Agree. Whenever the President dictates what Congress should do I die a little bit inside. The whole purpose of government was to ensure that certain inalienable rights were protected. It shouldn't have to provide for us economically. If we can't manage to feed and clothe ourselves on our own merits than we deserve to die. Notice that the right to live is not an inalienable right, being that everyone dies in the end. Government protects us from other governments, and from people who would deny us liberty. But more and more it's the creature which denies us our own essential liberty. If you don't like the way a company does something, you should have both the liberty and the inclination to do something about it. But government regulation removes your liberty, and suddenly you don't have the inclination anymore.
This is what we have become because of big government, sheep afraid to step up and provide reasonable service at a reasonable price. If you don't like the way something is being done, perhaps its you who should be doing something about it.
Holy crap, I wish I had mod points. This is a joke, and especially a jab at all the people who use the term "Liberal" and "Conservative" to describe other's viewpoints in a discussion. I HATE being labeled like that. "Oh, you like the idea of reducing government spending and taxation, and reduced government, so that means you're a conservative!" People that make statements like that live in a two-tone world and wonder why nothing separates along the lines they've drawn.
PS, want to play the bongos with me sometime? I would like to ride my bike out into the wilderness with you and your man-boy friends and make some noise.
As I'm sure has been repeated, it appears that this is a compound of Boron where the Boron exists in two different covalently bonded structures, with different electronegativities. This results in the two structures forming ionic bonds.
Disclaimer: I'm drunk enough that I couldn't find my ass with a map and both hands.
When these ads get sophisticated enough that they can tell that I'm drunk and show me ads for the nearest liquor store or bar, count me in. But if they recognize my face as too feminine, count me out. Just because a designer designed something to catch up to two standard deviations from the mean doesn't mean that there isn't a tenth of a percentage point which is not caught by this scheme. These people will be very embarrassed to be assaulted with tampon ads. Effeminate men don't have periods. This I know, from knowing quite a few in my day.
SF movies haven't been getting dumbed down, they've been moving into social sciences. BSG contained a lot of sociological and psychological ideas, like that even humans in the same social group will fight over resources, that people are very good at holding grudges, that people will lay down for a year in order to survive for much longer. These were interesting as a foray into social science, but they lack the rigorous construction of hard science.
I once watched a documentary where a pregnant woman from Gaza was being held in a security checkpoint for several hours while the security guards were inspecting vehicles in line in front of her. She was giving birth at the time. That, to me, is an atrocity.
No, models can be used to make predictions. For example, I have a pretty well-tested modeling approach for the force on a charged body resulting from a current flow nearby. This model can be used to predict what will happen to a charged body placed at any point near the current flow.
The computer that you type this on is good evidence of that, because much of the early design work is validated using those computer models which predict the sorts of behaviors conducive to computing. Granted there is actual prototyping to be done, because computer models represent only an approximation. But they represent our best approximations with the most precise predictive power. I'm sorry, but you need to fully understand an idea before you begin to refute it, and it doesn't appear that you understand computer modeling, or much of science at all.
The only thing that really sucks about Firefox is that I can't clone tabs from a right-click menu. That and it uses three times as much memory on my Xubuntu box that Opera does. And Opera does a lot of the same things as Firefox, with the added bonus of better tabbing capabilities.
The only real reason I use Opera on that Xubuntu box is because it's a laptop with a P3 700 and 256 MB of ram, so memory usage is very important.
Also, just to hedge your bets, have the manual printed in spanish as well as english. There's a pretty good chance that half the kids in the group that opens it will have spanish as their primary language and english as a second language.
Yeah, but personally relevant and educationally relevant are two different things. Punch cards are something that I would discuss as a historical aside in a high school computer science or programming or technology class, and I might trot some out just to show students how far we've come. That doesn't mean that I still use them to store data, or that I am a punch card fanatic.
Please look at this through the eyes of a teacher; the goal of this project is not to get students using old technology, but simply to give them some understanding of what their teachers had to learn on. I had a teacher in high school who had some old magnetic disks that apparently had to be immersed in a fluid. He showed those to me and some other interested students as novelties.
Imagine how cool it would be if your children or grandchildren could see what you had to live with, technology wise. Wouldn't that teach them something about history, or give them some understanding of how different our culture was compared to their culture? Essentially, is the goal of education to give a student some practical skills and then boot them out into the world, or do we want to give them a context for their skills?
This kind of activity is educationally relevant because it allows students to feel like they've contributed something to the world or done something cool. When it's unearthed it will be valuable because it gives their grandkids an understanding of what was technologically advanced in the past.
Think about all the work that went into assembling the 1/4-pounder with cheese, including all the processing of the ingredients and assembly in mass for shipping. Compare that to the work that went into assembling the mouse.
It's kind of cheering to think that the two most parsimonious explanations for god's existence both come out of eastern religions.
But anyone who suggests the idea of multiverses should be laughed at on general scientific principal for allowing the mathematics to lead them to untestable edge cases. Kinematics equations in special relativity allow us to move faster than the speed of light with the caveat that we become infinitely massive, then would appear to travel backwards. Is this something we can test? I would move that such a result should be discarded as nonsensical because it would be impossible to move a probe fast enough to perform such an experiment. The prediction that there should be multiverses bothers me for the same reason that predictions about what happens inside a black hole bother me. There is no way to make any sort of observation which would confirm or deny the theory.
Nothing and anything at all could happen inside a black hole, but it wouldn't matter because once you've passed the event horizon no information can escape back to the rest of the universe.
I've been at restaurants where waitresses invade my personal space by touching me or rubbing on me while handing other diners their food, and I just refuse to tip them because of that. Usually they do it because they think it gets them more tips if they make me want to have sex with them. That kind of manipulation really pisses me off. Remember that this is an example of why I like the tipping system.
Another reason why I like the system here is that if I really like the service someone gave me, I can say so by giving them a larger than average tip.
Actually, it would take a guy in the spacecraft a minimum of 4.3 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri. In Earth's reference frame it might take thousands of years. I'm saying that you're using the times in the wrong frames of reference.
The whole point of PvP isn't to serve as an endgame. Warhammer is all about fighting other players. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. And while we're on the subject of endgames, at least you don't have the massive imbalance caused by level 60s who have a 40-man raiding guild obsessed and backing them up every night to get better equipment going up against a team of 60s who have blues from 15-man raids because they aren't as fanatically obsessed. Basically the whole point of WoW was to get you onto the upgrade treadmill so that they could squeeze as much money out of you as possible before you got fed up with that one guild that plays the game like it's a full-time job.
I would go so far as to say that the very definition of IQ means that it follows a normal distribution. Standardized tests aren't "standard" in the sense that the tests are the same, they're standard because a subset of the population takes the test, and the range of scores is then standardized so that 66% of the population lies within one standard deviation of the median score. So it follows that the mean and median of IQ scores are the same.
I agree with the sibling post. The data is in. I've heard it explained very succinctly by a climate scientist. We know what to expect. We just don't have a plan to fix it that won't cause other major problems. The trouble isn't the problem of global warming, it's the problem of the loss of the polar ice caps, the flooding which will result, the destruction or change of ecosystems, the resultant loss of animal life, and the whole host of problems that that will cause for man.
Your statement about scientists not being able to predict the climate is an extreme generalization. It's difficult to predict where a particular patch of clouds will be at a particular point in time, but it's not hard to develop a model that closely approximates a number of environmental conditions over the entire Earth and then apply it to make predictions about trends based on current conditions. We have a decent understanding of what's generally going on, how fast energy is being radiated out into space versus how fast its being absorbed, and the factors which affect this. To say that the model isn't a good approximation is to ignore years of good research into the global environment.
Actually, weather, like any other chaotic system is truly deterministic. Given a precise set of initial conditions and a set of the laws governing that system one can, in principal, reproduce the state of the system. The only way that it could be considered unpredictable is in the sense that small variations in initial conditions can produce wildly different outcomes. The troublesome part is developing the laws and determining the initial conditions....this is going to turn into a philosophical argument, isn't it?
What made System Shock 2 and Thief fun for me was the feeling of fear and the sense that there was no help coming from anything in game. It wasn't about the challenge, it was about the atmosphere created by being set in a place where you're the only creature on your side. You start to feel like there are enemies around every corner, and the way that SS2 was designed there was a random chance of an enemy spawning on the level you were playing. This reinforced that sense that you're never safe. Then there were sections of the game where there were very few enemies. Either way you were never sure that the room you were about to enter was a safe place, and you were constantly looking around for security cameras, because hitting just one of those was enough to trigger a mass spawn and kill you. Even the people who were supposed to be helping you weren't neccessarily on your side. SHODAN would constantly come on and insult you and scream in your ear. Polito turned out to be dead.
It wasn't just the challenge, it was the fear of the challenge. And that was brought on in just the right increments.
We'll know it's paid off if the Ruskies ever attack from behind their iron curtain. Then we'll be able to mobilize our military much more effectively than we could without the interstate highway system.
Exactly. 3 years ago I remember reading a then 10 year old analysis of the US's energy issues, and this was one of the major steps that the author indicated that we would need to take in order to take advantage of renewable energy. This is not a new problem.
This is also one of the few areas where the federal government can make themselves useful, as opposed to butting in and making life harder.
I'd imagine that a nano battery explosion would be pretty similar to this video, but on a much smaller scale. So a lot of smoke, and possibly even a violent explosion or two. It might even be enough to catch any number of plastic parts in the iPod on fire.
It's certainly going to be a lot more violent than an ember from a cigarrette.
Yeah, except that by definition the Universe encompasses all that we can observe, so if we could observe these other Universes by definition they would become part of our Universe. Planes of existence might be a better phrase for it.
Well, to be honest, there are things in your home and/or appliances which are just as toxic when burned. Hell, plastic water piping is PVC. So unless you make it a point to light your refrigerator on fire at the end of its lifecycle you really don't have a case there.
And in general anything that replaces mechanical parts(a compressor) with electrical parts will achieve an increase in energy efficiency because of the absence of mechanical friction in the system.
Also there are already heat sinks on the back of refrigerators. How would this be a different situation? So yes, I do think this will be cheaper than bulky, loud, inefficient fluid compressors.
The point at which this becomes a Bad Thing is when those of us who live off campus and/or don't do anything illegal with P2P end up footing the bill for the students who do. As long as I don't end up getting charged a blanket fee for other students' uses of the internet, I'm okay with whatever my school decides to do. But if they want to bill me a $40 fee so that they can give me access to some DRM fest of a music server which won't even support my player, they can go fuck themselves.
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Agree. Whenever the President dictates what Congress should do I die a little bit inside. The whole purpose of government was to ensure that certain inalienable rights were protected. It shouldn't have to provide for us economically. If we can't manage to feed and clothe ourselves on our own merits than we deserve to die. Notice that the right to live is not an inalienable right, being that everyone dies in the end. Government protects us from other governments, and from people who would deny us liberty. But more and more it's the creature which denies us our own essential liberty. If you don't like the way a company does something, you should have both the liberty and the inclination to do something about it. But government regulation removes your liberty, and suddenly you don't have the inclination anymore.
This is what we have become because of big government, sheep afraid to step up and provide reasonable service at a reasonable price. If you don't like the way something is being done, perhaps its you who should be doing something about it.
Holy crap, I wish I had mod points. This is a joke, and especially a jab at all the people who use the term "Liberal" and "Conservative" to describe other's viewpoints in a discussion. I HATE being labeled like that. "Oh, you like the idea of reducing government spending and taxation, and reduced government, so that means you're a conservative!" People that make statements like that live in a two-tone world and wonder why nothing separates along the lines they've drawn.
PS, want to play the bongos with me sometime? I would like to ride my bike out into the wilderness with you and your man-boy friends and make some noise.
As I'm sure has been repeated, it appears that this is a compound of Boron where the Boron exists in two different covalently bonded structures, with different electronegativities. This results in the two structures forming ionic bonds.
Disclaimer: I'm drunk enough that I couldn't find my ass with a map and both hands.
When these ads get sophisticated enough that they can tell that I'm drunk and show me ads for the nearest liquor store or bar, count me in. But if they recognize my face as too feminine, count me out. Just because a designer designed something to catch up to two standard deviations from the mean doesn't mean that there isn't a tenth of a percentage point which is not caught by this scheme. These people will be very embarrassed to be assaulted with tampon ads. Effeminate men don't have periods. This I know, from knowing quite a few in my day.
Repeat disclaimer.
SF movies haven't been getting dumbed down, they've been moving into social sciences. BSG contained a lot of sociological and psychological ideas, like that even humans in the same social group will fight over resources, that people are very good at holding grudges, that people will lay down for a year in order to survive for much longer. These were interesting as a foray into social science, but they lack the rigorous construction of hard science.
I once watched a documentary where a pregnant woman from Gaza was being held in a security checkpoint for several hours while the security guards were inspecting vehicles in line in front of her. She was giving birth at the time. That, to me, is an atrocity.
No, models can be used to make predictions. For example, I have a pretty well-tested modeling approach for the force on a charged body resulting from a current flow nearby. This model can be used to predict what will happen to a charged body placed at any point near the current flow.
The computer that you type this on is good evidence of that, because much of the early design work is validated using those computer models which predict the sorts of behaviors conducive to computing. Granted there is actual prototyping to be done, because computer models represent only an approximation. But they represent our best approximations with the most precise predictive power. I'm sorry, but you need to fully understand an idea before you begin to refute it, and it doesn't appear that you understand computer modeling, or much of science at all.
The only thing that really sucks about Firefox is that I can't clone tabs from a right-click menu. That and it uses three times as much memory on my Xubuntu box that Opera does. And Opera does a lot of the same things as Firefox, with the added bonus of better tabbing capabilities.
The only real reason I use Opera on that Xubuntu box is because it's a laptop with a P3 700 and 256 MB of ram, so memory usage is very important.
Also, just to hedge your bets, have the manual printed in spanish as well as english. There's a pretty good chance that half the kids in the group that opens it will have spanish as their primary language and english as a second language.
Yeah, but personally relevant and educationally relevant are two different things. Punch cards are something that I would discuss as a historical aside in a high school computer science or programming or technology class, and I might trot some out just to show students how far we've come. That doesn't mean that I still use them to store data, or that I am a punch card fanatic.
Please look at this through the eyes of a teacher; the goal of this project is not to get students using old technology, but simply to give them some understanding of what their teachers had to learn on. I had a teacher in high school who had some old magnetic disks that apparently had to be immersed in a fluid. He showed those to me and some other interested students as novelties.
Imagine how cool it would be if your children or grandchildren could see what you had to live with, technology wise. Wouldn't that teach them something about history, or give them some understanding of how different our culture was compared to their culture? Essentially, is the goal of education to give a student some practical skills and then boot them out into the world, or do we want to give them a context for their skills?
This kind of activity is educationally relevant because it allows students to feel like they've contributed something to the world or done something cool. When it's unearthed it will be valuable because it gives their grandkids an understanding of what was technologically advanced in the past.
Think about all the work that went into assembling the 1/4-pounder with cheese, including all the processing of the ingredients and assembly in mass for shipping. Compare that to the work that went into assembling the mouse.
It's kind of cheering to think that the two most parsimonious explanations for god's existence both come out of eastern religions.
But anyone who suggests the idea of multiverses should be laughed at on general scientific principal for allowing the mathematics to lead them to untestable edge cases. Kinematics equations in special relativity allow us to move faster than the speed of light with the caveat that we become infinitely massive, then would appear to travel backwards. Is this something we can test? I would move that such a result should be discarded as nonsensical because it would be impossible to move a probe fast enough to perform such an experiment. The prediction that there should be multiverses bothers me for the same reason that predictions about what happens inside a black hole bother me. There is no way to make any sort of observation which would confirm or deny the theory.
Nothing and anything at all could happen inside a black hole, but it wouldn't matter because once you've passed the event horizon no information can escape back to the rest of the universe.
I like the tipping system here.
I've been at restaurants where waitresses invade my personal space by touching me or rubbing on me while handing other diners their food, and I just refuse to tip them because of that. Usually they do it because they think it gets them more tips if they make me want to have sex with them. That kind of manipulation really pisses me off. Remember that this is an example of why I like the tipping system.
Another reason why I like the system here is that if I really like the service someone gave me, I can say so by giving them a larger than average tip.
Actually, it would take a guy in the spacecraft a minimum of 4.3 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri. In Earth's reference frame it might take thousands of years. I'm saying that you're using the times in the wrong frames of reference.
The whole point of PvP isn't to serve as an endgame. Warhammer is all about fighting other players. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. And while we're on the subject of endgames, at least you don't have the massive imbalance caused by level 60s who have a 40-man raiding guild obsessed and backing them up every night to get better equipment going up against a team of 60s who have blues from 15-man raids because they aren't as fanatically obsessed. Basically the whole point of WoW was to get you onto the upgrade treadmill so that they could squeeze as much money out of you as possible before you got fed up with that one guild that plays the game like it's a full-time job.
I would go so far as to say that the very definition of IQ means that it follows a normal distribution. Standardized tests aren't "standard" in the sense that the tests are the same, they're standard because a subset of the population takes the test, and the range of scores is then standardized so that 66% of the population lies within one standard deviation of the median score. So it follows that the mean and median of IQ scores are the same.
I agree with the sibling post. The data is in. I've heard it explained very succinctly by a climate scientist. We know what to expect. We just don't have a plan to fix it that won't cause other major problems. The trouble isn't the problem of global warming, it's the problem of the loss of the polar ice caps, the flooding which will result, the destruction or change of ecosystems, the resultant loss of animal life, and the whole host of problems that that will cause for man.
Your statement about scientists not being able to predict the climate is an extreme generalization. It's difficult to predict where a particular patch of clouds will be at a particular point in time, but it's not hard to develop a model that closely approximates a number of environmental conditions over the entire Earth and then apply it to make predictions about trends based on current conditions. We have a decent understanding of what's generally going on, how fast energy is being radiated out into space versus how fast its being absorbed, and the factors which affect this. To say that the model isn't a good approximation is to ignore years of good research into the global environment.
Actually, weather, like any other chaotic system is truly deterministic. Given a precise set of initial conditions and a set of the laws governing that system one can, in principal, reproduce the state of the system. The only way that it could be considered unpredictable is in the sense that small variations in initial conditions can produce wildly different outcomes. The troublesome part is developing the laws and determining the initial conditions. ...this is going to turn into a philosophical argument, isn't it?
What made System Shock 2 and Thief fun for me was the feeling of fear and the sense that there was no help coming from anything in game. It wasn't about the challenge, it was about the atmosphere created by being set in a place where you're the only creature on your side. You start to feel like there are enemies around every corner, and the way that SS2 was designed there was a random chance of an enemy spawning on the level you were playing. This reinforced that sense that you're never safe. Then there were sections of the game where there were very few enemies. Either way you were never sure that the room you were about to enter was a safe place, and you were constantly looking around for security cameras, because hitting just one of those was enough to trigger a mass spawn and kill you. Even the people who were supposed to be helping you weren't neccessarily on your side. SHODAN would constantly come on and insult you and scream in your ear. Polito turned out to be dead.
It wasn't just the challenge, it was the fear of the challenge. And that was brought on in just the right increments.
We'll know it's paid off if the Ruskies ever attack from behind their iron curtain. Then we'll be able to mobilize our military much more effectively than we could without the interstate highway system.
Exactly. 3 years ago I remember reading a then 10 year old analysis of the US's energy issues, and this was one of the major steps that the author indicated that we would need to take in order to take advantage of renewable energy. This is not a new problem.
This is also one of the few areas where the federal government can make themselves useful, as opposed to butting in and making life harder.
It's certainly going to be a lot more violent than an ember from a cigarrette.
Yeah, except that by definition the Universe encompasses all that we can observe, so if we could observe these other Universes by definition they would become part of our Universe. Planes of existence might be a better phrase for it.
Well, to be honest, there are things in your home and/or appliances which are just as toxic when burned. Hell, plastic water piping is PVC. So unless you make it a point to light your refrigerator on fire at the end of its lifecycle you really don't have a case there.
And in general anything that replaces mechanical parts(a compressor) with electrical parts will achieve an increase in energy efficiency because of the absence of mechanical friction in the system.
Also there are already heat sinks on the back of refrigerators. How would this be a different situation? So yes, I do think this will be cheaper than bulky, loud, inefficient fluid compressors.
The point at which this becomes a Bad Thing is when those of us who live off campus and/or don't do anything illegal with P2P end up footing the bill for the students who do. As long as I don't end up getting charged a blanket fee for other students' uses of the internet, I'm okay with whatever my school decides to do. But if they want to bill me a $40 fee so that they can give me access to some DRM fest of a music server which won't even support my player, they can go fuck themselves.