True dat. The idea of "The Elder Scrolls" series was always good though, they've just had piss poor execution. Definitely lacking in the fun factor, which was an area the original Fallout and Fallout II excelled in (Making somebodies head explode, Weee!) Totally open ended gameplay sounds like a good idea, but often falls so far short of the promise.
Do what now? The only herbivores in the Carnivora are the Pandas. Genetic studies have shown that Pandas are closely related to bears, but they're given their own genus on the basis of their herbivorous habit. Everything else is omnivorous, and simultaneously a dangerous predator (bears), or carnivorous. A quasi-exception to that are some of the species that can live off of plant material exclusively (most of the Canines), but they're best characterized as omnivores, they'll preferentially take meat when they can get it, and accept plants if they can't. A herbivorous derivative of the Felis genus would be grounds for a new genus in all probability. As it would require major changes to Feline body chemistry. Felines are extremely deficient in their ability to metabolically process sugar, which makes a herbivorous diet dangerous for them.
You seem to be completely ignorant of Phylogenetics, which is being used to reorganize taxonomy, on the basis of much more sound principles, like genetics and biochemistry, as more data becomes available. Sometimes major surprises come up, and large groups get shifted around. A well publicized recent change was the discovery that order Aves, belonged in Superorder Saurischia as a sister group to the Therapoda. Which is to say that birds were found to be dinosaurs and a sister group of the Theropods.
In my world view there is such a thing as a sphere of responsibility. The size of the sphere varies by person, but people are more responsible for things closer to the center. Things they are directly responsible for causing are very close to the center. People make a choice to have children, even if that choice is simply to not have an abortion after being raped. You make a choice to have children, and you are responsible for raising them. Simple as that.
My objection is this: we aren't even doing a very good job of treating the major cases, let alone the mild ones. In many cases we are institutionalizing them, but not in a hospital with psychiatric care, we're institutionalizing them in Prisons in the general population with minimal care and oversight. In defense of claiming Bipolar disorder on the list major mental problems, I'm aware of just how often those severe swings in mood can result in run-ins with the police. I am aware of one man locally who stopped taking his meds and ended up in a rather heated shoot-out with the police. In one of the most exceptional cases of police restraint I've ever heard of, they aimed to shoot him in the leg, and wound him, successfully, and took him to the hospital. Please note that when i say "shoot-out," I mean that he was shoot back at them.
That people are very sensitive about mental illness, I will readily acknowledge. In my opinion, that is a societal issue that needs to be addressed with education.
I would like to say that the complaint which was underlying my post was not a disparagement of mental health care professionals, but upset at how low a priority such care is given in the United States. In effect, Prisons in the United States are the de jure Mental Hospitals. Which is atrocious in my opinion. The low priority given to mental health also means that what public services are available are understaffed and so overworked that they are unable to do their job properly. Hence major and often quite pronounced mental illness goes undiagnosed; Hence the ability of an intelligent and educated observer (but one outside the mental health field) to be able to detect probable cases and initiate a proper Psychiatric diagnosis. I find this appalling. It is my belief that people deserve better than this. In my opinion, if a functioning system was in place, my friend wouldn't be the first one to suspect pronounced Bipolar, or Schizophrenia or other major illness in these cases, and they might be kept out of the criminal justice system completely. My story was meant to provide additional anecdotal evidence of how poorly the system performs.
Christianity??? Eh? What precisely did I say about Christianity in this thread? I've reread my post multiple times and can't figure out where you came up with that one.
Please note: I most certainly did NOT say that multiple psychiatrists got it wrong, I said "counselors," there being a significant difference. A counselor being a M.S. or usually Ph.D. in Psychology. A Psychiatrist being a medical doctor (or equivalent, osteopaths can also be psychiatrists), who has undergone additional psychiatric education, and is additionally licensed by a board of psychiatry (as well as licensed to practice medicine). I would like to point out that I said that Psychiatrists were much better at diagnoses than counselors.
Did I even say anything about MPD? Hallucinating voices is a genuine symptom associated with some cases of Schizophrenia.
Additionally, although I didn't explicitly say so, because I assumed "Public Defender" made it obvious, my friend is an attorney, a lawyer practicing in criminal defense. As the interviews my friend does are an attorney interviewing a client that he is to defend in criminal court, He had damn well better keep referring clients for Psych Evals by Clinical psychiatrists when he suspects major underlying mental illness. Failure to do so is cause for disciplinary action by the State Bar Association (The overseeing body for the legal profession) for failure to meet his obligation to defend his clients adequately. In major cases (murders, etc) he requests Psych evals as a matter of routine, whether he suspects mental illness or not, as he has a duty to do.
Firstly, I don't give a shit about the parents. They fucked up, majorly and in a way that costs other people their lives. At the very least, they failed to protect society from their spawn's violent mental illness, even if there really was nothing else they could do.
As for why its always a school, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that available data might indicate that school is a major stressor in young people. Which would explain why, when those that do finally snap, they lash out at it specifically. What that means for society ought to be fairly clear. Society has created an institution that aggravates/creates mental illness in its young people, and is an apparent cause of high youth suicide rates as well. Think you might ought to go evaluate about how to fix that then?
I think its pretty clear that its not because of difficulty of the material, because they aren't being taught a damn thing. Best look for other answers.
Apathy with the state of the world might be high on the list of additional stressors. High School is completely meaningless in terms of the rest of a person life, yet everyone has to go through it. It is in many ways quite like prison (and we all know that's never hurt anybody's sanity!) Pointless, Meaningless, and with apparently bleak prospects for the future afterward.
The Virginia Tech shooting may have been unpreventable, but that doesn't mean that our mental health system in the USA isn't shit. There were definitely signs that Cho was dangerously unstable, with the potential for violent behavior. Another thing I think is amazing is how often schizophrenia goes undiagnosed, at least in my area. I have a personal friend who works in the Public Defender's Office, he has very little psychological training, a Psych minor as an undergrad, but he regularly encounters clients who have a simple diagnosis of Depression, that just interviewing them, he can tell something much more serious is wrong with them (apparently, a client who has difficulty focusing on an interview because he's "talking to the voices" is a very good sign, imagine! These are clients that have seen multiple counselors, and none of them noticed anything!). He then requests a Psych eval from a Clinical Psychiatrist, he has a very good success rate at guessing what comes up in diagnoses.
It is frightening to me that these people just slip through the cracks, with some of them caught by somebody not even in the field. It angers me because I think society has an obligation to take better care of these people, if only for the safety of society at large.
Of course, the theory also assumes that the market will be efficient enough to prevent this (trading yourself into oblivion on a truly massive scale), and assumes perfect rationality to look after one's own interests.
Even at truly relativistic speeds? By which I mean asymptotic approach of the speed of light? I just looked up the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Re lativistic_mass article on Wikipedia, and it does reinforce what you are saying, and I apologize for my error. In defense of my University, I'm fairly certain that the things I said are what I gleaned from my own independent studies, rather than things taught to me by Physics professor, who was a very sound, very rational nuclear physics Ph.D. that I respect very much.
I glean from the Wikipedia article that that what changes is the apparent mass as seen by an outside observer in an independent reference frame. So this change is not apparent to an observer in the same reference frame as the relativistic object? Also does this apparent change in mass change the force required to accelerate the object further? I'm sorry, I merely wish to understand correctly to the best of my ability.
umm, *cough* Parallels adding 3D isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. At least, not for a long, long while. Firstly the 3D support is very primitive currently, Second, Gaming in Parallels would have a substantial performance hit, since they don't allow guest SMP, and they're having to virtualize the 3D API. To say nothing of the lack of support for shaders at this stage.
I don't think it actually would. I really meant to say that it would seem to allow for faster than light information transfer. Your second logical analysis is what I think is probably true. Such a substance wouldn't just need to be perfectly rigid, it would have to be infinitely strong as well, to resist shearing stresses, which would be infinite at the speed of light (to make matters worse, mass at the speed of light becomes infinitely large, so you've got infinitely strong gravity of the object itself to contend with.) That sounds pretty implausible to me for such a thing to exist. But like any decent scientific thinker, I know that I could be shown to be incorrect.
Wow, I was hoping that there would already be an explanation answering this, but here you go: The speed of "force" as you put it, is actually quite slow. It's a actually the speed of sound through the object. Why? Because when you push the rod, you're bumping the molecules, they have to push the molecules in front of them, and on until you reach the end. This is actually a sound wave propagating the medium, you just usually can't hear it. Now, if you had a perfectly rigid pole (cue penis jokes here) it would seeming move instantly. However, no known substance is anywhere close to perfectly rigid. Even atomic nuclei, which are, far, far more rigid than bulk matter, behave like drops of fluid and can have waves propagate through them. So no, you can't forge a pole to another planet and communicate instantly, it would be hugely slower than normal radio.
Yeah, that's why I hardly ever open Safari, even though I'm a Mac User now. I still use firefox, just like I did on windows, and before that mozilla. It is largely because its what I'm used to, but for me there's no great reason to change. It's not like I'm using Internet Explorer or something! If somebody showed that an alternative was noticibly more secure, or had a major feature advantage, I'd use it. Until then, Firefox is good enough.
Ah, one of the fallacies of modern Neo-Classical economics. Incorrect. What thought experiments of absolute advantage show is that it is possible, at least in theory, for both parties to benefit from trade. In reality, absolute advantage is relatively rare. Thus it often seems to one party that the exchange benefits them, (example: Native americans trading land to Europeans for beads), when in reality its a horribly bad idea. Another example - trading to export your native manufacturing base to another, potentially hostile country, or becoming dependent on resources from countries that are in fact hostile. The goods they offer may be cheaper, but the other prices they carry may be very, very high.
Water was good enough for precise measurements doing osmotic pressure experiments in back in the olden days before modern analytic equipment became available. Plenty of molar masses of compounds were determined this way. Chem Labs in industry and academia used to have glass osmotic pressure meters running up stories tall through the different floors. This was around 1900 or so. They weren't far off either. Things like mass spec provided more precision and better structural information, but usually their data was pretty solid.
If you're going to be pedantic, its best to be correct. The density of average density of ocean water is in fact: 1025kg/m^3, while the density of pure water is: 998kg/km^3. Pressure at a given depth is given by: p = g * rho * h. Where p is pressure (units depending on the units of the other values, but we'll use SI, giving Pressure in pascals), g is acceleration due to gravity, rho; is the density of the fluid and h is depth. Let's apply the formula and see what we get! If we have freshwater 998kg/m^3 * 9.8m/s^2 * 10m = 97.804kpa. For saltwater we have 1025kg * 9.8m/s^2 * 10m = 100.45kpa.
ooooh, burn. Don't worry, study up, and I'm sure you'll be better at being a trolling asshole next time! For those that wish to check me, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_statics The formula used is the one list in the first section: "Hydrostatic Pressure." Or you can check any decent college level Physics text.
1. The Diameter of the straw doesn't matter because pressure is only dependent on depth. The Pressure exerted on a body submerged 10m below the surface of a body of water is the same, regardless of whether its a swimming pool or the ocean (with one caveat, which I'll get to in a second)
2. The Density of a fluid does matter. The denser a fluid is, the lower the height the pressure of the atmosphere can support it. So, ocean water, being denser than distilled or fresh water, can't be supported up to a full 32ft. Mercury, being exceptionally dense, over 13 times as dense as water, can only be supported to a height of 760 millimeters.
The last fact I mentioned is why barometers are traditionally made using mercury. In order to accurately measure atmospheric pressure (useful in meteorology) you need to be able to see changes in the height of a fluid column (before we got more advanced equipment anyway). Water is obviously inconvenient for this, requiring a column 32 ft high, although it is very precise, because minute changes in pressure cause large fluctuations in the height of the column. This is why mm*Hg (millimeters of mercury) is a standard unit of pressure, with 760mm*Hg = 1atm.
The caveat I mentioned above is that the pressure exerted on a body 10m under the surface in the ocean is higher, but only because salt water is denser than fresh water. It has nothing to do with the size of the body.
I did catch, its just that what I was complaining about in the first place is the guy with his "pimped out" car audio or home theatre bumping up the bass to absurd levels at "reference" volumes. To point out that doing so at low volumes is perfectly valid, is a red herring.
Your point about the economics of providing high quality service is, in my opinion, why a government controlled monopoly with enforced quality standards is the correct course when you're talking about vital infrastructure.
In my opinion, they shouldn't be allowed to get away it. They do, but is it a good idea to allow it when we're talking about infrastructure vital to a nation? Communications infrastructure affects everything, from business, and government, to the military, and our personal lives. I feel the same way about energy and transportation as well. Leaving entertainment up to the whims of the marketplace is one thing, having the lights go out because of Corporate shenanigans (Enron, rolling blackouts, remember?) is quite another.
What infuriates me is Neocon economists like Milton Friedman was, waving their hands and saying its impossible for those things to happen in their perfect little ideal theories. Sorry, but theories are supposed to explain the data, and if your theory ain't consistent with the data, then it is a load of shit. Say what you want about John Maynard Keynes, but he advocated analysis of historical data to derive hypotheses to shape policy. In short, he advocated Economics as an actual science, not just some idealistic philosophical fantasy.
Thank you, its good to hear from people who don't think I'm completely crazy from time to time.
I'm going to have to remember to my phrase arguments in favor of the old Government controlled Bell Telephone system this way: Fundamentally, regardless of whatever other complaints you want to make about the old Bell Telephone system, they provided a level of service and support that has remained absolutely unmatched in the United States telecommunications industry to this day. That gold standard of quality is what made it worth the flaws.
I wonder what happened to that exquisitely trained installation tech from your story. How did he fare in the Telecommunications merger/split circus that has characterized the last 20 years of the industry?
Slashdot Mirror
True dat. The idea of "The Elder Scrolls" series was always good though, they've just had piss poor execution. Definitely lacking in the fun factor, which was an area the original Fallout and Fallout II excelled in (Making somebodies head explode, Weee!) Totally open ended gameplay sounds like a good idea, but often falls so far short of the promise.
You seem to be completely ignorant of Phylogenetics, which is being used to reorganize taxonomy, on the basis of much more sound principles, like genetics and biochemistry, as more data becomes available. Sometimes major surprises come up, and large groups get shifted around. A well publicized recent change was the discovery that order Aves, belonged in Superorder Saurischia as a sister group to the Therapoda. Which is to say that birds were found to be dinosaurs and a sister group of the Theropods.
In my world view there is such a thing as a sphere of responsibility. The size of the sphere varies by person, but people are more responsible for things closer to the center. Things they are directly responsible for causing are very close to the center. People make a choice to have children, even if that choice is simply to not have an abortion after being raped. You make a choice to have children, and you are responsible for raising them. Simple as that.
That people are very sensitive about mental illness, I will readily acknowledge. In my opinion, that is a societal issue that needs to be addressed with education.
I would like to say that the complaint which was underlying my post was not a disparagement of mental health care professionals, but upset at how low a priority such care is given in the United States. In effect, Prisons in the United States are the de jure Mental Hospitals. Which is atrocious in my opinion. The low priority given to mental health also means that what public services are available are understaffed and so overworked that they are unable to do their job properly. Hence major and often quite pronounced mental illness goes undiagnosed; Hence the ability of an intelligent and educated observer (but one outside the mental health field) to be able to detect probable cases and initiate a proper Psychiatric diagnosis. I find this appalling. It is my belief that people deserve better than this. In my opinion, if a functioning system was in place, my friend wouldn't be the first one to suspect pronounced Bipolar, or Schizophrenia or other major illness in these cases, and they might be kept out of the criminal justice system completely. My story was meant to provide additional anecdotal evidence of how poorly the system performs.
Sorry about that, Slashdot collapsing threads made me think you were replying directly to my post a couple up the thread.
Christianity??? Eh? What precisely did I say about Christianity in this thread? I've reread my post multiple times and can't figure out where you came up with that one.
Did I even say anything about MPD? Hallucinating voices is a genuine symptom associated with some cases of Schizophrenia.
Additionally, although I didn't explicitly say so, because I assumed "Public Defender" made it obvious, my friend is an attorney, a lawyer practicing in criminal defense. As the interviews my friend does are an attorney interviewing a client that he is to defend in criminal court, He had damn well better keep referring clients for Psych Evals by Clinical psychiatrists when he suspects major underlying mental illness. Failure to do so is cause for disciplinary action by the State Bar Association (The overseeing body for the legal profession) for failure to meet his obligation to defend his clients adequately. In major cases (murders, etc) he requests Psych evals as a matter of routine, whether he suspects mental illness or not, as he has a duty to do.
As for why its always a school, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that available data might indicate that school is a major stressor in young people. Which would explain why, when those that do finally snap, they lash out at it specifically. What that means for society ought to be fairly clear. Society has created an institution that aggravates/creates mental illness in its young people, and is an apparent cause of high youth suicide rates as well. Think you might ought to go evaluate about how to fix that then?
I think its pretty clear that its not because of difficulty of the material, because they aren't being taught a damn thing. Best look for other answers.
Apathy with the state of the world might be high on the list of additional stressors. High School is completely meaningless in terms of the rest of a person life, yet everyone has to go through it. It is in many ways quite like prison (and we all know that's never hurt anybody's sanity!) Pointless, Meaningless, and with apparently bleak prospects for the future afterward.
If they're ending up in the Criminal justice system, they aren't doing that well.
It is frightening to me that these people just slip through the cracks, with some of them caught by somebody not even in the field. It angers me because I think society has an obligation to take better care of these people, if only for the safety of society at large.
Also, my explanation of why you can't communicate faster than light by moving a rod between to locations is correct, is it not?
Of course, the theory also assumes that the market will be efficient enough to prevent this (trading yourself into oblivion on a truly massive scale), and assumes perfect rationality to look after one's own interests.
I glean from the Wikipedia article that that what changes is the apparent mass as seen by an outside observer in an independent reference frame. So this change is not apparent to an observer in the same reference frame as the relativistic object? Also does this apparent change in mass change the force required to accelerate the object further? I'm sorry, I merely wish to understand correctly to the best of my ability.
umm, *cough* Parallels adding 3D isn't going to make a damn bit of difference. At least, not for a long, long while. Firstly the 3D support is very primitive currently, Second, Gaming in Parallels would have a substantial performance hit, since they don't allow guest SMP, and they're having to virtualize the 3D API. To say nothing of the lack of support for shaders at this stage.
I don't think it actually would. I really meant to say that it would seem to allow for faster than light information transfer. Your second logical analysis is what I think is probably true. Such a substance wouldn't just need to be perfectly rigid, it would have to be infinitely strong as well, to resist shearing stresses, which would be infinite at the speed of light (to make matters worse, mass at the speed of light becomes infinitely large, so you've got infinitely strong gravity of the object itself to contend with.) That sounds pretty implausible to me for such a thing to exist. But like any decent scientific thinker, I know that I could be shown to be incorrect.
Wow, I was hoping that there would already be an explanation answering this, but here you go: The speed of "force" as you put it, is actually quite slow. It's a actually the speed of sound through the object. Why? Because when you push the rod, you're bumping the molecules, they have to push the molecules in front of them, and on until you reach the end. This is actually a sound wave propagating the medium, you just usually can't hear it. Now, if you had a perfectly rigid pole (cue penis jokes here) it would seeming move instantly. However, no known substance is anywhere close to perfectly rigid. Even atomic nuclei, which are, far, far more rigid than bulk matter, behave like drops of fluid and can have waves propagate through them. So no, you can't forge a pole to another planet and communicate instantly, it would be hugely slower than normal radio.
Yeah, that's why I hardly ever open Safari, even though I'm a Mac User now. I still use firefox, just like I did on windows, and before that mozilla. It is largely because its what I'm used to, but for me there's no great reason to change. It's not like I'm using Internet Explorer or something! If somebody showed that an alternative was noticibly more secure, or had a major feature advantage, I'd use it. Until then, Firefox is good enough.
Ah, one of the fallacies of modern Neo-Classical economics. Incorrect. What thought experiments of absolute advantage show is that it is possible, at least in theory, for both parties to benefit from trade. In reality, absolute advantage is relatively rare. Thus it often seems to one party that the exchange benefits them, (example: Native americans trading land to Europeans for beads), when in reality its a horribly bad idea. Another example - trading to export your native manufacturing base to another, potentially hostile country, or becoming dependent on resources from countries that are in fact hostile. The goods they offer may be cheaper, but the other prices they carry may be very, very high.
Water was good enough for precise measurements doing osmotic pressure experiments in back in the olden days before modern analytic equipment became available. Plenty of molar masses of compounds were determined this way. Chem Labs in industry and academia used to have glass osmotic pressure meters running up stories tall through the different floors. This was around 1900 or so. They weren't far off either. Things like mass spec provided more precision and better structural information, but usually their data was pretty solid.
ooooh, burn. Don't worry, study up, and I'm sure you'll be better at being a trolling asshole next time! For those that wish to check me, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_statics The formula used is the one list in the first section: "Hydrostatic Pressure." Or you can check any decent college level Physics text.
2. The Density of a fluid does matter. The denser a fluid is, the lower the height the pressure of the atmosphere can support it. So, ocean water, being denser than distilled or fresh water, can't be supported up to a full 32ft. Mercury, being exceptionally dense, over 13 times as dense as water, can only be supported to a height of 760 millimeters.
The last fact I mentioned is why barometers are traditionally made using mercury. In order to accurately measure atmospheric pressure (useful in meteorology) you need to be able to see changes in the height of a fluid column (before we got more advanced equipment anyway). Water is obviously inconvenient for this, requiring a column 32 ft high, although it is very precise, because minute changes in pressure cause large fluctuations in the height of the column. This is why mm*Hg (millimeters of mercury) is a standard unit of pressure, with 760mm*Hg = 1atm.
The caveat I mentioned above is that the pressure exerted on a body 10m under the surface in the ocean is higher, but only because salt water is denser than fresh water. It has nothing to do with the size of the body.
I did catch, its just that what I was complaining about in the first place is the guy with his "pimped out" car audio or home theatre bumping up the bass to absurd levels at "reference" volumes. To point out that doing so at low volumes is perfectly valid, is a red herring.
In my opinion, they shouldn't be allowed to get away it. They do, but is it a good idea to allow it when we're talking about infrastructure vital to a nation? Communications infrastructure affects everything, from business, and government, to the military, and our personal lives. I feel the same way about energy and transportation as well. Leaving entertainment up to the whims of the marketplace is one thing, having the lights go out because of Corporate shenanigans (Enron, rolling blackouts, remember?) is quite another.
What infuriates me is Neocon economists like Milton Friedman was, waving their hands and saying its impossible for those things to happen in their perfect little ideal theories. Sorry, but theories are supposed to explain the data, and if your theory ain't consistent with the data, then it is a load of shit. Say what you want about John Maynard Keynes, but he advocated analysis of historical data to derive hypotheses to shape policy. In short, he advocated Economics as an actual science, not just some idealistic philosophical fantasy.
I'm going to have to remember to my phrase arguments in favor of the old Government controlled Bell Telephone system this way: Fundamentally, regardless of whatever other complaints you want to make about the old Bell Telephone system, they provided a level of service and support that has remained absolutely unmatched in the United States telecommunications industry to this day. That gold standard of quality is what made it worth the flaws.
I wonder what happened to that exquisitely trained installation tech from your story. How did he fare in the Telecommunications merger/split circus that has characterized the last 20 years of the industry?