Or live in a smaller place that is more affordable. Unless your job is in Beverly Hills most places do have a range of housing prices. I suspect that for most people, the priority has been on owning a "big house with a yard" and that the location of that house relative to commuting options has been at best a secondary consideration. Hey, I'm pretty guilty of that mind-set too, but realistically it is not the only possible choice.
Here is mine before and after I moved and my job moved offices, which happened within 6 months of each other:
Before Drive: 25 minutes Bus: 1 hour with no transfers and a bus that came by every 15 minutes during rush hour
After Drive: 15 minutes Bus: 2.25 hours with two transfers and a bus that comes by every 45 minutes during rush hour. Yes, that is right. Even though I live closer to my office by a little over 50% the bus trip takes over twice as long and requires more transfers.
Someone made a poor choice of either the location of their home, or the location of their work, or both.
It may not necessarily be batteries, but some sort of localized storage may be useful for subway and light rail. The size of the train system's electrical infrastructure needs to be sized to the peak electrical demand, which is greatest when the train is accelerating. Being able to have some storage on the train would allow for regenerative braking. Right now, all the kinetic energy of the train's motion, which is an awful lot, is lost every time the train slows or stops.
I think for pretty much any system running on wired electricity, regenerative braking is used to dump the power back into the grid - at least I've been told that this is done for trolley buses. I would think that if the grid system is able to supply X amount of power for acceleration without difficulty, it should have little difficulty with coping with the excess energy of deceleration.
But the batteries are portable. You could ship them off to China for maintenance. The overhead is fixed infrastructure. It has to be maintained in place by expensive local labour.
Who might spend their income locally and certainly feed into the local tax system. There might be other advantages in maintaining that local fixed infrastructure that offset the possible higher costs.
Another way to do things without the need for a constitutional change is to use something like an interstate compact to have the states agree to use their Electoral College votes to vote for the winner of the popular vote. Looks like almost half the needed Electoral College votes are already set up for this:
I think it is way past time for us (as in every country on Earth) to pass laws that ban any further manufacture of vehicles that lack a mechanical key switch and mandate that any existing vehicles be modified by the manufacturer to comply with that law within six months, or else those vehicles are no longer allowed to be driven on public roads.
If the new technology creates a situation resulting in the death of 100 people per year due to new failure modes, yet also results in a savings of 500 lives per year that would have happened due to failure modes in the old technology shouldn't we favour the new technology?
I'm not saying that this particular instance is comparable, but the fact that we don't hear about these sorts of failures very often leads me to believe that it might not be worth the effort to address it via legislation.
That's a pretty theory, but it makes the bit where god declares that men won't live so long a little hard to explain.
Maybe that was a later edit to try to make sense of things? "What is this crap? Did those guys really live that long? I guess God must have changed things since then, so I'll just insert a verse or two."
Of course those of us here in the elite slashdot club have much more nuanced and sophisticated reasons to choose our smart phones than all those "others", be we iPhone or non-iPhone owners.
unwashed masses (plural only)
(idiomatic) The collective group ("mass") of people who are considered by someone to be somehow uneducated, uninformed, or in some other way unqualified for inclusion in the speaker's elite circles.
Apple has manged to convince the "unwashed masses" that their eco-system and devices are easier to use than the alternatives, and in fact their systems are pretty well thought out and easy to use and their control of the whole eco-system has made interoperability of software and hardware pretty seamless. Non-Apple sellers have the difficult job of convincing most buyers that their possibly better features are more valuable than Apple's "ease of use", even if the "ease of use" of their devices are as good or better than Apple's. The perception of Apple being the one source for hardware, software and content (through the single iTunes channel), as well as info-syncing (iCloud) is comforting to many. The competition has a number of places the consumer might feel they need to go for hardware support (Samsung perhaps), software support (Samsung, Google, and others?), content (Amazon, iTunes, etc), and services (Google and others?). Even if there is one vastly dominant company in each of these areas, they are still going to be perceived as more complicated than getting it all from Apple - even if it is not more complicated.
Tangentially, I think smart phones are approaching the same point that personal computers reached not that long ago - for the vast majority of customers the increased power and features of new devices are insufficient to justify upgrading their current device. When everyone in the world already has a decent smart phone the market for new phones is going to get much smaller.
experiment (since IANAP), I do want to say that there seems to be a troubling trend amongst the best and the brightest in many STEM fields to mistake theory for reality. Theory is great and proceeds under the scientific method from empirical observation, but as we've seen throughout history, new phenomena and corner cases to arise and require theory to be amended.
While it is certainly worthwhile to keep an open mind and question our assumptions, there are a variety of different levels of confidence we have in different ideas. The major conservation laws (linear momentum, energy, angular momentum) are mathematically equivalent (via Noether's theorem) to symmetries of the space. If the laws of motion are independent of position then linear momentum is conserved. If linear momentum is not conserved, than the laws of motion are not independent of position. (similarly for rotation invariance angular momentum conservation and time invariance conservation of energy).
So this goes way beyond understanding of EM theory - if we have a case where momentum is not conserved, that will fundamentally change how we think the universe is put together. In my mind it is much much much more likely that there is error or fraud or psychosis than momentum is not being conserved.
Back to the USA, there are already some interesting private/public delivery programs that promise to keep service costs low, too. As an example, Smartpost is an economical FedEx service that uses the USPS to deliver the last mile. Expect more of this stuff in the future.
That last mile is where the bulk of the delivery expense is. Are you sure those other low cost delivery services aren't basically externalizing their unprofitable business expenses onto, I mean taking advantage of, the Post Office?
"Using the Post Office" can't be "taking advantage of" in that the USPS is selling a service. Using it to deliver things in-town is what every local person is doing. I doubt very much that Smartpost is underpaying for their use of the USPS. Last mile delivery may be where all the expenses are, but the USPS is already paying most of those costs every day anyway, even if not used by Smartpost for example.
Wow! If they're that good, then it makes me wonder why they have to have a government-granted monopoly on letters.
The monopoly position is one of the reasons it works. If you were to cherry pick the easy to deliver stuff by starting a service without universal coverage, you might be able to do it cheaper, but if you want universal delivery, not so much.
Are there any G20 countries without a monopoly postal system?
I suspect that advertising decisions are not as influenced by actual data as we might think, and even those influenced by data, probably much of it is data that does not mean what the advertisers think it means. Listening to podcasts from Freakonomics as well from Terry O'reilly http://terryoreilly.ca/ I get the feeling that advertisement is still very much a "that feels right" type of business, and that evidence based advertisement is still the exception rather than the rule.
Stereotypes do not always exist because of an "overwhelming preponderance of anecdotal evidence", but often because of a few experiences compounded by a lot of repetition and selective memory. It does not take much for an individual to form a negative stereotypical opinion of something - doing so has survival benefits. Being cautious about people from "outside the tribe" makes sense, so any negative traits noticed are easily exaggerated.
But they didn't harass me. I think that it was good and reasonable that they stop and question people who appear to not belong.
There are some (many?) who feel that being stopped and questioned is a form of harassment. They might argue that being of a certain race in a certain area should not be considered "probable cause", and the authorities should not be interfering in any way with anyone without sufficient reason.
Being spotted by cops would mean getting pulled over, being questioned, and my car searched with a fine toothed comb while waiting with hands on hood.
Did they do it because they were power-crazed bastards, or because they know from long experience that white people go into that neighborhood to buy drugs and then bald-faced lie about it?
Why not both? Maybe we could make the system even more efficient by issuing everyone documents showing where they were allowed to go, and if you went somewhere without the proper documents that would be proof that you were up to no good and should be arrested.
The whole point of Randi's challenge is to create actual tests of claimed effects.
Presuming that is actually what's happening, and this isn't yet another example of a confidence man making his fortune by playing on the firmly-held beliefs of a particular group, that's a good challenge. It's just that I'm not 100% convinced Mr. Randi is actually trying to test for these things, and not just using the "debunking of junk science" as a rather lucrative way to become and stay an extremely wealthy man.
I don't know how this would be particularly lucrative. "Hey everyone, I'll give you a million bucks if you can demonstrate some specific claims!" That doesn't seem like a very good way of making much of a profit. Clearly he has some incentives to not make it easy to get the money, but since it isn't his money in the first place, I don't see how it helps him become or stay wealthy. I suppose he could be taking a huge salary from the JREF funded from donations, but it seems like not a great road to riches.
My dad always used to tell us as kids: the man who accuses everyone around him of being a liar, is a man you'll probably never hear the truth from.
That's the beauty of the challenge, he doesn't need to call anyone a liar, he just has to point out when people claiming amazing powers are unable or unwilling to make a clear statement of what those powers actually can do, and then test if they can actually do that.
In this case, it clams he can heat a cup of water to 97degrees Celcius by his hands. That seems like an easy thing to test unambiguously. If true it would be an amazing blow to our understanding of human physiology and basic physics, and would have tremendous value in our search for knowledge in addition to the potential economic benefits that would come with understanding the new science involved.
Then I think "humm, which is more likely, he isn't doing the test because it is 'too much bother' or he isn't doing the test because he knows he is a fraud?" Then I feel fine to ignore him.
In this particular case, it is not clear exactly what Pajkic is supposedly able to do. If he is merely surprisingly resilient to electricity, I don't know that would qualify as "paranormal" - people with particularly conductive or non-conductive skin might be "special", but not outside the bounds of scientific understanding. If he can actually generate electricity or heat or light or store it and later release it, that type of thing would be pretty amazing.
So what do you think Khyber can do and how could he be tested?
Furthermore, you can't prove a negative. Can you prove that bigfoot doesn't exist? How? Can you prove that there isn't a teapot sitting in the middle of a crater on Titan? Both those things, however, could very easily be proved - if they were true. Until then, it seems wise to assume that they aren't.
Therein lies the lack of scientific reasoning that I am questioning; ironic, as you point it out yourself ("you can't prove a negative"), then jump right into doing just the thing you claim can't be done ("both those things... could very easily be proved - if they were true") - trying to prove a negative by citing the lack of evidence.
The whole point of Randi's challenge is to create actual tests of claimed effects. Randi may say things like "this entire field is bunk", but I believe that he has always acknowledged that his belief has no bearing on what the world is actually like. The challenge is much more limited than testing if an entire field has value - it tests the validity of specific claims. "I can dowse water", "I can read your mind", "I can predict the future" are the general types of claims that get tested, but the actual specific test is much more focused: "I can use these dowsing rods to pick the buckets of water from the buckets of sand more accurately than 70% of the time." Testing specific claims is vitally important in these sorts of fields, and is in now way intellectually dishonest. There is no need to invoke the "proof of a negative" issue, as the tests are always designed to be clear tests of a specific claim, with the claim and the testing protocol agreed to by Randi as well as the claimant.
Furthermore, you can't prove a negative. Can you prove that bigfoot doesn't exist? How? Can you prove that there isn't a teapot sitting in the middle of a crater on Titan? Both those things, however, could very easily be proved - if they were true. Until then, it seems wise to assume that they aren't.
Therein lies the lack of scientific reasoning that I am questioning; ironic, as you point it out yourself ("you can't prove a negative"), then jump right into doing just the thing you claim can't be done ("both those things... could very easily be proved - if they were true") - trying to prove a negative by citing the lack of evidence.
The whole point of Randi's challenge is to create actual tests of claimed effects. Randi may say things like "this entire field is bunk", but I believe that he has always acknowledged that his belief has no bearing on what the world is actually like. The challenge is much more limited than testing if an entire field has value - it tests the validity of specific claims. "I can dowse water", "I can read your mind", "I can predict the future" are the general types of claims that get tested, but the actual specific test is much more focused: "I can use these dowsing rods to pick the buckets of water from the buckets of sand more accurately than 70% of the time." Testing specific claims is vitally important in these sorts of fields, and is in now way intellectually dishonest. There is no need to invoke the "proof of a negative" issue, as the tests are always designed to be clear tests of a specific claim, with the claim and the testing protocol agreed to by Randi as well as the claimant.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe charlatans who prey on people's scientific ignorance as-much-if-not-moreso than the next guy here - I'm just not so convinced Mr. Randi here isn't one himself.
Imagine a supposed charalatan came along and produced something that actually worked. Consistently, repeatably, under the controlled conditions you require. And agreed to publish their methods, thereby allowing other people to do the same thing reliably in their own labs. But if they do all of that, what they've come up with isn't pseudo-science, it's actual science. Doesn't that mean you wouldn't have to pay them?:-)
Randi et all get together with the claimant and they agree on a protocol: "I can make this happen". If someone comes up with a "magic" device that actually works they will be able to claim the prize, provided that they can get Randi to think that it won't work while developing the protocol.
So if you've manged to discover some new science you could collect some money from Randi, but since it has not happened yet, and I don't hear of many trying to collect it this way, so I doubt it is a big issue.
Slightly on topic I recently visited a Barnes and Noble and they have an entire section for "paranormal romance". No not a shelf, not a bookcase, a section of bookcases.
Yeah, in many physical bookstores the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" section is now filled with romance novels and vampire detectives and zombie cheerleader series. Some of them might be good, but it does make it harder to find any "real" science fiction.
While Apple did use old OSM data (from around April 2010) for the low-res background for iPhoto, I'd love to see a clear example where "here's something in Apple Maps" and "here's something in OpenStreetMap", and there both obviously the same yet subtly different from what's on the ground.
So far I don't think anyone's been able to pin anything down. There have been lots of suggestions made but they can mostly be explained by the fact that if Map A maps a place and so does Map B, they're expected to be similar because they're the same place!
Another point made however was that police did in fact think that guy photographing the person being restrained during his episode was violating privacy of that person. Not the police - the person having the episode.
They were wrong. But everyone here is screaming about "shitty police suppressing the truth about their terrible behaviour" and that's just clearly not the case here.
Actually, that may be what the police *said*, but that is not necessarily what they *thought*. In fact, we have absolutely no real idea what the situation was given that we only have second hand info on what the police said.
Slashdot Mirror
I like these ones:
Organ donor opt-out: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pass-bill-change-united-states-organ-donation-system-be-opt-out-rather-opt/B04YdczT
Pink firearms: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/require-all-civilian-firearms-be-painted-pink/YfFtRGVL
webcams in congress: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-demand-surveillance-technology-congress-and-white-house/C3c6ZsgY
Or live in a smaller place that is more affordable. Unless your job is in Beverly Hills most places do have a range of housing prices. I suspect that for most people, the priority has been on owning a "big house with a yard" and that the location of that house relative to commuting options has been at best a secondary consideration. Hey, I'm pretty guilty of that mind-set too, but realistically it is not the only possible choice.
How do you recover those Joules with regenerative braking and no batteries?
You dump the energy back into the grid.
Here is mine before and after I moved and my job moved offices, which happened within 6 months of each other:
Before
Drive: 25 minutes
Bus: 1 hour with no transfers and a bus that came by every 15 minutes during rush hour
After
Drive: 15 minutes
Bus: 2.25 hours with two transfers and a bus that comes by every 45 minutes during rush hour. Yes, that is right. Even though I live closer to my office by a little over 50% the bus trip takes over twice as long and requires more transfers.
Someone made a poor choice of either the location of their home, or the location of their work, or both.
It may not necessarily be batteries, but some sort of localized storage may be useful for subway and light rail. The size of the train system's electrical infrastructure needs to be sized to the peak electrical demand, which is greatest when the train is accelerating. Being able to have some storage on the train would allow for regenerative braking. Right now, all the kinetic energy of the train's motion, which is an awful lot, is lost every time the train slows or stops.
I think for pretty much any system running on wired electricity, regenerative braking is used to dump the power back into the grid - at least I've been told that this is done for trolley buses. I would think that if the grid system is able to supply X amount of power for acceleration without difficulty, it should have little difficulty with coping with the excess energy of deceleration.
But the batteries are portable. You could ship them off to China for maintenance. The overhead is fixed infrastructure. It has to be maintained in place by expensive local labour.
Who might spend their income locally and certainly feed into the local tax system. There might be other advantages in maintaining that local fixed infrastructure that offset the possible higher costs.
Another way to do things without the need for a constitutional change is to use something like an interstate compact to have the states agree to use their Electoral College votes to vote for the winner of the popular vote. Looks like almost half the needed Electoral College votes are already set up for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
I think it is way past time for us (as in every country on Earth) to pass laws that ban any further manufacture of vehicles that lack a mechanical key switch and mandate that any existing vehicles be modified by the manufacturer to comply with that law within six months, or else those vehicles are no longer allowed to be driven on public roads.
If the new technology creates a situation resulting in the death of 100 people per year due to new failure modes, yet also results in a savings of 500 lives per year that would have happened due to failure modes in the old technology shouldn't we favour the new technology?
I'm not saying that this particular instance is comparable, but the fact that we don't hear about these sorts of failures very often leads me to believe that it might not be worth the effort to address it via legislation.
That's a pretty theory, but it makes the bit where god declares that men won't live so long a little hard to explain.
Maybe that was a later edit to try to make sense of things? "What is this crap? Did those guys really live that long? I guess God must have changed things since then, so I'll just insert a verse or two."
Unwashed masses?
Really?
:-)
I just took a shower....
It was meant in only the best way....
Of course those of us here in the elite slashdot club have much more nuanced and sophisticated reasons to choose our smart phones than all those "others", be we iPhone or non-iPhone owners.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unwashed_masses :
unwashed masses (plural only)
(idiomatic) The collective group ("mass") of people who are considered by someone to be somehow uneducated, uninformed, or in some other way unqualified for inclusion in the speaker's elite circles.
Yes, because it is very hard to flick a hardware switch on the side of the phone to put it on silent/vibrate.
I suspect the sideslash would like to automate it so that s/he doesn't need to remember to do so.
I always forget to turn it back to ringer and so would like to have a "silent for the next xxx minutes" feature.
Apple has manged to convince the "unwashed masses" that their eco-system and devices are easier to use than the alternatives, and in fact their systems are pretty well thought out and easy to use and their control of the whole eco-system has made interoperability of software and hardware pretty seamless. Non-Apple sellers have the difficult job of convincing most buyers that their possibly better features are more valuable than Apple's "ease of use", even if the "ease of use" of their devices are as good or better than Apple's. The perception of Apple being the one source for hardware, software and content (through the single iTunes channel), as well as info-syncing (iCloud) is comforting to many. The competition has a number of places the consumer might feel they need to go for hardware support (Samsung perhaps), software support (Samsung, Google, and others?), content (Amazon, iTunes, etc), and services (Google and others?). Even if there is one vastly dominant company in each of these areas, they are still going to be perceived as more complicated than getting it all from Apple - even if it is not more complicated.
Tangentially, I think smart phones are approaching the same point that personal computers reached not that long ago - for the vast majority of customers the increased power and features of new devices are insufficient to justify upgrading their current device. When everyone in the world already has a decent smart phone the market for new phones is going to get much smaller.
experiment (since IANAP), I do want to say that there seems to be a troubling trend amongst the best and the brightest in many STEM fields to mistake theory for reality. Theory is great and proceeds under the scientific method from empirical observation, but as we've seen throughout history, new phenomena and corner cases to arise and require theory to be amended.
While it is certainly worthwhile to keep an open mind and question our assumptions, there are a variety of different levels of confidence we have in different ideas. The major conservation laws (linear momentum, energy, angular momentum) are mathematically equivalent (via Noether's theorem) to symmetries of the space. If the laws of motion are independent of position then linear momentum is conserved. If linear momentum is not conserved, than the laws of motion are not independent of position. (similarly for rotation invariance angular momentum conservation and time invariance conservation of energy).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem
So this goes way beyond understanding of EM theory - if we have a case where momentum is not conserved, that will fundamentally change how we think the universe is put together. In my mind it is much much much more likely that there is error or fraud or psychosis than momentum is not being conserved.
Back to the USA, there are already some interesting private/public delivery programs that promise to keep service costs low, too. As an example, Smartpost is an economical FedEx service that uses the USPS to deliver the last mile. Expect more of this stuff in the future.
That last mile is where the bulk of the delivery expense is. Are you sure those other low cost delivery services aren't basically externalizing their unprofitable business expenses onto, I mean taking advantage of, the Post Office?
"Using the Post Office" can't be "taking advantage of" in that the USPS is selling a service. Using it to deliver things in-town is what every local person is doing. I doubt very much that Smartpost is underpaying for their use of the USPS. Last mile delivery may be where all the expenses are, but the USPS is already paying most of those costs every day anyway, even if not used by Smartpost for example.
Wow! If they're that good, then it makes me wonder why they have to have a government-granted monopoly on letters.
The monopoly position is one of the reasons it works. If you were to cherry pick the easy to deliver stuff by starting a service without universal coverage, you might be able to do it cheaper, but if you want universal delivery, not so much.
Are there any G20 countries without a monopoly postal system?
I suspect that advertising decisions are not as influenced by actual data as we might think, and even those influenced by data, probably much of it is data that does not mean what the advertisers think it means. Listening to podcasts from Freakonomics as well from Terry O'reilly http://terryoreilly.ca/ I get the feeling that advertisement is still very much a "that feels right" type of business, and that evidence based advertisement is still the exception rather than the rule.
Stereotypes do not always exist because of an "overwhelming preponderance of anecdotal evidence", but often because of a few experiences compounded by a lot of repetition and selective memory. It does not take much for an individual to form a negative stereotypical opinion of something - doing so has survival benefits. Being cautious about people from "outside the tribe" makes sense, so any negative traits noticed are easily exaggerated.
But they didn't harass me. I think that it was good and reasonable that they stop and question people who appear to not belong.
There are some (many?) who feel that being stopped and questioned is a form of harassment. They might argue that being of a certain race in a certain area should not be considered "probable cause", and the authorities should not be interfering in any way with anyone without sufficient reason.
Being spotted by cops would mean getting pulled over, being questioned, and my car searched with a fine toothed comb while waiting with hands on hood.
Did they do it because they were power-crazed bastards, or because they know from long experience that white people go into that neighborhood to buy drugs and then bald-faced lie about it?
Why not both? Maybe we could make the system even more efficient by issuing everyone documents showing where they were allowed to go, and if you went somewhere without the proper documents that would be proof that you were up to no good and should be arrested.
The whole point of Randi's challenge is to create actual tests of claimed effects.
Presuming that is actually what's happening, and this isn't yet another example of a confidence man making his fortune by playing on the firmly-held beliefs of a particular group, that's a good challenge. It's just that I'm not 100% convinced Mr. Randi is actually trying to test for these things, and not just using the "debunking of junk science" as a rather lucrative way to become and stay an extremely wealthy man.
I don't know how this would be particularly lucrative. "Hey everyone, I'll give you a million bucks if you can demonstrate some specific claims!" That doesn't seem like a very good way of making much of a profit. Clearly he has some incentives to not make it easy to get the money, but since it isn't his money in the first place, I don't see how it helps him become or stay wealthy. I suppose he could be taking a huge salary from the JREF funded from donations, but it seems like not a great road to riches.
My dad always used to tell us as kids: the man who accuses everyone around him of being a liar, is a man you'll probably never hear the truth from.
That's the beauty of the challenge, he doesn't need to call anyone a liar, he just has to point out when people claiming amazing powers are unable or unwilling to make a clear statement of what those powers actually can do, and then test if they can actually do that.
I always wonder why people like this http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/slavisa-pajkic-a-real-life-human-battery.html don't take up Randi on his challenge and collect the million dollars? Surely spending a week or two in coming up with a procedure and then making a formal application would be worth it?
In this case, it clams he can heat a cup of water to 97degrees Celcius by his hands. That seems like an easy thing to test unambiguously. If true it would be an amazing blow to our understanding of human physiology and basic physics, and would have tremendous value in our search for knowledge in addition to the potential economic benefits that would come with understanding the new science involved.
Then I think "humm, which is more likely, he isn't doing the test because it is 'too much bother' or he isn't doing the test because he knows he is a fraud?" Then I feel fine to ignore him.
In this particular case, it is not clear exactly what Pajkic is supposedly able to do. If he is merely surprisingly resilient to electricity, I don't know that would qualify as "paranormal" - people with particularly conductive or non-conductive skin might be "special", but not outside the bounds of scientific understanding. If he can actually generate electricity or heat or light or store it and later release it, that type of thing would be pretty amazing.
So what do you think Khyber can do and how could he be tested?
whoops, bad quoting. I should have said:
Furthermore, you can't prove a negative. Can you prove that bigfoot doesn't exist? How? Can you prove that there isn't a teapot sitting in the middle of a crater on Titan? Both those things, however, could very easily be proved - if they were true. Until then, it seems wise to assume that they aren't.
Therein lies the lack of scientific reasoning that I am questioning; ironic, as you point it out yourself ("you can't prove a negative"), then jump right into doing just the thing you claim can't be done ("both those things... could very easily be proved - if they were true") - trying to prove a negative by citing the lack of evidence.
The whole point of Randi's challenge is to create actual tests of claimed effects. Randi may say things like "this entire field is bunk", but I believe that he has always acknowledged that his belief has no bearing on what the world is actually like. The challenge is much more limited than testing if an entire field has value - it tests the validity of specific claims. "I can dowse water", "I can read your mind", "I can predict the future" are the general types of claims that get tested, but the actual specific test is much more focused: "I can use these dowsing rods to pick the buckets of water from the buckets of sand more accurately than 70% of the time." Testing specific claims is vitally important in these sorts of fields, and is in now way intellectually dishonest. There is no need to invoke the "proof of a negative" issue, as the tests are always designed to be clear tests of a specific claim, with the claim and the testing protocol agreed to by Randi as well as the claimant.
Furthermore, you can't prove a negative. Can you prove that bigfoot doesn't exist? How? Can you prove that there isn't a teapot sitting in the middle of a crater on Titan? Both those things, however, could very easily be proved - if they were true. Until then, it seems wise to assume that they aren't.
Therein lies the lack of scientific reasoning that I am questioning; ironic, as you point it out yourself ("you can't prove a negative"), then jump right into doing just the thing you claim can't be done ("both those things... could very easily be proved - if they were true") - trying to prove a negative by citing the lack of evidence.
The whole point of Randi's challenge is to create actual tests of claimed effects. Randi may say things like "this entire field is bunk", but I believe that he has always acknowledged that his belief has no bearing on what the world is actually like. The challenge is much more limited than testing if an entire field has value - it tests the validity of specific claims. "I can dowse water", "I can read your mind", "I can predict the future" are the general types of claims that get tested, but the actual specific test is much more focused: "I can use these dowsing rods to pick the buckets of water from the buckets of sand more accurately than 70% of the time." Testing specific claims is vitally important in these sorts of fields, and is in now way intellectually dishonest. There is no need to invoke the "proof of a negative" issue, as the tests are always designed to be clear tests of a specific claim, with the claim and the testing protocol agreed to by Randi as well as the claimant.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe charlatans who prey on people's scientific ignorance as-much-if-not-moreso than the next guy here - I'm just not so convinced Mr. Randi here isn't one himself.
Imagine a supposed charalatan came along and produced something that actually worked. Consistently, repeatably, under the controlled conditions you require. And agreed to publish their methods, thereby allowing other people to do the same thing reliably in their own labs. But if they do all of that, what they've come up with isn't pseudo-science, it's actual science. Doesn't that mean you wouldn't have to pay them? :-)
Randi et all get together with the claimant and they agree on a protocol: "I can make this happen". If someone comes up with a "magic" device that actually works they will be able to claim the prize, provided that they can get Randi to think that it won't work while developing the protocol.
So if you've manged to discover some new science you could collect some money from Randi, but since it has not happened yet, and I don't hear of many trying to collect it this way, so I doubt it is a big issue.
Slightly on topic I recently visited a Barnes and Noble and they have an entire section for "paranormal romance". No not a shelf, not a bookcase, a section of bookcases.
Yeah, in many physical bookstores the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" section is now filled with romance novels and vampire detectives and zombie cheerleader series. Some of them might be good, but it does make it harder to find any "real" science fiction.
While Apple did use old OSM data (from around April 2010) for the low-res background for iPhoto, I'd love to see a clear example where "here's something in Apple Maps" and "here's something in OpenStreetMap", and there both obviously the same yet subtly different from what's on the ground.
So far I don't think anyone's been able to pin anything down. There have been lots of suggestions made but they can mostly be explained by the fact that if Map A maps a place and so does Map B, they're expected to be similar because they're the same place!
It looks like Apple does give a credit in iPhoto: http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/03/08/welcome-apple/
Another point made however was that police did in fact think that guy photographing the person being restrained during his episode was violating privacy of that person. Not the police - the person having the episode.
They were wrong. But everyone here is screaming about "shitty police suppressing the truth about their terrible behaviour" and that's just clearly not the case here.
Actually, that may be what the police *said*, but that is not necessarily what they *thought*. In fact, we have absolutely no real idea what the situation was given that we only have second hand info on what the police said.