I'm aware of the tongue and cheek nature of this post, but I'm also not a theoretical physicist, so can someone tell me if the current body of knowledge indicates any way to contain a black hole? In other words, it's impossible to put a charge on a black hole, right?
Can you clear that up for me? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't both India and Pakistan go from nuclear power to nuclear weapons after the establishment of NATO and the NPT?
NPR was running a story on the cell phone aspect of the inauguration yesterday morning. They reported the carriers were encouraging people to text instead of call (which I'm sure was only to save bandwidth and had nothing to do with the massively inflated cost per text - which/. has also covered) I will say though that my girlfriend was texting back and forth from the mall a lot, while she had to press send a couple of times for some messages, once they were through, they were delivered in a timely fashion - she also didn't seem to have any problem receiving messages (on verizon).
Large celestial bodies are only spherical to a first order approximation. Just like cosmic background radiation is uniform, atoms are inert, and space is empty.
For most things the first order approximations are enough, but the more we refine our models the more neat things we can do.
Under the law, the federal defense of marriage act, they're not considered married if they move out of MA.
Under the constitution, specifically the full faith and credit clause, they should be.
The issue as to whether a gay couple married in MA is married in other states is unresolved until someone decides to sue a state that doesn't recognize their marriage.
You'd have to provide some evidence that most foreclosures are investment properties. More likely everyone believed that they'd be able to refinance out of their ARM on their primary (read:only) house, because "home values all ways go up." When that wasn't the case you get what we see now.
There's plenty of blame to be spread around, from the builders who overbuilt saturating the market to the bankers who financed every subdivision to come along, to the home buyers who thought they wouldn't really have to pay the higher rate in x years, to the mortgage brokers who sold loans to people who couldn't afford them on commission, to the banks who bought, them bundled, them broke them apart, and took out CDSs on them, to the hedge funds, retirement pensions, and private investors and anyone else who didn't bother to divide median home price by median income to see if their investments were reasonable.
Here's what I think about juries - They consist of 12 people with enough civic responsibility to not beg out.
The reason that far too many juries have a below median intelligence is because too many of the people reading this site have schemed their way out. I am not naive, and I don't want my fate being in the hands of a jury. On the flip side, I'm not going to make up bullshit excuses for not doing my jury duty.
It is wise to remember that the final verdict on what is and isn't illegal is rendered by a jury, so even if the prosecutor is out to railroad you on a technicality using your vacation pictures, he has to convince 12 of your peers that you deserve to go to jail.
(arguments about the damaging nature of the indictment are valid - but not unique to this case)
It is interesting, and there has been a long legal tradition hashing out what obsenity means. Currently, we operate under the miller standard. Before that (fuller?) a work couldn't be obscene if it has any literary, artistic, or scientific value, so people putting on obscene productions would have the performers recite at least a single line of Shakespeare or a Biblical verse - automatically imbuing the performance with at least one like of artistic value.
Also note that the test applies contemporary community values - in other words it is quite possible that the exact same work is legal under (a hypothetical) federal (obscenity) law in San Francisco, and illegal under the same law in Salt Lake City.
Hit up Wikipedia, there's a lot of information about evolving decency standards.
Here's what I'll say, reporting on press releases is always sloppy, but sometimes unavoidable. Reporting from inside the company is quality neutral: blogging from inside with a grudge is generally bad (exception for whistle blowing), blogging from inside without a grudge, i.e. objectively is good (exception for PR sanitized blogging - which is worse than reporting on press releases AND might be difficult to detect). Real investigative journalism is better than an inside man blogging.
If you don't use decent English, and it doesn't have to be perfect, you either don't care, or you're not intelligent enough to make insightful connections. Either way, a reasonable grasp of the English language is required for me to take someone seriously (comments - which are composed and posted impulsively have a lower standard.)
Metablogging is ok, but should not be confused with actual reporting. Ditto for the traditional media reporting on reporting or blogging.
Ok, I have a question for you. I assume you're looking at a number of metrics, accuracy, timeliness, grammar, etc. I think most of us would agree that accuracy is the most important, but it is also the hardest to identify if taken in isolation. So my question is, can a reasonably well informed person identify an inaccurate blog post based on other cues, such as grammar and language use?
The reason I ask is I get a reasonable portion of my news from blogs - and I think I'm pretty good at telling which ones are crap, and which ones get the story mostly right. Even on slashdot where story quality varies dramatically submitter to submitter and from editor to editor, I think I can usually gauge the quality of the story based on the summary (quality is usually inversely proportional to sensationalism). Failing that blog posts usually reference a source which I can double-check. And then there's the badsummary tag...
The Senate increases the stature of low population states, the house is more democratic. However, the number of house seats does very little to change the influence of any one constituency. States, however gerrymander their representative districts to serve the interests of the party in power at the time. No change in number of seats would undo this particularly sticky problem.
You're right about the first part (though really it's a representative democracy - but that's more or less a semantic difference) but trail off from there.
The 435 members of the house of representatives is essentially arbitrary, but the very reason for the house (and by extension the electoral college) is to increase the stature of low population states. One can argue that this is a provision that has outlived its usefulness, but it was part of the original intent - basically it was necessary to get the southern states to ratify the constitution.
The runner up as VP model was changed in the twelfth amendment. We decided (rightly) that it was a bad idea. The veep has only two essential duties of consequence: tie-breaker in the senate, and 2nd in line for the presidency. Remember, the constitution was drafted without regard for political parties, when they appeared that model was recognized as flawed. If that model were never changed veeps would be so marginalized as to be useless, and when a president died they'd be so far out of the loop it could cast the country into turmoil. They'd and they'd have to put up with all the appointments of their predecessor for at least a little while while they run their transition.
I'm not going to sit here and argue that the UAW hasn't overreached, but it's not like if unions disappeared things wouldn't dramatically swing back in the other direction.
Look at health insurance and retirement, things that industry used to do, but now dumped on society (read: government) both of which are current or upcoming crises. Look at Walmart, minimize full time employees, maximize part-time workers, and skimp on benefits. Read about conditions in meat packing plants, a job that used to be unionized, but is increasingly held by immigrant workers.
The American model is relatively rare, but that does not mean that it wasn't well thought out, nor does it mean that our chief executive has unchecked power. I'm not going to disagree with you that W has overstepped the constitutional limits of his power, but historically our system has been fairly remarkably resilient, with presidential power waxing and waning depending on the political climate. Andrew Jackson, Abe Lincoln, and FDR all expanded the power of the executive, and subsequent congresses have re-exerted their authority.
I'm not sure what model of government you consider superior, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that parliamentary governments, suffer from abuses as well. For one, coalition governments can be remarkably unstable and can be completely hamstrung if a working majority cannot be assembled. Further, to continue the theme of your post, the Wiemar Republic, a parliamentary government, legally handed power to Hitler. Finally, parliaments aren't above stunning human rights abuses, parliaments presided over Apartheid, and both sides of the ongoing Israel/Palestinian conflict.
For the sake of argument I'll grant that the difference between building roads, providing public transportation, and giving away free cars is a difference of degree, rather than one of kind. Even still, it is in fact possible to avoid going over the slippery slope from common good to full blown communism, as a country we've been doing it for more than 200 years.
I'm sorry, but "common welfare" doesn't mean it has to be good for everyone individually, it just means it has to be good for society as a whole. The taxpayer funded establishment of Washington DC didn't benefit everyone, nor did the establishment of the post office, nor the first and second banks of the United States, and the people who wrote the constitution were directly involved in those endeavors.
Regardless of whether you believe if we should have welfare, social security, public education, public roads, universal health care, pollution regulation, a minimum wage, or national parks, any (reasonable) argument will center around whether the benefits outweighs the costs, since they all address common welfare in one aspect or another. You can bloviate about taxation being equivalent to theft, and rail about how all government projects are unconstitutional until the cows come home, and no one will take you seriously, when you call it a human rights violation you look like an ass.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware of the tongue and cheek nature of this post, but I'm also not a theoretical physicist, so can someone tell me if the current body of knowledge indicates any way to contain a black hole? In other words, it's impossible to put a charge on a black hole, right?
I would think you'd need a quantum theory of gravity to express the effects time dilation in or near a black hole of this scale.
Wasn't N. Korea's test a few years back was a dud - or a partial dud?
Can you clear that up for me? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't both India and Pakistan go from nuclear power to nuclear weapons after the establishment of NATO and the NPT?
First, I'm going to echo the GP - this is a very crass topic.
Second, isn't shooting to maim against the Geneva conventions?
NPR was running a story on the cell phone aspect of the inauguration yesterday morning. They reported the carriers were encouraging people to text instead of call (which I'm sure was only to save bandwidth and had nothing to do with the massively inflated cost per text - which /. has also covered) I will say though that my girlfriend was texting back and forth from the mall a lot, while she had to press send a couple of times for some messages, once they were through, they were delivered in a timely fashion - she also didn't seem to have any problem receiving messages (on verizon).
not so fast
Large celestial bodies are only spherical to a first order approximation. Just like cosmic background radiation is uniform, atoms are inert, and space is empty.
For most things the first order approximations are enough, but the more we refine our models the more neat things we can do.
Under the law, the federal defense of marriage act, they're not considered married if they move out of MA.
Under the constitution, specifically the full faith and credit clause, they should be.
The issue as to whether a gay couple married in MA is married in other states is unresolved until someone decides to sue a state that doesn't recognize their marriage.
if you think there's a a climate model that only spits out a single number you're out of your damn mind.
You'd have to provide some evidence that most foreclosures are investment properties. More likely everyone believed that they'd be able to refinance out of their ARM on their primary (read:only) house, because "home values all ways go up." When that wasn't the case you get what we see now.
There's plenty of blame to be spread around, from the builders who overbuilt saturating the market to the bankers who financed every subdivision to come along, to the home buyers who thought they wouldn't really have to pay the higher rate in x years, to the mortgage brokers who sold loans to people who couldn't afford them on commission, to the banks who bought, them bundled, them broke them apart, and took out CDSs on them, to the hedge funds, retirement pensions, and private investors and anyone else who didn't bother to divide median home price by median income to see if their investments were reasonable.
Are GPSs immune to failure or tampering?
Here's what I think about juries - They consist of 12 people with enough civic responsibility to not beg out.
The reason that far too many juries have a below median intelligence is because too many of the people reading this site have schemed their way out. I am not naive, and I don't want my fate being in the hands of a jury. On the flip side, I'm not going to make up bullshit excuses for not doing my jury duty.
I agree, I expect many B&M stores to lower their asking price for the retail space they inhabit.
4% isn't good enough.
When T-bills, municipal bonds, and FDIC insured CDs outperform your business, it's time to find a different strategy.
It is wise to remember that the final verdict on what is and isn't illegal is rendered by a jury, so even if the prosecutor is out to railroad you on a technicality using your vacation pictures, he has to convince 12 of your peers that you deserve to go to jail.
(arguments about the damaging nature of the indictment are valid - but not unique to this case)
It is interesting, and there has been a long legal tradition hashing out what obsenity means. Currently, we operate under the miller standard. Before that (fuller?) a work couldn't be obscene if it has any literary, artistic, or scientific value, so people putting on obscene productions would have the performers recite at least a single line of Shakespeare or a Biblical verse - automatically imbuing the performance with at least one like of artistic value.
Also note that the test applies contemporary community values - in other words it is quite possible that the exact same work is legal under (a hypothetical) federal (obscenity) law in San Francisco, and illegal under the same law in Salt Lake City.
Hit up Wikipedia, there's a lot of information about evolving decency standards.
The government doesn't have discretion - the jury does.
Here's what I'll say, reporting on press releases is always sloppy, but sometimes unavoidable. Reporting from inside the company is quality neutral: blogging from inside with a grudge is generally bad (exception for whistle blowing), blogging from inside without a grudge, i.e. objectively is good (exception for PR sanitized blogging - which is worse than reporting on press releases AND might be difficult to detect). Real investigative journalism is better than an inside man blogging.
If you don't use decent English, and it doesn't have to be perfect, you either don't care, or you're not intelligent enough to make insightful connections. Either way, a reasonable grasp of the English language is required for me to take someone seriously (comments - which are composed and posted impulsively have a lower standard.)
Metablogging is ok, but should not be confused with actual reporting. Ditto for the traditional media reporting on reporting or blogging.
Ok, I have a question for you. I assume you're looking at a number of metrics, accuracy, timeliness, grammar, etc. I think most of us would agree that accuracy is the most important, but it is also the hardest to identify if taken in isolation. So my question is, can a reasonably well informed person identify an inaccurate blog post based on other cues, such as grammar and language use?
The reason I ask is I get a reasonable portion of my news from blogs - and I think I'm pretty good at telling which ones are crap, and which ones get the story mostly right. Even on slashdot where story quality varies dramatically submitter to submitter and from editor to editor, I think I can usually gauge the quality of the story based on the summary (quality is usually inversely proportional to sensationalism). Failing that blog posts usually reference a source which I can double-check. And then there's the badsummary tag...
sorry replying to myself...
The Senate increases the stature of low population states, the house is more democratic. However, the number of house seats does very little to change the influence of any one constituency. States, however gerrymander their representative districts to serve the interests of the party in power at the time. No change in number of seats would undo this particularly sticky problem.
You're right about the first part (though really it's a representative democracy - but that's more or less a semantic difference) but trail off from there.
The 435 members of the house of representatives is essentially arbitrary, but the very reason for the house (and by extension the electoral college) is to increase the stature of low population states. One can argue that this is a provision that has outlived its usefulness, but it was part of the original intent - basically it was necessary to get the southern states to ratify the constitution.
The runner up as VP model was changed in the twelfth amendment. We decided (rightly) that it was a bad idea. The veep has only two essential duties of consequence: tie-breaker in the senate, and 2nd in line for the presidency. Remember, the constitution was drafted without regard for political parties, when they appeared that model was recognized as flawed. If that model were never changed veeps would be so marginalized as to be useless, and when a president died they'd be so far out of the loop it could cast the country into turmoil. They'd and they'd have to put up with all the appointments of their predecessor for at least a little while while they run their transition.
Unless they all yelled "I tried ejecting," I can think of a better way to make sure that information get's back to the project leaders.
I'm not going to sit here and argue that the UAW hasn't overreached, but it's not like if unions disappeared things wouldn't dramatically swing back in the other direction.
Look at health insurance and retirement, things that industry used to do, but now dumped on society (read: government) both of which are current or upcoming crises. Look at Walmart, minimize full time employees, maximize part-time workers, and skimp on benefits. Read about conditions in meat packing plants, a job that used to be unionized, but is increasingly held by immigrant workers.
Holy Godwin.
The American model is relatively rare, but that does not mean that it wasn't well thought out, nor does it mean that our chief executive has unchecked power. I'm not going to disagree with you that W has overstepped the constitutional limits of his power, but historically our system has been fairly remarkably resilient, with presidential power waxing and waning depending on the political climate. Andrew Jackson, Abe Lincoln, and FDR all expanded the power of the executive, and subsequent congresses have re-exerted their authority.
I'm not sure what model of government you consider superior, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that parliamentary governments, suffer from abuses as well. For one, coalition governments can be remarkably unstable and can be completely hamstrung if a working majority cannot be assembled. Further, to continue the theme of your post, the Wiemar Republic, a parliamentary government, legally handed power to Hitler. Finally, parliaments aren't above stunning human rights abuses, parliaments presided over Apartheid, and both sides of the ongoing Israel/Palestinian conflict.
Witness the strawman.
For the sake of argument I'll grant that the difference between building roads, providing public transportation, and giving away free cars is a difference of degree, rather than one of kind. Even still, it is in fact possible to avoid going over the slippery slope from common good to full blown communism, as a country we've been doing it for more than 200 years.
I'm sorry, but "common welfare" doesn't mean it has to be good for everyone individually, it just means it has to be good for society as a whole. The taxpayer funded establishment of Washington DC didn't benefit everyone, nor did the establishment of the post office, nor the first and second banks of the United States, and the people who wrote the constitution were directly involved in those endeavors.
Regardless of whether you believe if we should have welfare, social security, public education, public roads, universal health care, pollution regulation, a minimum wage, or national parks, any (reasonable) argument will center around whether the benefits outweighs the costs, since they all address common welfare in one aspect or another. You can bloviate about taxation being equivalent to theft, and rail about how all government projects are unconstitutional until the cows come home, and no one will take you seriously, when you call it a human rights violation you look like an ass.