That's exactly the problem. Christianity doesn't just want to impose it's point of view on it's own practitioners (which would be understandable) but on everyone, whether they are Christians or not. They seem to think that it's perfectly OK to impose religious dogma on people who don't even share their religion!
They can beleive whatever they want to beleive, and set whatever arbitrary rules about marriage and such-not that they want to set: for themselves. It's when they try to impose their beleif system, dogma, and archaic religious taboos onto me, and kids in my family that I have a problem.
I buy into what you're saying, but it seems to mean there must be fewer and fewer nitches for a new species to develop and become sucessful... Then evolution should essentialy stop at some point. Is that what happens?
In addition to the enviornmental change mentioned by the poster above, life also creates more nices. The growth of clusters of giant trees to form rainforests created canopy niches and undergrowth niches and all sorts of niches that didn't exist before rainforests came into being. There are fish that find a niche eating the parasites off of larger sea-creatures. Large animals eat up one kind of plant and create a niche for another. You don't run out of niches, becase changing the system in any way (even to fill a niche) just creates more niches.
By that logic, say they found two people who they thought were terrorists, but further investigation revealed that they were not terrorists after all. By your logic, this would be evidence that terrorism isn't really a threat to the country, since all evidence shows that these two individuals are not a threat.
less faciciously:
Once you get on the right side of the decimal point, things get REALL fuzzy in binary. Floats are represented in binary in terms of x(1/2) + y(1/4) + z(1/8), etc, etc, etc. Any number that isn't a fraction of a power of two (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc) needs a LOT of decimal places to be represented with any degree of accuracy-- and even then it's an approximation.
A fixed decimal system, on the other hand, is exact to a certain (known) number of decimal spaces. It's still a limited precision: but the limit can be to a very small fraction of a penny, and is known and predictable-- thus much more reliable for finantial transactions (since the known, limited, precision can be to a very, very small fraction of a penny).