Actually, it could be a sign that the buyers of this stock failed... to see that it was OVERPRICED
Didn't you read the article? It explains what happened to Google's share price: "It was the second time in a week that Google shares - the hottest, most talked about company stock in the world - were plunged unexpectedly into a frigid bath."
Robots fighting eachother is better then men fighting eachother. Sadly, I think it will mostly be bots fighting men, but whatever.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield, or at sea.
They will be fought in space... or possibly on top of a very tall
mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by
small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is
clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
Preparing for some doomsday scenario involving an invasion of giant cloned mice-men is hardly at the top of the list of liberal legislative priorities.
What about legislation legalizing gay marriage for cloned mice-men? Aren't we liberals in favor of that, if only because it would make the Bible Belt go ballistic and make Pat Robertson lose whatever is left of his sanity?
Imagine that two lawyers both write the exact same argument- say, in favor of capital punishment- and both do a solid job. However, one believes passionately in the argument, and the other one doesn't. Who's the better lawyer? Obviously the one who didn't believe what they were writing.
Lawyers are not hired on the basis of their beliefs, they're hired because they will argue whatever you pay them to argue. A good lawyer is capable of arguing that up is actually down, a black cat is really white, and that you really didn't stab your wife and her lover thirty-seven times even though he/she knows you're guilty as sin. If you don't believe in DRM but can argue effectively for it, you're an asset to your company.
I was pretty pissed when Oprah said it didn't matter whether he was telling the truth or not. What is the #1 thing women claim they want in a man? Honesty. But when it turned out that this guy is a liar, a complete fraud, these women were falling all over themselves to defend him, including their self-appointed leader, Oprah herself.
I'm glad she tore into him; he deserved that. Still, why wasn't that her first reaction? What do women really want, then? The cynic in me says that when women complain about finding out that men aren't honest, they're not asking for us to be honest. They're asking us to be better at lying to them, and to create more perfect illusions. So do women want honesty, or do they just want a compelling storyteller- a guy who can tell her she's a princess (when she's not), and that he's Prince Charming (when he's not), and that her ass doesn't look big in those jeans (when it does)?
McDonalds, Burger King, and 20 out of 24 hours behind a computer/console gaming has been VINDICATED!!!
Yes, it's not all the grease and lard in McDonald's food that causes you to become fat. But considering just how fat you'll get after eating there on a regular basis, Big Macs must be positively loaded with this virus...
Well, a Google music service would fit with their mania for diversification: Google Maps, Google News, Google Print, Google Print, Gmail, now radio advertising... what next? Google Malt Liquor? Google Sulfuric Acid? Google Organized Crime?
It's like the managers sit around and get really, really stoned and say, "Man, what can we put the Google name on this time?"
Of course, that wouldn't make me want to work there any less. Quite the contrary.
In Japan, if you want to display your financial superiority, you buy cool electronic toys - ultra-light laptops... In the US, you buy a big car
In short, in the U.S. if you have a small penis you buy big stuff. But in Japan, if you have a small penis you buy really small stuff. I guess it is a little less obvious that you're compensating when you do it that way.
Mexican plants are perfictly able to produce high quality products
I dunno about that. Last time I had anything produced from a Mexican plant, it was a bottle of Señor Borracho's Old Style Blue Agave Tequila, and next thing you know, I wake up in a Tijuana jail wearing nothing but a Mexican stripper's panties on my head. I'm never touching that shit again, man.
The NIH (ahref=http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/evidhiv .htmrel=url2html-6476http://www.niaid.nih.gov/fact sheets/evidhiv.htm>) has a pretty good overview. In short, the "HIV does not cause AIDS" camp sounds pretty flaky. HIV has been isolated and introduced to chimps and shown to cause AIDS in them, for instance.
True, sometimes in science you do have the radicals and visionaries who nobody will listen to, like the continental drift people before seafloor spreading was discovered. On the other hand, you have the dead-enders and lunatic fringe, people who refuse to accept an hypothesis even when confronted with a mountain of evidence. So how do you tell the difference between a minority camp with a legitimate hypothesis, and a minority camp that's completely out to lunch? What I've noticed is that the dead-enders tend to have one thing in common, which is that they have an anti-hypothesis, rather than a hypothesis. They will give you a million reasons why X can't be true, but they can't provide you with a reasonable alternative hypothesis.
For instance, there are still paleontologists who forcefully argue that the Yucatan asteroid/comet impact did not wipe out the dinosaurs... but they can't provide you a decent explanation for what did kill them. There are some ornithologists who refuse to believe that dinosaurs evolved from birds (feathered dinosaur fossils notwithstanding), but they can't tell you what birds did evolve from. Likewise, the Intelligent Design people argue that evolution couldn't cause the diversity of life on earth, but they can't tell you what did. But it's not enough to poke holes in a well-established theory to have it overturned- you've got to provide an alternative that better explains and predicts the facts.
Our understanding of the AIDS epidemic is hardly complete, but without a good alternative hypothesis, these guys sound a lot like lunatic fringe. In general, dissent is healthy, but in this case I think these guys are just spreading dangerous misinformation when millions of lives are on the line.
I'd been pursuing graduate studies for a while and one day, I realized I was miserable and I hated what I was doing. And this struck me as monumentally stupid: why get paid nothing to do work you hate, when there are businesses that will pay you six figures to do work you hate?
So I figured, damn the torpedoes: I'm going to do work I find interesting and enjoyable, or leave academia. After all, what's the worst thing that could happen? I'd end up doing stuff I hated, and have more money.
So I stopped worrying about what I thought other people would find interesting, and started working on problems that fascinated me. These days, I love my work and for the first time I really feel like I have a future in science. The thing is, if you find your work incredibly interesting, others may or may not find it exciting. But if you are an intelligent, curious person and you find your work boring, odds are damn good that other people will find it boring. And as far as I'm concerned, there are too many fascinating problems out there to waste time on the boring ones. These days, I wake up, and run over the dozen or so research projects I'm dabbling on, and say, "What do I want to work on today?", closely followed by, "And how long can I stall on this dissertation thing before my advisor kills me?"
Kuhn's paradigm shifts, perhaps one of the worst uses of technical terms that penetrated '80s business ideology, are more in line with the biological idea of punctuated equilibria applied to intellectualism.
Wrong way 'round: punctuated equilibrium is Kuhn applied to evolutionary biology. Kuhn published _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ in 1962. Eldredge and Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium paper came out ten years later, in 1972.
Honestly, the whole wine tasting industry is mostly snake oil anyway.
I once ran across - in an upscale liquor shop, no less- a brand of wine which was called "Cheap White Wine". My palate isn't sophisticated enough to comment on the wine's body, aroma, etc., but said wine was indeed white, was indeed cheap, and the label was printed on something which resembled a paper bag in both texture and color.
Naturally, I had to buy it. If nothing else, everyone got a laugh out of it, and it was refreshing to see that truth in advertising does exist.
Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state
Abstract
A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.
The author is one Boris Volfson. Is that like a cool-ass name for a mad scientist or what? You can almost picture it: "Yes, Mister Bond, it is I, Dr. Boris Volfson, your old nemesis. Do not attempt to reach for your pistol- yes, I can see it quite clearly as one of my eyes has been replaced with an X-ray sensor. At any rate, it would be futile as my rib cage and cranium are reinforced with titanium plating."
Speaking of the family thing, I grew up in a small town in rural Alaska- about 10,000 people. It would be a great place to raise a family, except for two things. First, I don't have a family. I want one. But almost every girl who had anything going for her got the hell out of town as soon as she graduated high school, and never came back, and few single women move in to replace them. Lots of single guys move in, however. So overall you've got got stiff competition for a very poor selection of women. It's downright depressing to live in a small town as a single man. Alaskan women have a different problem, the saying goes, "The odds are good, but the goods are odd".
Second, what would I do? Small towns offer a limited number of potential jobs, particularly if you're educated and want challenging, interesting work. There are also fewer and fewer jobs, mainly because of technology. Because of better technology like hydraulics, radar, sonar, GPS, sodium lights, refrigeration etc. the fishing boats can now operate more effectively in more weather conditions, any time of day or night, and stay out for longer, and are better at catching fish. That means you need fewer boats and fewer crew to catch the same amount of fish, and fewer jobs in town. Same deal with farming towns: more labor-saving machinery means you just don't need as many farmers. I suspect that's why small towns are drying up: the jobs aren't there to support them.
Suck my dick. Modern day conservatives are nothing more that apologists for tyranny, murder, criminality, and rampant immorality.
You forgot massive deficit spending. And tax cuts for people who have more money than God. And failed foreign policy. And governments trying to tell people how to live their personal lives. And barbecuing cute little puppies.
Well, I don't know about that last one. But if that was the worst thing the neocons were up to, this country would be in a hell of a lot better situation than we are now.
It was David Raup and John Sepkoski who argued for 26-million year periodicity, using a statistical analysis of the fossil record; others argued that this was just a statistical artifact. These days, the idea looks hard to defend. The problem is that periodicity implies a common mechanism for mass extinctions. However, while some extinctions seem to have been caused by comet or asteroid impacts (such as the Triassic mass extinction that gave the dinosaurs their opportunity, and the Cretaceous mass extinction that later did in the dinosaurs), the mother of all mass extinctions, the Permian event, appears to have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions. Which is kind of a pity, because it's an interesting idea.
You laugh, but this guy has written his own book and everything. According to the summary of his book:
Ancient folklore from around the world rings with two resonating themes: History moves in cycles with alternating Golden and Dark Ages, and the slow movement of the stars across the sky, the Precession of the Equinox, is the cause and timekeeper of these cycles. For years we have heard that these are only myths, there was no Golden Age and precession is just a wobbling of the Earth's axis. Now "Lost Star of Myth and Time" shows evidence the Ancients were not just weaving fanciful tales - science is on the verge of an amazing discovery - our Sun has a companion star carrying us through a great cycle of stellar influences. If true, it means the Ancients were right and our views of space and time and the history of civilization will never be the same. More than that, it would mean we are now at the dawn of a new age in human development and world conditions.
And the book gets a rave review from none other than the influential LA Yoga Magazine. You can't argue with a major astrophysical journal like that (http://www.loststarbook.com/). Clearly, this man and his theories demand to be taken seriously. Thank you, Zonk, for continuing to bring us only the finest in science journalism.
More to the point, why is it perfectly legal for me (in this state at least) to bend a 16-year-old girl over the back of a chair and fuck her brains out... but God forbid I take a nude picture of her?
Oh please, your question is purely hypothetical, and has no real bearing on reality. I mean, if you or I had a chance in hell of doing either of those things, would we be posting on/.?
Everybody knows Archimedes Plutonium was the real driving force behind the Pluto mission. It will be the final vindication of his Plutonium Totality Theory, by proving his prediction that Pluto is entirely made of Plutonium.
Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale". They didn't use pills, but the idea was that you could pay to have positive memories implanted. Don't buy the vacation, buy the memory of the trip.
No, we are seeing Google's transition to ALL media.
And in related news, Google has announced its intention to acquire the caves of Lascaux in France, world-famous for their Neolithic cave paintings. Google did not comment when asked about recent bulk purchases of charcoal, red ocher and animal fat.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't you read the article? It explains what happened to Google's share price: "It was the second time in a week that Google shares - the hottest, most talked about company stock in the world - were plunged unexpectedly into a frigid bath."
There was shrinkage involved!
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield, or at sea. They will be fought in space... or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you."
What about legislation legalizing gay marriage for cloned mice-men? Aren't we liberals in favor of that, if only because it would make the Bible Belt go ballistic and make Pat Robertson lose whatever is left of his sanity?
Who said:--Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Lawyers are not hired on the basis of their beliefs, they're hired because they will argue whatever you pay them to argue. A good lawyer is capable of arguing that up is actually down, a black cat is really white, and that you really didn't stab your wife and her lover thirty-seven times even though he/she knows you're guilty as sin. If you don't believe in DRM but can argue effectively for it, you're an asset to your company.
I'm glad she tore into him; he deserved that. Still, why wasn't that her first reaction? What do women really want, then? The cynic in me says that when women complain about finding out that men aren't honest, they're not asking for us to be honest. They're asking us to be better at lying to them, and to create more perfect illusions. So do women want honesty, or do they just want a compelling storyteller- a guy who can tell her she's a princess (when she's not), and that he's Prince Charming (when he's not), and that her ass doesn't look big in those jeans (when it does)?
Yes, it's not all the grease and lard in McDonald's food that causes you to become fat. But considering just how fat you'll get after eating there on a regular basis, Big Macs must be positively loaded with this virus...
It's like the managers sit around and get really, really stoned and say, "Man, what can we put the Google name on this time?"
Of course, that wouldn't make me want to work there any less. Quite the contrary.
In short, in the U.S. if you have a small penis you buy big stuff. But in Japan, if you have a small penis you buy really small stuff. I guess it is a little less obvious that you're compensating when you do it that way.
I dunno about that. Last time I had anything produced from a Mexican plant, it was a bottle of Señor Borracho's Old Style Blue Agave Tequila, and next thing you know, I wake up in a Tijuana jail wearing nothing but a Mexican stripper's panties on my head. I'm never touching that shit again, man.
True, sometimes in science you do have the radicals and visionaries who nobody will listen to, like the continental drift people before seafloor spreading was discovered. On the other hand, you have the dead-enders and lunatic fringe, people who refuse to accept an hypothesis even when confronted with a mountain of evidence. So how do you tell the difference between a minority camp with a legitimate hypothesis, and a minority camp that's completely out to lunch? What I've noticed is that the dead-enders tend to have one thing in common, which is that they have an anti-hypothesis, rather than a hypothesis. They will give you a million reasons why X can't be true, but they can't provide you with a reasonable alternative hypothesis.
For instance, there are still paleontologists who forcefully argue that the Yucatan asteroid/comet impact did not wipe out the dinosaurs... but they can't provide you a decent explanation for what did kill them. There are some ornithologists who refuse to believe that dinosaurs evolved from birds (feathered dinosaur fossils notwithstanding), but they can't tell you what birds did evolve from. Likewise, the Intelligent Design people argue that evolution couldn't cause the diversity of life on earth, but they can't tell you what did. But it's not enough to poke holes in a well-established theory to have it overturned- you've got to provide an alternative that better explains and predicts the facts.
Our understanding of the AIDS epidemic is hardly complete, but without a good alternative hypothesis, these guys sound a lot like lunatic fringe. In general, dissent is healthy, but in this case I think these guys are just spreading dangerous misinformation when millions of lives are on the line.
So I figured, damn the torpedoes: I'm going to do work I find interesting and enjoyable, or leave academia. After all, what's the worst thing that could happen? I'd end up doing stuff I hated, and have more money.
So I stopped worrying about what I thought other people would find interesting, and started working on problems that fascinated me. These days, I love my work and for the first time I really feel like I have a future in science. The thing is, if you find your work incredibly interesting, others may or may not find it exciting. But if you are an intelligent, curious person and you find your work boring, odds are damn good that other people will find it boring. And as far as I'm concerned, there are too many fascinating problems out there to waste time on the boring ones. These days, I wake up, and run over the dozen or so research projects I'm dabbling on, and say, "What do I want to work on today?", closely followed by, "And how long can I stall on this dissertation thing before my advisor kills me?"
Wrong way 'round: punctuated equilibrium is Kuhn applied to evolutionary biology. Kuhn published _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ in 1962. Eldredge and Gould's Punctuated Equilibrium paper came out ten years later, in 1972.
As opposed to what, exactly? What else is cryogenics at this point, if not science fiction desperately hoping to become science fact?
I once ran across - in an upscale liquor shop, no less- a brand of wine which was called "Cheap White Wine". My palate isn't sophisticated enough to comment on the wine's body, aroma, etc., but said wine was indeed white, was indeed cheap, and the label was printed on something which resembled a paper bag in both texture and color.
Naturally, I had to buy it. If nothing else, everyone got a laugh out of it, and it was refreshing to see that truth in advertising does exist.
Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state
Abstract
A space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state is provided comprising a hollow superconductive shield, an inner shield, a power source, a support structure, upper and lower means for generating an electromagnetic field, and a flux modulation controller. A cooled hollow superconductive shield is energized by an electromagnetic field resulting in the quantized vortices of lattice ions projecting a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly outside the space vehicle. The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.
The author is one Boris Volfson. Is that like a cool-ass name for a mad scientist or what? You can almost picture it: "Yes, Mister Bond, it is I, Dr. Boris Volfson, your old nemesis. Do not attempt to reach for your pistol- yes, I can see it quite clearly as one of my eyes has been replaced with an X-ray sensor. At any rate, it would be futile as my rib cage and cranium are reinforced with titanium plating."
Second, what would I do? Small towns offer a limited number of potential jobs, particularly if you're educated and want challenging, interesting work. There are also fewer and fewer jobs, mainly because of technology. Because of better technology like hydraulics, radar, sonar, GPS, sodium lights, refrigeration etc. the fishing boats can now operate more effectively in more weather conditions, any time of day or night, and stay out for longer, and are better at catching fish. That means you need fewer boats and fewer crew to catch the same amount of fish, and fewer jobs in town. Same deal with farming towns: more labor-saving machinery means you just don't need as many farmers. I suspect that's why small towns are drying up: the jobs aren't there to support them.
You forgot massive deficit spending. And tax cuts for people who have more money than God. And failed foreign policy. And governments trying to tell people how to live their personal lives. And barbecuing cute little puppies.
Well, I don't know about that last one. But if that was the worst thing the neocons were up to, this country would be in a hell of a lot better situation than we are now.
It was David Raup and John Sepkoski who argued for 26-million year periodicity, using a statistical analysis of the fossil record; others argued that this was just a statistical artifact. These days, the idea looks hard to defend. The problem is that periodicity implies a common mechanism for mass extinctions. However, while some extinctions seem to have been caused by comet or asteroid impacts (such as the Triassic mass extinction that gave the dinosaurs their opportunity, and the Cretaceous mass extinction that later did in the dinosaurs), the mother of all mass extinctions, the Permian event, appears to have been caused by massive volcanic eruptions. Which is kind of a pity, because it's an interesting idea.
Ancient folklore from around the world rings with two resonating themes: History moves in cycles with alternating Golden and Dark Ages, and the slow movement of the stars across the sky, the Precession of the Equinox, is the cause and timekeeper of these cycles. For years we have heard that these are only myths, there was no Golden Age and precession is just a wobbling of the Earth's axis. Now "Lost Star of Myth and Time" shows evidence the Ancients were not just weaving fanciful tales - science is on the verge of an amazing discovery - our Sun has a companion star carrying us through a great cycle of stellar influences. If true, it means the Ancients were right and our views of space and time and the history of civilization will never be the same. More than that, it would mean we are now at the dawn of a new age in human development and world conditions.
And the book gets a rave review from none other than the influential LA Yoga Magazine. You can't argue with a major astrophysical journal like that (http://www.loststarbook.com/). Clearly, this man and his theories demand to be taken seriously. Thank you, Zonk, for continuing to bring us only the finest in science journalism.
Oh please, your question is purely hypothetical, and has no real bearing on reality. I mean, if you or I had a chance in hell of doing either of those things, would we be posting on /.?
Everybody knows Archimedes Plutonium was the real driving force behind the Pluto mission. It will be the final vindication of his Plutonium Totality Theory, by proving his prediction that Pluto is entirely made of Plutonium.
A pill that wipes out memories of trauma? If only this had been available after "Episode I: Attack of the Clones."
Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale". They didn't use pills, but the idea was that you could pay to have positive memories implanted. Don't buy the vacation, buy the memory of the trip.
And in related news, Google has announced its intention to acquire the caves of Lascaux in France, world-famous for their Neolithic cave paintings. Google did not comment when asked about recent bulk purchases of charcoal, red ocher and animal fat.