sorry, stupid HMTL formatting lost the paragraphs there... why oh why can't slashdot it it's geekful wisdom implement a double-enter = new paragraph option?
Many are in this (like me) not for wildlife, or for natural beauty, but simply because they want to have an environment which supports their form of life as "fond of breathing". I don't care about over-fishing for the sake of fish, I care about it because I or my descendents may not have any food left to eat. I don't care about drilling for oil because it despoils the countryside, I care about burning the oil causing climate change and eventually buggering up the gulf stream so food is scarce, or making holes in the ozone layer so that I die of cancer. I don't want people driving hummers because I like to breathe. Yes it's selfish, of course it is. But I think this is how we need to talk about it - it will affect us not just in terms of dying natural beauty, or fewer species of animals, or forests going away.
The issues that will mean that there is less food, clean water, breathable air and even land to live on, are where we need to fight these battles, because ultimately that's what matters to people. Maybe if we do that we can win the environmental battles that really matter. Yes, it's sad about natural beauty, animals etc etc, but we have to prioritise, and ensure we win the really important ones. The metric we should use on evaluation is one of human benefit vs human costs, because to most people that's what matters.
Oh, and for the record: I approve of covering hills with wind turbines, even if it kills birds or "looks ugly" if it will mean we burn less fossil fuels and produce more energy. I approve of building nuclear power plants if we get a significant amount more energy out than we put in to build the place, and you can show that the chance of meltdown is very low. I know that this won't win me friends amongst the animal lovers or people who want to preserve natural beauty, but I think that we really need to look at what is the most important thing to us, and to me that's ensuring my survival and that of my family.
Ugh, 5 minutes of interesting concept, an hour and a half of boring movie, and a "plot twist" that you had to be blind not to see coming...I think Asimov and Clarke have short stories that are at least similar and more interesting.
I'd agree if with this if speed cameras were used in places where people drive dangerously fast - outside schools, city centres, built up areas etc. But in my experience, they're on motorways, dual carriageways, where their safety impact appears to be far less of a concern than their money making. Same in the US - how often do you see someone pulled over for speeing on the interstate compared to in a more populous area? In the US, the 55mph limit is often ridiculous, so the speed traps become a tax - they make a law no-one obeys then selectively enforce it for money. Is 55mph in broad daylight on a well maintained, 99% empty, 2 lane wide road really that dangerous? It's actually something that makes me smile when I think of americans - you can't take their guns away because it's a freedom, and yet people get shot every year. But there don't seem to be any riots about the limits on how fast they can drive on a highway...
So in theory, yes, I think that speed cameras/radar could have a place, but it would need to be used in places where it would prevent the most accidents, not raise the most money. Until that happens, I'll continue to think of it as a revenue earner.
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 1
Once again, just pointing out that it seemed amusing to me. In a classical dead-tree encyclopedia etc you would expect Goethe to get a longer article that's all there was to it. Of course, you can get hissy and call it stupid if you like, I'm sorry if I inadvertently insulted your favourite TV show or something, I was just making a comparison which would seem make sense in the context of an older encyclopedia - if that were all you'd used you would find it amusing too.
Wouldn't quite put it like that, but yeah. I didn't say "Don't cover X", just pointed out covering Stargate more than Goethe. Personally I find that amusing, that's all.
I'm sorry, I don't want to upset too many wiki-ites, but it really didn't blow away Britannica. It had the same number of errors per article with shorter articles. Of course, this is a very crude metric - the significance of these errors is also important, but probably un-quantifiable.
Wikipedia is still troll ridden and error prone, and I think even the greatest fans will admit this. You only need think of the Stephen Colbert/Elephant thing to see how abused it can be. There is more information on Stargate Atlantis than Goethe. Whilst some people may consider wikipedia a useful tool, making statements like this just fuel its detractors.
This is actually answered by Wittgenstein (amongst others) - it's actually not that complicated. You just associate a word with an input into your mind (the sky is blue). Now, all human eyes work the same way, so if you swapped George and Fred's eyes, they would see the same things. Likewise with visual cortices.
However, inside the mind, you're actually into linguistics - what is perception of "blue" other than seeing something that is blue? Well, "blue" is just a word, I could call blue "bleu" and green "vert" being perverse (or French, if you please). Do the French see different colours to us? Well, that would seem silly, so the logical recourse is that the name of the word is but a name. All we can know of the mind of someone else (barring psychic powers, and other science fictions) is the response that is given by a person - they tell you that they see blue, or a certain (set of) neuron(s) fires.
Similar things have been done with birdsong - do all birds hear song the same way. Well, so far as it is ever going to be possible to know (above assumptions about psychic powers made), yes. They have the same reaction.
Now, I know that this may not be satisfactory, but for those who know a little mathematics, you could call them identical up to isomorphism - if you give two things a complete set of inputs and they output the exact same thing as one another for each, you call them isomorphic (or identical). In that case human brains are identical.
No, it's not. See http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm - McDonalds held a policy of keeping coffee at 185 degrees, when they knew that temperature is enough to cause serious injury. The judge called McDonalds conduct reckless, callous and willful, and in fact consuming the coffee at 185 would cause injury to the throat.
If someone is handing out food (particularly fast food - intended to be eaten/drunk immediately) in such a condition that it causes harm once consumed, I think they're in the wrong. And now McDonalds serves coffee at 158 degrees. Lawsuit served its purpose - after 700 people complaining, 1 lawsuit took them to the cleaners and there's no problem anymore.
Nonsense. Filtering is not wrong - it is a stopgap. Sure, it doesn't help my ISP much, but it saves me time. Yes the bandwidth is taken up, but my time isn't. And for a few dollars a month I can upgrade my bandwidth, and hell, even buy a new processor every year or two, but my time is more valuable than that.
I agree that it would be very nice to stop spam altogether, or at least stop it before it gets near to my mail server, but so far as I'm concerned, filtering has changed spam from being a 15 minute annoyance each working day to a bandwidth hit that I barely notice.
I can't fault your technical knowledge, I'm not that good, but in so far as my workplace is concerned, filters do an adequate job.
It's funny that you mention "real" things, and then talk about electrons. The electron as a particle is really just a modeling tool. We can't see it, in quantum mechanics it's fairly non-localized as a wavefunction, etc etc. Not that I believe in strings either, but I digress. Gravity, also - we use flux laws to derive the coulomb force for gravity - why? Because at some level we're modeling it with the idea of a graviton or some similar particle. I hate to burst your bubble here, but really, all of physics is just a modeling tool.
Erm, you ever think they might be targeting it because it's ABOUT to become popular? Couple Window's track record of massive uptake to Windows' track record of poor security on initial releases and I think you're onto a winner. Vista looks likely to become BIG because masses of people will want the new version of Windows because they think new=better. For undefined metrics of better.
Think about it like this - if there's a new series of American Idol coming out, people will pay a lot of money to advertise during its timeslot. Sure, there aren't any viewers yet, but given its track record, you can bet there will be a few million watching come the first few shows.
Why is there symmetry breaking in the electro-weak interaction? Does the Higgs particle actually exist? If the Higgs exists (which a lot of high energy folk seem to believe) does its mass bear any resemblance to supersymmetry theories? Can we find evidence of dark matter?
Now, I know that some people think these questions can't be answered by the LHC, but it's possible that some of them can. I'm not a HEP guy, in fact I'd quite like their funding to be used elsewhere too, but I do think that there are some valid issues they'd like to look at, and who knows, maybe they'll find something new entirely...
Everyone's complaining about Paris Hilton, Lisa Simpson, etc. Let's compile our own top 10 list.
My votes (in no particular order):
Sophie Germain - Mathematician (Number theory, prime numbers) Emmy(?) Noether - Mathematician/Physicist (Conservation laws from symmetries, algebras) Marie Curie - Physicist - Discovered radioactivity. Hypatia of Alexander - Astronomer (Inverntor of astrolabe, supposedly) Valentina Tereshkova - First woman in space Rosalind Franklin - Chemist (DNA structure, Coal/Graphite) Barbara McClintock - Biologist (Chromosomes, work on Maize) Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Physicist (Atomic structure, nucleon numbers) Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Astronomer (Discovered pulsars) Gertrude Elion - Biologist (Treatments for leukemia, malaria, herpes, work on organ transplants)
Mainly names off the top of my head, anyone got some good ones that I missed?
PS: I'm talking REAL women here, noted for their SCIENTIFIC contributions...
"A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough."
No, it isn't. You defraud my ATM you can steal my money, but the bank will reimburse me, and overall there's not much harm done. You steal my vote, you can do a lot worse things to me than take my money away.
It's the parents. Not for letting him play GTA, oh no, but for calling him Cody. Cody Posey. How was that kid EVER going to get through school without being seriously messed up? Clearly a lack parental responsibility.
Wow, someone actually said "Etcetera" as an excuse? I want to meet this person! Think about it - we now know the ultimate blow-off excuse for ANYTHING:
"Why didn't you go to my wedding?" "Etcetera". "Grandma's Birthday?" "Etcetera". Fantastic.
And then a lot of the nazi scientists came to avoid the Russians or trials for war crimes etc. Both the USSR and the USA got a lot of these scientists to work for them after the war sometimes in exchange for not asking questions about how their research had been focused before...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know, thing is I previewed, added stuff then hit submit, stupid me...
sorry, stupid HMTL formatting lost the paragraphs there... why oh why can't slashdot it it's geekful wisdom implement a double-enter = new paragraph option?
Many are in this (like me) not for wildlife, or for natural beauty, but simply because they want to have an environment which supports their form of life as "fond of breathing". I don't care about over-fishing for the sake of fish, I care about it because I or my descendents may not have any food left to eat. I don't care about drilling for oil because it despoils the countryside, I care about burning the oil causing climate change and eventually buggering up the gulf stream so food is scarce, or making holes in the ozone layer so that I die of cancer. I don't want people driving hummers because I like to breathe. Yes it's selfish, of course it is. But I think this is how we need to talk about it - it will affect us not just in terms of dying natural beauty, or fewer species of animals, or forests going away. The issues that will mean that there is less food, clean water, breathable air and even land to live on, are where we need to fight these battles, because ultimately that's what matters to people. Maybe if we do that we can win the environmental battles that really matter. Yes, it's sad about natural beauty, animals etc etc, but we have to prioritise, and ensure we win the really important ones. The metric we should use on evaluation is one of human benefit vs human costs, because to most people that's what matters. Oh, and for the record: I approve of covering hills with wind turbines, even if it kills birds or "looks ugly" if it will mean we burn less fossil fuels and produce more energy. I approve of building nuclear power plants if we get a significant amount more energy out than we put in to build the place, and you can show that the chance of meltdown is very low. I know that this won't win me friends amongst the animal lovers or people who want to preserve natural beauty, but I think that we really need to look at what is the most important thing to us, and to me that's ensuring my survival and that of my family.
Ugh, 5 minutes of interesting concept, an hour and a half of boring movie, and a "plot twist" that you had to be blind not to see coming...I think Asimov and Clarke have short stories that are at least similar and more interesting.
I'd agree if with this if speed cameras were used in places where people drive dangerously fast - outside schools, city centres, built up areas etc. But in my experience, they're on motorways, dual carriageways, where their safety impact appears to be far less of a concern than their money making. Same in the US - how often do you see someone pulled over for speeing on the interstate compared to in a more populous area? In the US, the 55mph limit is often ridiculous, so the speed traps become a tax - they make a law no-one obeys then selectively enforce it for money. Is 55mph in broad daylight on a well maintained, 99% empty, 2 lane wide road really that dangerous? It's actually something that makes me smile when I think of americans - you can't take their guns away because it's a freedom, and yet people get shot every year. But there don't seem to be any riots about the limits on how fast they can drive on a highway...
So in theory, yes, I think that speed cameras/radar could have a place, but it would need to be used in places where it would prevent the most accidents, not raise the most money. Until that happens, I'll continue to think of it as a revenue earner.
I dunno, it still beats verizon...
Once again, just pointing out that it seemed amusing to me. In a classical dead-tree encyclopedia etc you would expect Goethe to get a longer article that's all there was to it. Of course, you can get hissy and call it stupid if you like, I'm sorry if I inadvertently insulted your favourite TV show or something, I was just making a comparison which would seem make sense in the context of an older encyclopedia - if that were all you'd used you would find it amusing too.
Wouldn't quite put it like that, but yeah. I didn't say "Don't cover X", just pointed out covering Stargate more than Goethe. Personally I find that amusing, that's all.
I'm sorry, I don't want to upset too many wiki-ites, but it really didn't blow away Britannica. It had the same number of errors per article with shorter articles. Of course, this is a very crude metric - the significance of these errors is also important, but probably un-quantifiable.
Wikipedia is still troll ridden and error prone, and I think even the greatest fans will admit this. You only need think of the Stephen Colbert/Elephant thing to see how abused it can be. There is more information on Stargate Atlantis than Goethe. Whilst some people may consider wikipedia a useful tool, making statements like this just fuel its detractors.
Excellent. I tried to say the same thing but I think you've got it more succinctly.
This is actually answered by Wittgenstein (amongst others) - it's actually not that complicated. You just associate a word with an input into your mind (the sky is blue). Now, all human eyes work the same way, so if you swapped George and Fred's eyes, they would see the same things. Likewise with visual cortices.
l and various others for the bird references.
However, inside the mind, you're actually into linguistics - what is perception of "blue" other than seeing something that is blue? Well, "blue" is just a word, I could call blue "bleu" and green "vert" being perverse (or French, if you please). Do the French see different colours to us? Well, that would seem silly, so the logical recourse is that the name of the word is but a name. All we can know of the mind of someone else (barring psychic powers, and other science fictions) is the response that is given by a person - they tell you that they see blue, or a certain (set of) neuron(s) fires.
Similar things have been done with birdsong - do all birds hear song the same way. Well, so far as it is ever going to be possible to know (above assumptions about psychic powers made), yes. They have the same reaction.
Now, I know that this may not be satisfactory, but for those who know a little mathematics, you could call them identical up to isomorphism - if you give two things a complete set of inputs and they output the exact same thing as one another for each, you call them isomorphic (or identical). In that case human brains are identical.
See: http://acp.eugraph.com/news/news03/margoliash.htm
No, it's not. See http://www.lectlaw.com/files/cur78.htm - McDonalds held a policy of keeping coffee at 185 degrees, when they knew that temperature is enough to cause serious injury. The judge called McDonalds conduct reckless, callous and willful, and in fact consuming the coffee at 185 would cause injury to the throat. If someone is handing out food (particularly fast food - intended to be eaten/drunk immediately) in such a condition that it causes harm once consumed, I think they're in the wrong. And now McDonalds serves coffee at 158 degrees. Lawsuit served its purpose - after 700 people complaining, 1 lawsuit took them to the cleaners and there's no problem anymore.
I agree that it would be very nice to stop spam altogether, or at least stop it before it gets near to my mail server, but so far as I'm concerned, filtering has changed spam from being a 15 minute annoyance each working day to a bandwidth hit that I barely notice.
I can't fault your technical knowledge, I'm not that good, but in so far as my workplace is concerned, filters do an adequate job.
It's funny that you mention "real" things, and then talk about electrons. The electron as a particle is really just a modeling tool. We can't see it, in quantum mechanics it's fairly non-localized as a wavefunction, etc etc. Not that I believe in strings either, but I digress. Gravity, also - we use flux laws to derive the coulomb force for gravity - why? Because at some level we're modeling it with the idea of a graviton or some similar particle. I hate to burst your bubble here, but really, all of physics is just a modeling tool.
Indeed you do, for those who have seen them are no longer star wars fans...
Erm, you ever think they might be targeting it because it's ABOUT to become popular? Couple Window's track record of massive uptake to Windows' track record of poor security on initial releases and I think you're onto a winner. Vista looks likely to become BIG because masses of people will want the new version of Windows because they think new=better. For undefined metrics of better. Think about it like this - if there's a new series of American Idol coming out, people will pay a lot of money to advertise during its timeslot. Sure, there aren't any viewers yet, but given its track record, you can bet there will be a few million watching come the first few shows.
Move along... never seemed more relevant.
You mean questions like:
Why is there symmetry breaking in the electro-weak interaction?
Does the Higgs particle actually exist?
If the Higgs exists (which a lot of high energy folk seem to believe) does its mass bear any resemblance to supersymmetry theories?
Can we find evidence of dark matter?
Now, I know that some people think these questions can't be answered by the LHC, but it's possible that some of them can. I'm not a HEP guy, in fact I'd quite like their funding to be used elsewhere too, but I do think that there are some valid issues they'd like to look at, and who knows, maybe they'll find something new entirely...
Everyone's complaining about Paris Hilton, Lisa Simpson, etc. Let's compile our own top 10 list.
My votes (in no particular order):
Sophie Germain - Mathematician (Number theory, prime numbers)
Emmy(?) Noether - Mathematician/Physicist (Conservation laws from symmetries, algebras)
Marie Curie - Physicist - Discovered radioactivity.
Hypatia of Alexander - Astronomer (Inverntor of astrolabe, supposedly)
Valentina Tereshkova - First woman in space
Rosalind Franklin - Chemist (DNA structure, Coal/Graphite)
Barbara McClintock - Biologist (Chromosomes, work on Maize)
Maria Goeppert-Mayer - Physicist (Atomic structure, nucleon numbers)
Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Astronomer (Discovered pulsars)
Gertrude Elion - Biologist (Treatments for leukemia, malaria, herpes, work on organ transplants)
Mainly names off the top of my head, anyone got some good ones that I missed?
PS: I'm talking REAL women here, noted for their SCIENTIFIC contributions...
"A voting machine that is as secure as an ATM is probably good enough." No, it isn't. You defraud my ATM you can steal my money, but the bank will reimburse me, and overall there's not much harm done. You steal my vote, you can do a lot worse things to me than take my money away.
It's the parents. Not for letting him play GTA, oh no, but for calling him Cody. Cody Posey. How was that kid EVER going to get through school without being seriously messed up? Clearly a lack parental responsibility.
Wow, someone actually said "Etcetera" as an excuse? I want to meet this person! Think about it - we now know the ultimate blow-off excuse for ANYTHING: "Why didn't you go to my wedding?" "Etcetera". "Grandma's Birthday?" "Etcetera". Fantastic.
Mushroom, mushroom?
Damn, you'd call your kid "Jumior"? You really won't be a responsible parent, s/he's never gonna make it through high school with a name like that.
And then a lot of the nazi scientists came to avoid the Russians or trials for war crimes etc. Both the USSR and the USA got a lot of these scientists to work for them after the war sometimes in exchange for not asking questions about how their research had been focused before...