Yeah. I once TA'd a class aimed at education students. During this, I graded an essay question which asked whether the voltage across some basic circuit element would be higher or lower than some other circuit. One of the students actually claimed (in two different places in the essay) exact opposite answers!
Given that there was an exact, numerical answer to the question, this person didn't get a very good score. I would have given a better score for choosing one answer and sticking to it. Unfortunately, he/she (I can't remember which) probably passed the course and is out there somewhere teaching students.
"The more the idea takes hold in my mind, the easier it is to see examples of what cowardly bullies Americans are."
The more of this I see, the easier it is to realize what bigoted morons slashdotters are. (And if you disagree with me, mod this dude down and prove me wrong! How many comments from here against this fiasco do you think are from Americans?)
How about they haven't added support for your provider just yet, and will presumably get around to it when it makes sense for them, monetarily, to do so?
I really doubt, especially based on the other responses here, that they are targeting "States Only."
If you look at the Fox News sight, the article is no longer listed under the opinions. I can't find it using Google, either. Either its the Slashdot effect, or else Fox News decided it had made a mistake publishing such a piece of garbage.
Funnily enough, the real problem wasn't that Christianity rejected the idea that the Earth was round (it didn't; read Dante's inferno, written in the 13 and 14th centuries by a believing Christian for evidence) but rather that Christianity absorbed the entire Greek system (the closest thing they had to science), warts and all. They did not get their cosmology from the Bible, which has very little explicitely on the subject, and what is in the Bible was even then typically interpreted as symbolic and not used for a real world-view.
This makes the rejection of Galileo more interesting because we have a religious group rejecting a world-view inconsistent with Greek (meaning, for earlier Christians, pagan) philosophy but which could be reconciled with their own scripture. I'm not a historian, so I'll not speculate as to why it's so, but somehow I have a feeling the parent post is being a tad bit simplistic.
No. They're variables that are always passed by reference rather than passed by value. That may be the same thing to you, but to neophytes, its a whole different idea.
As it stands in the most recent Fortran standard, it actually is possible to create real pointers, etc. However they are much more limited, fairly recent and not part of the base libraries. Which is a good thing for its intended purposes.
From my perspective (as someone who has used both Fortran and C for numerical computing) the biggest thing missing from C is native support for complex numbers. (Don't tell me *anything* about the complex types in C++. They're really inneficient compared to native types, especially if you're executing the same loop 1000000 times.) The second thing needed is native, optimised support for common scientific functions, such as exponentiation and sin(), cos(), etc. If these could be added, then C would be comparable to Fortran in the computing arena.
Agreed! It seems to me that nowadays, separation of church and state is morphing into the rather impractical philosophy of having the state ignore religion-which is highly unlikely in many places, given that politicians have to be elected by more than half the voters. In places where religion is important to people, it will leak into policy no matter what you do. The question is more a matter of how to keep minorities out of real trouble.
P.S. I rather think the law is impractical and unnecessary. It's politicians posturing, as usual.
The above post should never have been modded insightful. The issues are a lot less clear-cut than he described, and unsurprisingly, what is discussed is the worst possible description.
What happened is that Salt Lake City sold a part of Main Street to the Mormon church. As far as I know, a city selling property to a private institution is perfectly legal. Thus the main street plaza is now *private property* and the restrictions on free speech are the same restriction you can impose on anyone who you invite into your house, i.e. you can ask them to leave for any reason at any time.
The problem popped up when the city tried to maintain an easement on the property, allowing the general public access to the property 24/7/365/indefinitely. (I think there are contraints on when private property can be open, or how long, or something.) The UCLA sued, saying that if the public was to be given any government-sanctioned access at all, they should have all rights they have on city-owned property (which have never been questioned in the entire process, I might add!) The Denver circuit court agreed, so the Mormon church again *sold* the easement back to the city, making the plaza exclusively *private property*.
Now I might add that there is another lawsuit coming up, claiming that the whole deal was unconstitutional (separation of church and state). I'm not sure what its current status is, but I doubt in practice it will change anything.
Referring to this issue as religion against rights is unfair. It is rights against rights: Once the Mormon church owns the property, what rights to they have in regard to behavior? Does the city have the right to deal with the Church, to sell it property? Civil rights on public property have been completely untouched by the brou-haha, which means that there will still be people yelling obscenities, screaming, holding offensive posters (they're offensive to me!), passing out flyers and so forth at the next church-wide meeting. That hasn't changed.
I'm not going to defend the idea of keeping the ten commandments on governement property. I will just note that fifty years ago, the issue wouldn't have come up. It was considered constitutional after almost 200 years of the constitution. The vast majority of people who would have discussed the issue would have come to exactly opposite the conclusion that you state. This doesn't make it right. It just means that if people oppose you on an issue, it may not be quite as obvious as you think. Despite what people seem to think, the constitution has changed drastically in recent years, by virtue of interpretation rather than wording. Much that is now unconstitutional was commonplace.
The encryption technology is based on science that was developed very early in quantum theory, namely the uncertainty principle. Basically this says that there are some features of a system you cannot simultaneously know-if you measure one, the other is uncertain, and if you then measure the other, the original quantity has been scrambled. The fact that this is true can and has been measured experimentally. Repeated measurements have been made on a simple, uncoupled system, and the results of traditional quantum mechanics have been verified in great detail. More complicated theories have been based off of these assumptions, which predict such things as the behavior of electrons in computer chips, and most of these theories match reality better than anything anyone has come up with.
One could possibly argue that quantum mechanics always gives the correct answer, but there must be more information hidden away somewhere that we just can't get at. Unfortunately, it is not difficult to prove that any hidden values will produce some experimental results different from quantem theories, and all the experiments have indicated that quantum theory is the correct one. (This results from Bell's inequality, an idea which has spawned more philosophy about physics than any other idea I've seen.) So modern scientists have good reason to think quantum theory, at least the part used for encryption, is excellent for these uses.
Before you start bashing quantum theory, remember that physicists, especially experimental physicists, don't really want to make the world more complicated than they have to. They've accepted quantum theory because it's better than anything anyone has has come up with.
It's not groupthink to think that fusion produces radiation in large doses. One of the main ways of detecting fusion at rooms temperatures is to detect the almost inevitable neutron emmisions. The whole reason that fusion reactions can occur is because the system ends up with lower energy after the reaction than it had before. The excess energy has to go somewhere, and it typically ends up partly as heat in the system and partly as kinetic energy in an emmited particle--radiation. And a particle has to be emitted to conserve momentum. And radiation, in large enough doses, is deadly-very deadly. I would have to be a fool indeed to think that just because its radiation also means its safe, especially because it isn't.
However, I am not afraid of nuclear resonance imaging, for instance (also known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging). I know how it works, and I know it isn't dangerous-radio waves just interact with the nucleus, but there is no ionizing radiation. Perfectly safe. I'm quite smart enough to judge each instance on its own merits.
As for the cold fusion bit, I think something is happening in the cells. But it probably isn't just fusion.
"though Antonella de Ninno and colleagues from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies Energy and the Environment, in Rome, have found strong evidence of helium generation when the palladium cells are producing excess heat but not otherwise."
FYI, I did read the article first, and I wasn't impressed. A single result, which isn't conclusive, isn't enough to make me change my mind about helium being created. Until someone else duplicates the measurement consistently, this is one more measurement, and not a definitive one.
I actually have no problems accepting that something is generating heat, or that there could be some low-level background fusion taking place. In my opinion, both of those observations have been reproduced. Steve Jones, at BYU (my undergrad institution), has worked on muon-induced fusion. The main beef with their results is the amount of energy they claimed was being produced by fusion reactions, not that some fusion reactions are occuring.
The argument about the radiation poisoning is not a straw man, it is good science. The amount of heat being produced from fusion reactions would be proportional to the amount of radiation being produced by those same reactions. It would not be difficult to figure out an order-of-magnitude estimate for how much radiation a person, or the equipment, would be exposed to in the case of a specific amound of heat gain. I am not an expert in this area, and I suspect you are not either, but there are people who know about these things, simply so they can live with their experiments. I am basing this statement off of personal statements made by Ross Spencer at BYU, who has a PhD in physics and specializes in plasma physics.
Just to finish, I believe that something is going on there, and I also believe that it should be studied. That is not the same as saying it is fusion.
Something there is producing some serious heat. Nobody ever denied that. But if it were fusion that were doing it, the researchers would be dead from radiation poisoning. I think that the phenomenon needs research, but I wouldn't hold my breath as to actually getting fusion out. There could still be a chemical basis for the energy.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that there was an exact, numerical answer to the question, this person didn't get a very good score. I would have given a better score for choosing one answer and sticking to it. Unfortunately, he/she (I can't remember which) probably passed the course and is out there somewhere teaching students.
Heaven help our schools.
Shouldn't we just tack this on to the huge list of other things people used to justify slavery? Why is this excuse special?
"The more the idea takes hold in my mind, the easier it is to see examples of what cowardly bullies Americans are." The more of this I see, the easier it is to realize what bigoted morons slashdotters are. (And if you disagree with me, mod this dude down and prove me wrong! How many comments from here against this fiasco do you think are from Americans?)
How about they haven't added support for your provider just yet, and will presumably get around to it when it makes sense for them, monetarily, to do so? I really doubt, especially based on the other responses here, that they are targeting "States Only."
OK, I'll bite. What are the symptoms of being held back? Can you give any examples where being sloppy about causation has hindered a field?
If you look at the Fox News sight, the article is no longer listed under the opinions. I can't find it using Google, either. Either its the Slashdot effect, or else Fox News decided it had made a mistake publishing such a piece of garbage.
Funnily enough, the real problem wasn't that Christianity rejected the idea that the Earth was round (it didn't; read Dante's inferno, written in the 13 and 14th centuries by a believing Christian for evidence) but rather that Christianity absorbed the entire Greek system (the closest thing they had to science), warts and all. They did not get their cosmology from the Bible, which has very little explicitely on the subject, and what is in the Bible was even then typically interpreted as symbolic and not used for a real world-view. This makes the rejection of Galileo more interesting because we have a religious group rejecting a world-view inconsistent with Greek (meaning, for earlier Christians, pagan) philosophy but which could be reconciled with their own scripture. I'm not a historian, so I'll not speculate as to why it's so, but somehow I have a feeling the parent post is being a tad bit simplistic.
The American church? No such beast. The conflicting relgions tend to cover all the bases on social and religious debates.
No. They're variables that are always passed by reference rather than passed by value. That may be the same thing to you, but to neophytes, its a whole different idea. As it stands in the most recent Fortran standard, it actually is possible to create real pointers, etc. However they are much more limited, fairly recent and not part of the base libraries. Which is a good thing for its intended purposes. From my perspective (as someone who has used both Fortran and C for numerical computing) the biggest thing missing from C is native support for complex numbers. (Don't tell me *anything* about the complex types in C++. They're really inneficient compared to native types, especially if you're executing the same loop 1000000 times.) The second thing needed is native, optimised support for common scientific functions, such as exponentiation and sin(), cos(), etc. If these could be added, then C would be comparable to Fortran in the computing arena.
Agreed! It seems to me that nowadays, separation of church and state is morphing into the rather impractical philosophy of having the state ignore religion-which is highly unlikely in many places, given that politicians have to be elected by more than half the voters. In places where religion is important to people, it will leak into policy no matter what you do. The question is more a matter of how to keep minorities out of real trouble. P.S. I rather think the law is impractical and unnecessary. It's politicians posturing, as usual.
Define seperation of church and state. Then we can talk.
The above post should never have been modded insightful. The issues are a lot less clear-cut than he described, and unsurprisingly, what is discussed is the worst possible description.
What happened is that Salt Lake City sold a part of Main Street to the Mormon church. As far as I know, a city selling property to a private institution is perfectly legal. Thus the main street plaza is now *private property* and the restrictions on free speech are the same restriction you can impose on anyone who you invite into your house, i.e. you can ask them to leave for any reason at any time.
The problem popped up when the city tried to maintain an easement on the property, allowing the general public access to the property 24/7/365/indefinitely. (I think there are contraints on when private property can be open, or how long, or something.) The UCLA sued, saying that if the public was to be given any government-sanctioned access at all, they should have all rights they have on city-owned property (which have never been questioned in the entire process, I might add!) The Denver circuit court agreed, so the Mormon church again *sold* the easement back to the city, making the plaza exclusively *private property*.
Now I might add that there is another lawsuit coming up, claiming that the whole deal was unconstitutional (separation of church and state). I'm not sure what its current status is, but I doubt in practice it will change anything.
Referring to this issue as religion against rights is unfair. It is rights against rights: Once the Mormon church owns the property, what rights to they have in regard to behavior? Does the city have the right to deal with the Church, to sell it property? Civil rights on public property have been completely untouched by the brou-haha, which means that there will still be people yelling obscenities, screaming, holding offensive posters (they're offensive to me!), passing out flyers and so forth at the next church-wide meeting. That hasn't changed.
I'm not going to defend the idea of keeping the ten commandments on governement property. I will just note that fifty years ago, the issue wouldn't have come up. It was considered constitutional after almost 200 years of the constitution. The vast majority of people who would have discussed the issue would have come to exactly opposite the conclusion that you state. This doesn't make it right. It just means that if people oppose you on an issue, it may not be quite as obvious as you think. Despite what people seem to think, the constitution has changed drastically in recent years, by virtue of interpretation rather than wording. Much that is now unconstitutional was commonplace.
The encryption technology is based on science that was developed very early in quantum theory, namely the uncertainty principle. Basically this says that there are some features of a system you cannot simultaneously know-if you measure one, the other is uncertain, and if you then measure the other, the original quantity has been scrambled. The fact that this is true can and has been measured experimentally. Repeated measurements have been made on a simple, uncoupled system, and the results of traditional quantum mechanics have been verified in great detail. More complicated theories have been based off of these assumptions, which predict such things as the behavior of electrons in computer chips, and most of these theories match reality better than anything anyone has come up with.
One could possibly argue that quantum mechanics always gives the correct answer, but there must be more information hidden away somewhere that we just can't get at. Unfortunately, it is not difficult to prove that any hidden values will produce some experimental results different from quantem theories, and all the experiments have indicated that quantum theory is the correct one. (This results from Bell's inequality, an idea which has spawned more philosophy about physics than any other idea I've seen.) So modern scientists have good reason to think quantum theory, at least the part used for encryption, is excellent for these uses.
Before you start bashing quantum theory, remember that physicists, especially experimental physicists, don't really want to make the world more complicated than they have to. They've accepted quantum theory because it's better than anything anyone has has come up with.
It's not groupthink to think that fusion produces radiation in large doses. One of the main ways of detecting fusion at rooms temperatures is to detect the almost inevitable neutron emmisions. The whole reason that fusion reactions can occur is because the system ends up with lower energy after the reaction than it had before. The excess energy has to go somewhere, and it typically ends up partly as heat in the system and partly as kinetic energy in an emmited particle--radiation. And a particle has to be emitted to conserve momentum. And radiation, in large enough doses, is deadly-very deadly. I would have to be a fool indeed to think that just because its radiation also means its safe, especially because it isn't. However, I am not afraid of nuclear resonance imaging, for instance (also known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging). I know how it works, and I know it isn't dangerous-radio waves just interact with the nucleus, but there is no ionizing radiation. Perfectly safe. I'm quite smart enough to judge each instance on its own merits. As for the cold fusion bit, I think something is happening in the cells. But it probably isn't just fusion.
"though Antonella de Ninno and colleagues from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies Energy and the Environment, in Rome, have found strong evidence of helium generation when the palladium cells are producing excess heat but not otherwise."
FYI, I did read the article first, and I wasn't impressed. A single result, which isn't conclusive, isn't enough to make me change my mind about helium being created. Until someone else duplicates the measurement consistently, this is one more measurement, and not a definitive one.
I actually have no problems accepting that something is generating heat, or that there could be some low-level background fusion taking place. In my opinion, both of those observations have been reproduced. Steve Jones, at BYU (my undergrad institution), has worked on muon-induced fusion. The main beef with their results is the amount of energy they claimed was being produced by fusion reactions, not that some fusion reactions are occuring.
The argument about the radiation poisoning is not a straw man, it is good science. The amount of heat being produced from fusion reactions would be proportional to the amount of radiation being produced by those same reactions. It would not be difficult to figure out an order-of-magnitude estimate for how much radiation a person, or the equipment, would be exposed to in the case of a specific amound of heat gain. I am not an expert in this area, and I suspect you are not either, but there are people who know about these things, simply so they can live with their experiments. I am basing this statement off of personal statements made by Ross Spencer at BYU, who has a PhD in physics and specializes in plasma physics.
Just to finish, I believe that something is going on there, and I also believe that it should be studied. That is not the same as saying it is fusion.
Something there is producing some serious heat. Nobody ever denied that. But if it were fusion that were doing it, the researchers would be dead from radiation poisoning. I think that the phenomenon needs research, but I wouldn't hold my breath as to actually getting fusion out. There could still be a chemical basis for the energy.