Well, I picked Antarctica for that reason (and how it's a relatively unknown area with conditions most similar to other worlds). Quadrupedal or beyond doesn't work for traversing boulders and narrow ledges. Flight doesn't reliably work because of the weather conditions and fast winds. Climbing robots are restricted to far more consistent surfaces, at least the last I checked.
The human body trades raw speed for endurance and versatility. A specialized robot will always work better for what it's designed for, but a human is a far better generalist. Robots can't effectively walk because it's extremely difficult, whereas humans have evolved for it. I'd also imagine a human's path-finding ability exceeds a robot's, despite the variety of sensors put on them. In a few decades, robots may make humans obsolete, but I suspect humans will always be superior in a few regards.
Well, I know humans can still do a few things that robots cannot. Walk for instance. Show me a robot that can scale the mountains in Antarctica, or decide to explore a cave along the way. Furthermore, humans can operate autonomously quite well, which is important at great distances from Earth, or on the far side of the moon. As a corollary of that, while humans can make dumb mistakes, we don't cease working all-together or keep making the same mistakes if confronted with unexpected data.
The ideal scenario is to use a mixture of both manned and unmanned components on the same mission. As our launch capacity improves, sending humans into space should become nearly trivial compared to the overall complexity of the mission.
There may have been cultures that thought that way. They did not survive. Roughly four billion years of evolution has programmed us to use anything and everything as a competitive advantage.
I'm not sure if "benefit" is the right word... Being able to detect neutrinos (and subsequently the sub) might be the end for nuclear powered submarines.
I imagine the laser's carbon footprint is going to be larger than burying the paper in a landfill. Everyone knows the cycle - tree absorbs CO2, gets turned into paper, doesn't get recycled/burned/composted, goes into a landfill, and in a few million years turns into fossil fuel.
The current solution is grossly ineffective and extraordinarily expensive at the same time. It's time to stop beating a dead horse and move on to a solution that's been proven to work.
Where is the proof? Here's the list of actual causes of death in the US (in order, likely only "preventable" but my pocket reference doesn't specify):
Tobacco, Poor diet and exercise, Alcohol, Microbial agents, Toxic agents, Motor vehicle, Firearms, Sexual behavior, Illicit drug use
If you wanted to be technical, alcohol probably contributes to many of the others (especially firearms and MVAs), so it's probably a little underestimated. The striking point is that the legalized drugs are two of the top three causes of death (perhaps all three if you include caffeine, although that's a bit of a stretch). And this is just one component of their overall cost to society.
Thus, as legalization seems ineffective for alcohol and tobacco, I'm curious as to why other substances would be different. I'm libertarian leaning by nature (and thus conflicted over this), but have always had problems with people being "free" to imbibe substances that are well known to rob you of your freedom.
If they keep things up, the gap between the US and Chinese Navies will only widen. Right now, the US has more battle tonnage than the next 13 navies combined, whereas China is still planning to build a blue-water navy. Economically, the US has 43% of the world's military expenditures, $698 billion, whereas China (#2) spends $119 billion, while the UK, France, and Russia each spend ~$60 billion.
I don't think I need to breakdown the fraction spent on Naval power, but I'd imagine it's higher for the US since we don't maintain as large of a land army as China. Plus, China's been trying to reduce costs by buying old Soviet hardware, which is never going to let it surpass the US in naval power. While I agree that the US Navy won't remain the most powerful forever, it will for the foreseeable future and the China of today is no threat to that.
The UK is the only other country even considering building a supercarrier, although France's planned second carrier and China's one or two carriers under construction are close (still about half the displacement of the US supercarriers). The latter should be completed around the same time (2015) as the US's brand new Ford-class supercarrier.
China is a rapidly developing nation, to be sure, but they're not the threat to the US people make them out to be. Here in the states, the military-industrial complex loves to scare people into spending more, so that's one source of that. My guess is that elsewhere, people really want another superpower to rise to keep the US in check, and China's their best hope for that. (IMHO, that's counterproductive wishful thinking as they're making Americans fear for our continuing military supremacy, thus ensuring we spend even more money on it.) For China, I see no real advantage to them building up a large military to threaten the US (e.g. see how that worked for the USSR). Their current relation to the US is mutually beneficial, or perhaps even slanted in their favor, so why would they want to change it?
They don't need to prove anything to not hire you. They're more likely to assume you're lying or that you're non-conformist/anti-social, none of which bode well for your application.
Plus, it's not like explorer.exe is the only shell for Windows. If you don't like Metro, and there's no classic mode, there are several alternative shells to choose from (the single key registry edit hasn't changed). Heck, you can also be a stick in the mud and use no shell at all, the (rather pleasant) method for which hasn't changed (probably) since Windows 95.
He also had problems when his mail client changed the Icon to write e-mails from "Mail" to "Compose".
I'm curious as to where UIs will go, as it seems the latest trend is to not label icons at all. Personally, I think that's stupid since icons typically represent a real-world item, which relies on you figuring out what item is pictured and then which function of the program the designer thinks you should associate with that item. Not being a graphics designer, this is often cumbersome... e.g. WTF does an EKG showing normal sinus rhythm, or worse, ST segment elevation mean in the context of a word processor? Or, slightly more amusingly, if a simple math equation represents something "difficult", does that mean the artist sucks at math?
For example, my aunt called me over Christmas trying to figure out how to use the Kindle Fire e-mail client. Apparently it wasn't obvious that the square was the appropriate area to tap to compose a new e-mail. (I think it was supposed to represent a sheet of paper... an equally useless metaphor IMHO, as I doubt anyone younger than my aunt has recently handwritten a letter.) On the same toolbar was a rectangle (also likely representing a sheet of paper, or a list... it's highly stylized) for the android context menu, which contained other functions.
I realize that words are equally abstract, but at least they're mostly consistent, whereas designers change icons for everything. Plus, words take on new meanings, whereas pencils, floppy disks, or file cabinets are tangible items that are fading in prominence, and have no intrinsic connection to modern electronics. Just try composing a document on your tablet using a pencil and saving it to a floppy disk, just remember to record the support call and post it to the internet.
Linux is certainly getting more bloated, but the last I checked my whole system volume could easily fit into 4 GB of RAM with enough room left over for standard desktop usage. Caching data files is nice, but with an SSD that shouldn't be noticeable, nor does it work if you're unlikely to reopen files. Obviously, different usage patterns have different requirements, but, for me, the only time I hit my RAM limit in any OS is with a memory leak (Firefox -- which happens daily if I let it). Not swapping should improve performance, security, and privacy, and the only "cost" is not being able to run highly inefficient applications (or memory-limited number crunching if that's your job/hobby).
It wouldn't surprise me if there's something akin to a non-disclosure agreement in the settlement offer, thus ensuring nobody should give specifics or post under their primary username. That's also likely the reason the submitter hasn't found much information about the experience.
Living in a city causes a fair bit of damage to one's lungs due to the urban air pollution. I'd love if vehicle exhaust was merely water vapor. Also, I expect a single large, stationary powerplant can have far better pollution controls than thousands of relatively inexpensive and mobile vehicles. Furthermore, a powerplant can be located where its pollution will have the least impact on humans and the natural environment.
Care to cite a disease on which "big pharma" has withheld a cure on for a profit incentive? They're doing pretty good with antibiotics, antivirals, chemotherapy, vaccines, anti-thyroids, and various other medications that cure disease. Many once-fatal diseases are now so easily cured with medication that we hardly even think about them.
Others, such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, or diabetes, have eluded a cure despite huge amounts of research from both the public and private sector. If any of these could be cured with current technology, whichever company developed the cure would be rich overnight, and their competitors (all fiercely vying for market share and cutting into each others profits) would have large swaths of their revenue cut.
Pattern-matching is highly discouraged nowadays (you'd never even have a chance of passing boards). Evidence-based medicine took off a long time ago, and generally involves generating a number of hypotheses and testing them to confirm one of them within the the threshold for treatment. The major differences from typical research are that alpha varies according to the treatment's number needed to harm, beta is much, much smaller for important diagnoses, and you only have a single data source to sample.
As for advancing systemic knowledge, most doctors do some research. It's actually rather unlikely for someone who hasn't done any to even get into medical school. From there, most do more in medical school, and most residency programs require still more. Practicing physicians frequently get case reports published, and a fair percentage stay in academic medicine. All physicians hone their skills, looking for ways to improve current treatment, and I doubt any would pass the opportunity to publish a practice-changing article if they develop a great method for something.
If you still feel that medicine doesn't use a scientific approach (e.g. theories, models, predictions), then I encourage you to read the sample chapter from this book. It's a good introduction to current evidence-based practice, geared toward medical students just starting the clinical years. Given, most physicians don't understand the statistics very well, but neither do most researchers (31% of articles in Nature reveal the author has a poor understanding of the underlying statistics by the way they discuss or present them, and 38% of papers contain an outright error). And, as you point out, doctors have to be adept at other things as well, human interaction foremost, so there's a bit of a "Jack of all Trades" syndrome going on.
Two things make cell phone conversations more annoying that either of your examples. First, we only hear one half of the conversation, so we naturally assume the unanswered interjections and such directed toward us until we consciously realize it's the cell phone user (which makes them far more distracting and annoying). Second, people using cell phones in noisy places tend to shout because they can barely hear the other party, and assume the other party can barely hear them.
So you believe your hunch more than many, many years of very careful and extremely pedantic research.
Not once did I say I believe that. Merely that finding a limitation of one part of the system doesn't rule out emergent properties that exceed said limitation (e.g. the whole is more than the sum of the parts). Keeping the possibility in mind until it has been proven false is not the same as believing it to be true.
I've written software to do that. It is absolutely and completely nothing like that at all.
Ok, I'm not a photographer so I'll take that at face value. The concept I was trying to exemplify was using data from multiple sources to compile a better approximation of reality than any single sample can obtain.
If not, then why do you choose to disbelieve this science?
Setting aside my prior points, science isn't my religion. I try not to jump to conclusions easily, nor eliminate possibilities without a near-mathematical level of proof. Science is about probability, a concept 31% of Nature-published scientists obviously misunderstand (as evidenced in their papers), leading to 38% of such papers containing statistical errors, and (IIRC) 4% of the time this changes the conclusion of the paper (so the author's explanation of why such and such happened is completely wrong). Less high-profile journals probably have even greater error rates. This is in addition to the allowed false-positive rate of 5%, and false-negative rate of 20%, and the countless biases and illogical conclusions generated by the pressure to publish and scientists developing pet theories. And those are only the errors we know about!
Now, I apologize for saying something I expect you to find blasphemous. If it's any consolation, I don't consider myself anti-science. I do believe that it is, by far, the best indicator of objective truth about the physical world we have, despite its fallibility. Plus as I'm just about to finish my fourth post-grad year in a branch of the sciences, I'd hope I have at least some affinity for it!
No one can see X-rays (or infrared, or ultraviolet, or microwaves). It doesn't matter how much a person believes he can. Retinas simply don't have the sensory hardware.
I wouldn't be so sure... $10 IR filter goggles. The human senses do have limits, but they're rather soft and fuzzy. First, there's genetic variation in the exact sensitivity range (e.g. some people can perceive further into the "infrared" spectrum than others, it's a common high school & college lab experiment). Plus, pedantically, everyone can detect IR up to 3,000 nm at least, cooking would be highly impractical otherwise, and Beethoven felt for vibrations so he could continue composing/performing despite his deafness (IOW, our senses overlap, very important for concert goers that like to feel the bass).
Second, and more importantly, the raw signals are integrated by the brain in a semi-predictable pattern (obviously it's a self-teaching neural network, so people process things differently, although there are common trends). An insect has a compound eye with dozens or hundreds of photoreceptor units. Individually, they're not terribly sensitive, but when integrated provide a much clearer picture. It's akin to how photographers can merge multiple overlapping images to create gigapixel-level quality.
Given harmonics, pinna distortion and such, it wouldn't surprise me if hair cells do not impose an absolute limit on hearing, as the article states. OTOH, I doubt that 192 kHz offers any real sound improvement, but I don't think you can argue that with just biology, as there are few, if any, definites in that subject.
200,000+ civilians dead, far worse carnage than Saddam caused for the majority of people.
Of which, only 11,516 were killed by coalition forces (a distastefully large number, to be sure, but that's what happens when combatants hide amongst civilians). It was a powder keg, not an "annihilation" or extermination of civilians by the US.
Use a software firewall on your personal drive, or one of those portable miniature hardware firewalls. It's not like it can record very much into the BIOS. If you're extra paranoid, use something like System Safety Monitor to prevent the "self-healing" process. That-is, if it's more than marketing hype for a difficult-to-uninstall rootkit.
You should listen to everyone and use some critical thinking. An expert should be able to make a very convincing logical argument supported by data. If they cannot, they're probably overspecialized and speaking outside their area of expertise.
If you remain uneducated then I would argue that is a form of stupidity. It's not exactly a difficult thing to acquire between mandatory schooling, public libraries, and the internet. A basic education is absolutely beneficial. And I think it's fair to call someone stupid if they consistently and knowingly chose a detrimental course of action over beneficial ones.
That said, if those conditions do not apply, then it is possible to be uneducated and not stupid. I know such a person. He's a deaf-mute who was never taught any language because his parents kept him out of school. Most people have no such excuse for lacking a basic education. (And even he, with his massive disadvantages, went on to teach himself how to fix or build most any type of machinery, which enables him to earn a living and take care of himself.)
Something lost on most people (hopefully not the NSA) is that there is no such thing as encrypting something twice. If you add two encryption functions together, you have effectively just made one new encryption function that is the sum of the two. (Probably crossproduct or something if someone who understands the math wants to be pedantic.)
Say you encrypt your secret message with a Caesar cipher. That's not very secure, so you do 8 more rounds of Caesar. Now, to crack the encryption they have to break the Caesar cipher nine times right? Oops, what you've actually done is use ROT-1. Better do 43 more rounds of Caesar so it's even more secure!
The point is that your new encryption algorithm that's a combination of, say, GOST and Blowfish, hasn't been studied. It's entirely possible you've made a very weak algorithm (I say quite likely, since making a good encryption algorithm is very hard). This became an issue back when people used DES. You'd think two rounds of DES with two different 56 bit keys would have 112 bits of security. In actuality, it's 57 bits of security. Three rounds of DES is vulnerable to a meet-in-the-middle attack, so Triple-DES is actually DES-encrypt with key one -> DES-decrypt with key two -> DES-encrypt with key three (or key one if you really want 112 bit security and know better than to do Double-DES).
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Well, I picked Antarctica for that reason (and how it's a relatively unknown area with conditions most similar to other worlds). Quadrupedal or beyond doesn't work for traversing boulders and narrow ledges. Flight doesn't reliably work because of the weather conditions and fast winds. Climbing robots are restricted to far more consistent surfaces, at least the last I checked.
The human body trades raw speed for endurance and versatility. A specialized robot will always work better for what it's designed for, but a human is a far better generalist. Robots can't effectively walk because it's extremely difficult, whereas humans have evolved for it. I'd also imagine a human's path-finding ability exceeds a robot's, despite the variety of sensors put on them. In a few decades, robots may make humans obsolete, but I suspect humans will always be superior in a few regards.
Well, I know humans can still do a few things that robots cannot. Walk for instance. Show me a robot that can scale the mountains in Antarctica, or decide to explore a cave along the way. Furthermore, humans can operate autonomously quite well, which is important at great distances from Earth, or on the far side of the moon. As a corollary of that, while humans can make dumb mistakes, we don't cease working all-together or keep making the same mistakes if confronted with unexpected data.
The ideal scenario is to use a mixture of both manned and unmanned components on the same mission. As our launch capacity improves, sending humans into space should become nearly trivial compared to the overall complexity of the mission.
IMHO, scanning coins would be a good way to send the same message, but not risk running afoul of counterfeiting laws.
There may have been cultures that thought that way. They did not survive. Roughly four billion years of evolution has programmed us to use anything and everything as a competitive advantage.
I'm not sure if "benefit" is the right word... Being able to detect neutrinos (and subsequently the sub) might be the end for nuclear powered submarines.
I imagine the laser's carbon footprint is going to be larger than burying the paper in a landfill. Everyone knows the cycle - tree absorbs CO2, gets turned into paper, doesn't get recycled/burned/composted, goes into a landfill, and in a few million years turns into fossil fuel.
The current solution is grossly ineffective and extraordinarily expensive at the same time. It's time to stop beating a dead horse and move on to a solution that's been proven to work.
Where is the proof? Here's the list of actual causes of death in the US (in order, likely only "preventable" but my pocket reference doesn't specify):
Tobacco, Poor diet and exercise, Alcohol, Microbial agents, Toxic agents, Motor vehicle, Firearms, Sexual behavior, Illicit drug use
If you wanted to be technical, alcohol probably contributes to many of the others (especially firearms and MVAs), so it's probably a little underestimated. The striking point is that the legalized drugs are two of the top three causes of death (perhaps all three if you include caffeine, although that's a bit of a stretch). And this is just one component of their overall cost to society.
Thus, as legalization seems ineffective for alcohol and tobacco, I'm curious as to why other substances would be different. I'm libertarian leaning by nature (and thus conflicted over this), but have always had problems with people being "free" to imbibe substances that are well known to rob you of your freedom.
If they keep things up, the gap between the US and Chinese Navies will only widen. Right now, the US has more battle tonnage than the next 13 navies combined, whereas China is still planning to build a blue-water navy. Economically, the US has 43% of the world's military expenditures, $698 billion, whereas China (#2) spends $119 billion, while the UK, France, and Russia each spend ~$60 billion.
I don't think I need to breakdown the fraction spent on Naval power, but I'd imagine it's higher for the US since we don't maintain as large of a land army as China. Plus, China's been trying to reduce costs by buying old Soviet hardware, which is never going to let it surpass the US in naval power. While I agree that the US Navy won't remain the most powerful forever, it will for the foreseeable future and the China of today is no threat to that.
The UK is the only other country even considering building a supercarrier, although France's planned second carrier and China's one or two carriers under construction are close (still about half the displacement of the US supercarriers). The latter should be completed around the same time (2015) as the US's brand new Ford-class supercarrier.
China is a rapidly developing nation, to be sure, but they're not the threat to the US people make them out to be. Here in the states, the military-industrial complex loves to scare people into spending more, so that's one source of that. My guess is that elsewhere, people really want another superpower to rise to keep the US in check, and China's their best hope for that. (IMHO, that's counterproductive wishful thinking as they're making Americans fear for our continuing military supremacy, thus ensuring we spend even more money on it.) For China, I see no real advantage to them building up a large military to threaten the US (e.g. see how that worked for the USSR). Their current relation to the US is mutually beneficial, or perhaps even slanted in their favor, so why would they want to change it?
They don't need to prove anything to not hire you. They're more likely to assume you're lying or that you're non-conformist/anti-social, none of which bode well for your application.
Plus, it's not like explorer.exe is the only shell for Windows. If you don't like Metro, and there's no classic mode, there are several alternative shells to choose from (the single key registry edit hasn't changed). Heck, you can also be a stick in the mud and use no shell at all, the (rather pleasant) method for which hasn't changed (probably) since Windows 95.
He also had problems when his mail client changed the Icon to write e-mails from "Mail" to "Compose".
I'm curious as to where UIs will go, as it seems the latest trend is to not label icons at all. Personally, I think that's stupid since icons typically represent a real-world item, which relies on you figuring out what item is pictured and then which function of the program the designer thinks you should associate with that item. Not being a graphics designer, this is often cumbersome... e.g. WTF does an EKG showing normal sinus rhythm, or worse, ST segment elevation mean in the context of a word processor? Or, slightly more amusingly, if a simple math equation represents something "difficult", does that mean the artist sucks at math?
For example, my aunt called me over Christmas trying to figure out how to use the Kindle Fire e-mail client. Apparently it wasn't obvious that the square was the appropriate area to tap to compose a new e-mail. (I think it was supposed to represent a sheet of paper... an equally useless metaphor IMHO, as I doubt anyone younger than my aunt has recently handwritten a letter.) On the same toolbar was a rectangle (also likely representing a sheet of paper, or a list... it's highly stylized) for the android context menu, which contained other functions.
I realize that words are equally abstract, but at least they're mostly consistent, whereas designers change icons for everything. Plus, words take on new meanings, whereas pencils, floppy disks, or file cabinets are tangible items that are fading in prominence, and have no intrinsic connection to modern electronics. Just try composing a document on your tablet using a pencil and saving it to a floppy disk, just remember to record the support call and post it to the internet.
Linux is certainly getting more bloated, but the last I checked my whole system volume could easily fit into 4 GB of RAM with enough room left over for standard desktop usage. Caching data files is nice, but with an SSD that shouldn't be noticeable, nor does it work if you're unlikely to reopen files. Obviously, different usage patterns have different requirements, but, for me, the only time I hit my RAM limit in any OS is with a memory leak (Firefox -- which happens daily if I let it). Not swapping should improve performance, security, and privacy, and the only "cost" is not being able to run highly inefficient applications (or memory-limited number crunching if that's your job/hobby).
It wouldn't surprise me if there's something akin to a non-disclosure agreement in the settlement offer, thus ensuring nobody should give specifics or post under their primary username. That's also likely the reason the submitter hasn't found much information about the experience.
I really hope I'm never in distress with you as the only bystander...
Living in a city causes a fair bit of damage to one's lungs due to the urban air pollution. I'd love if vehicle exhaust was merely water vapor. Also, I expect a single large, stationary powerplant can have far better pollution controls than thousands of relatively inexpensive and mobile vehicles. Furthermore, a powerplant can be located where its pollution will have the least impact on humans and the natural environment.
Care to cite a disease on which "big pharma" has withheld a cure on for a profit incentive? They're doing pretty good with antibiotics, antivirals, chemotherapy, vaccines, anti-thyroids, and various other medications that cure disease. Many once-fatal diseases are now so easily cured with medication that we hardly even think about them.
Others, such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, or diabetes, have eluded a cure despite huge amounts of research from both the public and private sector. If any of these could be cured with current technology, whichever company developed the cure would be rich overnight, and their competitors (all fiercely vying for market share and cutting into each others profits) would have large swaths of their revenue cut.
Pattern-matching is highly discouraged nowadays (you'd never even have a chance of passing boards). Evidence-based medicine took off a long time ago, and generally involves generating a number of hypotheses and testing them to confirm one of them within the the threshold for treatment. The major differences from typical research are that alpha varies according to the treatment's number needed to harm, beta is much, much smaller for important diagnoses, and you only have a single data source to sample.
As for advancing systemic knowledge, most doctors do some research. It's actually rather unlikely for someone who hasn't done any to even get into medical school. From there, most do more in medical school, and most residency programs require still more. Practicing physicians frequently get case reports published, and a fair percentage stay in academic medicine. All physicians hone their skills, looking for ways to improve current treatment, and I doubt any would pass the opportunity to publish a practice-changing article if they develop a great method for something.
If you still feel that medicine doesn't use a scientific approach (e.g. theories, models, predictions), then I encourage you to read the sample chapter from this book. It's a good introduction to current evidence-based practice, geared toward medical students just starting the clinical years. Given, most physicians don't understand the statistics very well, but neither do most researchers (31% of articles in Nature reveal the author has a poor understanding of the underlying statistics by the way they discuss or present them, and 38% of papers contain an outright error). And, as you point out, doctors have to be adept at other things as well, human interaction foremost, so there's a bit of a "Jack of all Trades" syndrome going on.
Two things make cell phone conversations more annoying that either of your examples. First, we only hear one half of the conversation, so we naturally assume the unanswered interjections and such directed toward us until we consciously realize it's the cell phone user (which makes them far more distracting and annoying). Second, people using cell phones in noisy places tend to shout because they can barely hear the other party, and assume the other party can barely hear them.
So you believe your hunch more than many, many years of very careful and extremely pedantic research.
Not once did I say I believe that. Merely that finding a limitation of one part of the system doesn't rule out emergent properties that exceed said limitation (e.g. the whole is more than the sum of the parts). Keeping the possibility in mind until it has been proven false is not the same as believing it to be true.
I've written software to do that. It is absolutely and completely nothing like that at all.
Ok, I'm not a photographer so I'll take that at face value. The concept I was trying to exemplify was using data from multiple sources to compile a better approximation of reality than any single sample can obtain.
If not, then why do you choose to disbelieve this science?
Setting aside my prior points, science isn't my religion. I try not to jump to conclusions easily, nor eliminate possibilities without a near-mathematical level of proof. Science is about probability, a concept 31% of Nature-published scientists obviously misunderstand (as evidenced in their papers), leading to 38% of such papers containing statistical errors, and (IIRC) 4% of the time this changes the conclusion of the paper (so the author's explanation of why such and such happened is completely wrong). Less high-profile journals probably have even greater error rates. This is in addition to the allowed false-positive rate of 5%, and false-negative rate of 20%, and the countless biases and illogical conclusions generated by the pressure to publish and scientists developing pet theories. And those are only the errors we know about!
Now, I apologize for saying something I expect you to find blasphemous. If it's any consolation, I don't consider myself anti-science. I do believe that it is, by far, the best indicator of objective truth about the physical world we have, despite its fallibility. Plus as I'm just about to finish my fourth post-grad year in a branch of the sciences, I'd hope I have at least some affinity for it!
Of course this is ludicrous.
No one can see X-rays (or infrared, or ultraviolet, or microwaves). It doesn't matter how much a person believes he can. Retinas simply don't have the sensory hardware.
I wouldn't be so sure... $10 IR filter goggles. The human senses do have limits, but they're rather soft and fuzzy. First, there's genetic variation in the exact sensitivity range (e.g. some people can perceive further into the "infrared" spectrum than others, it's a common high school & college lab experiment). Plus, pedantically, everyone can detect IR up to 3,000 nm at least, cooking would be highly impractical otherwise, and Beethoven felt for vibrations so he could continue composing/performing despite his deafness (IOW, our senses overlap, very important for concert goers that like to feel the bass).
Second, and more importantly, the raw signals are integrated by the brain in a semi-predictable pattern (obviously it's a self-teaching neural network, so people process things differently, although there are common trends). An insect has a compound eye with dozens or hundreds of photoreceptor units. Individually, they're not terribly sensitive, but when integrated provide a much clearer picture. It's akin to how photographers can merge multiple overlapping images to create gigapixel-level quality.
Given harmonics, pinna distortion and such, it wouldn't surprise me if hair cells do not impose an absolute limit on hearing, as the article states. OTOH, I doubt that 192 kHz offers any real sound improvement, but I don't think you can argue that with just biology, as there are few, if any, definites in that subject.
200,000+ civilians dead, far worse carnage than Saddam caused for the majority of people.
Of which, only 11,516 were killed by coalition forces (a distastefully large number, to be sure, but that's what happens when combatants hide amongst civilians). It was a powder keg, not an "annihilation" or extermination of civilians by the US.
Use a software firewall on your personal drive, or one of those portable miniature hardware firewalls. It's not like it can record very much into the BIOS. If you're extra paranoid, use something like System Safety Monitor to prevent the "self-healing" process. That-is, if it's more than marketing hype for a difficult-to-uninstall rootkit.
You should listen to everyone and use some critical thinking. An expert should be able to make a very convincing logical argument supported by data. If they cannot, they're probably overspecialized and speaking outside their area of expertise.
If you remain uneducated then I would argue that is a form of stupidity. It's not exactly a difficult thing to acquire between mandatory schooling, public libraries, and the internet. A basic education is absolutely beneficial. And I think it's fair to call someone stupid if they consistently and knowingly chose a detrimental course of action over beneficial ones.
That said, if those conditions do not apply, then it is possible to be uneducated and not stupid. I know such a person. He's a deaf-mute who was never taught any language because his parents kept him out of school. Most people have no such excuse for lacking a basic education. (And even he, with his massive disadvantages, went on to teach himself how to fix or build most any type of machinery, which enables him to earn a living and take care of himself.)
Something lost on most people (hopefully not the NSA) is that there is no such thing as encrypting something twice. If you add two encryption functions together, you have effectively just made one new encryption function that is the sum of the two. (Probably crossproduct or something if someone who understands the math wants to be pedantic.)
Say you encrypt your secret message with a Caesar cipher. That's not very secure, so you do 8 more rounds of Caesar. Now, to crack the encryption they have to break the Caesar cipher nine times right? Oops, what you've actually done is use ROT-1. Better do 43 more rounds of Caesar so it's even more secure!
The point is that your new encryption algorithm that's a combination of, say, GOST and Blowfish, hasn't been studied. It's entirely possible you've made a very weak algorithm (I say quite likely, since making a good encryption algorithm is very hard). This became an issue back when people used DES. You'd think two rounds of DES with two different 56 bit keys would have 112 bits of security. In actuality, it's 57 bits of security. Three rounds of DES is vulnerable to a meet-in-the-middle attack, so Triple-DES is actually DES-encrypt with key one -> DES-decrypt with key two -> DES-encrypt with key three (or key one if you really want 112 bit security and know better than to do Double-DES).