Terms like "Invisible Sky Daddy" are not meant to insult and degrade. They are meant to highlight the irrationality of such beliefs in the hope that the otherwise rational individuals who hold them might reassess their beliefs and ultimately reject them.
Speaking as somebody who was also "bored" in high school, I have come to realize in adulthood that "bored" is just a way of saying "unmotivated" without accepting any personal responsibility. If you want a good education, you need to take charge of it yourself; it's as simple as that.
Read that Wikipedia paragraph again. It's weirdly phrased, but what it's saying is that in the clinical trials the drug didn't work when used as an adjuvant treatment. As a primary treatment, which is how it appears to have been prescribed in the Telegraph article, Avastin is an approved drug with supporting clinical evidence.
I'm not sure what exactly you think we have that is going to kill every living thing on earth. Weaponized biological agents are engineered to infect humans. The majority of species are immune to them, just as we humans tend to be immune to diseases that infect trees or fish. These are also things that have been around for ages without destroying the biosphere. We modern humans didn't create anthrax; we merely engineered some more lethal strains of it. Besides which, many such agents are themselves biotic in nature. Even if anthrax somehow managed to kill off every other species on the planet, there would still be life on earth in the form of anthrax.
As for the world's nuclear arsenal, many weapons would probably decay over time rather than spontaneously detonate. If detonations did occur, the effects would be highly localized. Even if these resulted in thousands of years of local contamination, that is still an extremely short time on the biological scale, and the rest of the world would be minimally affected.
A nuclear war would be another story, but even then the bombs would be focused on the human population centers, not spread evenly across the globe. Nobody is likely to target Antarctica or the ocean floor for nuclear destruction. A nuclear war would cause severe global climate change, and this would lead to mass extinction, but life has survived plenty of mass extinctions before, and it would survive again were this to happen.
Is a stable micro black hole even dangerous? The numbers I've seen show a black hole like this would behave more or less like a neutrino. Maybe hitting an atom every few thousand or million years. The sun will enter its red giant stage, destroy Earth, and shrink down to a white dwarf before the black hole gains any significant mass. I don't think we will care much at that point.
It sounds like one stable micro black hole would not be dangerous. From the estimates I've heard, the LHC could produce as many as 1 black hole per second. I'm not clear on what proportion of its time the LHC would actually be running, but suppose that over the course of its lifetime, it spends 1 full year colliding particles.
One stable micro black hole might be safe. What about 30,000,000 of them?
What makes it a black hole isn't the absolute strength of its gravity. It's the fact that it's compressed, which means that you can get much, MUCH closer to its center of mass. Remember, the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of distance, and that makes the force skyrocket as you get closer and closer.
Conceptually, take your lead ball and place a particle at the surface, say a centimeter away from its center of mass. The gravitational force on the particle is negligible. Now collapse the lead ball into a black hole - its radius is now something like 10^-30 meters. While the particle is still a centimeter away, the force it experiences remains unchanged - but move it to the surface (the event horizon) once again, and it is now 10^28 times closer than it was before. The gravitational force on it increases by a factor of 10^56!
As an aside, a stellar mass black hole isn't the size of an atomic nucleus. It's about 30 km in radius, or about the size of Rhode Island.
You're correct in that the effect of gravity from the black hole itself would be negligible from any measurable distance. However, anything coming into contact with the event horizon would be absorbed into the black hole, whether it was sucked in by gravity or not. So the way I see it being dangerous is this:
Black hole forms, has enough mass to prevent instant evaporation.
Being by far the densest object on the planet, the black hole quickly sinks to the center of the earth.
The immense pressures at the earth's core ensure that the black hole gets plenty of fuel, in the form of liquid rock.
As the earth's core is consumed by the black hole, the rest of the earth collapses around it, until eventually the entire planet is consumed.
So ironically, the earth would actually be destroyed by its own gravity, not that of the black hole.
Nope. Try following the link in the actual article:
"IPv6 address space given out: 143645.78/32s in 3090 blocks out of 536870912 possible/32s in the currently defined global unicast space (2000::/3) = 0.027%."
0.027% of the IPv6 address space has been given out. Since the addresses are given out in large blocks, that doesn't mean that each and every address given out is actively being used.
Okay, firstly, a 23% sales tax isn't going to add $6 to the price of a $5 item, so it should be immediately obvious that your numbers are off. The actual final prices will be $5 * (1 +.06 +.23) = $6.45 and $6 * (1 +.06 +.23) = $7.74.
Secondly, assume for the moment your figures were correct. Then Wal-Mart does have the advantage, because what is important is the difference between the percentages, which grows, and not the fact that both percentages increased by the same factor. However, since the percentages actually decrease by the same factor, the difference shrinks, and Wal-Mart in fact appears to be losing advantage under FairTax.
I think that's a bit of a stretch. De Sphaera Mundi was one of the most influential astronomical textbooks of the middle ages. Anyone in the intended audience for Copernicus' work would be likely to have read it and would already know exactly where the ideas came from.
Did you even read cbv's post before responding? The claim wasn't that Copernicus borrowed from Galileo, but rather from Johannes de Sacrobosco, whose Tractatus de Sphaera was published in 1230. If you're going to denounce the post, at least try to say something relevant.
The length of your post and your belief that you can characterize someone on the basis of 1000 or so words written on a single subject makes me believe that you are a troll.
To the best of my knowledge, the laws of thermodynamics have never been tested with respect to time travel, so how can you possibly make that assertion? That's like some 19th century scientist arguing that relativity is impossible because it's not accounted for by Newton's laws of motion. The laws of thermodynamics have held up so far, but that may be only because we have so far been unable to observe the exceptions.
Unless you're a relatively new user on that system, it's going to take a lot of low-demand torrents to hurt your share ratio that severely, and in my experience with seeding, this occurs very infrequently. I suppose I could have just been lucky up until now, though. Obviously, it's important to be lenient to the new users while they establish a share ratio, but beyond that I just can't see this as a potential problem.
True, but as a file transfer system becomes easier for novices to use, it is likely to draw users who aren't "serious", who cancel the upload as soon as the download completes. And if you try to enforce share ratios on a registered tracker, remember that the mean share ratio across all users is exactly 1.0; therefore not everybody can have a cumulative ratio >= 1.0. What happens when demand falls off for a file, and though you leave the upload going, nobody downloads more than a couple megabytes for days?
Then you're out of luck, and your share ratio suffers a little bit. Fortunately, this only becomes a problem if the enforced ratio is too high and/or it happens repeatedly to the same user.
I have no experience administering any sort of torrent-based file repository myself, but I imagine that the equation R' = (1 - R * G) / (1 - G) should hold, where G is the fraction of "good" users, R is the average ratio those "good" users, and R' is the average ratio over the other users necessary to maintain the system. R and G can both be easily measured using some simple assumptions about what constitutes a "good" user. R' can thus be used as a starting point for setting the enforced ratio, although it really should be set a bit less than R' to permit some spread in the distribution. Note the following two properties that hold under the reasonable assumptions that G > 0 and R > 1:
R' < 1
Whenever a user gets booted from the system for failing to meet the enforced ratio, that user is almost certainly a "bad" user and will not be missed. As a result, G increases, and R' correspondingly decreases. The system is therefore at least somewhat self-correcting.
So you put the evil function call in plain sight later on in the source, and in the entangled evil-looking comments you hide the code that disables it.
I know exactly squat about Plan 9, so correct me if I'm quoting out of context or something, but according to the second site you linked:
In Plan 9, the kernel mount device mnt(3) acts as a client to the 9P servers mounted in the current name space, translating system calls such as open(2) into 9P transactions such as open(9p). The kernel also multiplexes the potentially many processes onto a single 9P conversation with each server. Finally, the kernel provides each process with its own private name space which it can customize at will. Modern Unix systems do not provide these niceties, so the Unix port of these Plan 9 file servers provides them via other means.
On Unix, 9P clients do not access servers via the traditional file system call interface. Only the Unix name space can be accessed that way. Instead, 9P clients use the 9pclient(3) library to connect and interact directly with particular 9P servers. The 9p(1) command-line client is useful for interactive use and in shell scripts.
In other words, it's only in user-space if you're not running Plan 9, in which case it does more or less the same thing that KDE does.
Slashdot Mirror
Terms like "Invisible Sky Daddy" are not meant to insult and degrade. They are meant to highlight the irrationality of such beliefs in the hope that the otherwise rational individuals who hold them might reassess their beliefs and ultimately reject them.
Speaking as somebody who was also "bored" in high school, I have come to realize in adulthood that "bored" is just a way of saying "unmotivated" without accepting any personal responsibility. If you want a good education, you need to take charge of it yourself; it's as simple as that.
Read that Wikipedia paragraph again. It's weirdly phrased, but what it's saying is that in the clinical trials the drug didn't work when used as an adjuvant treatment. As a primary treatment, which is how it appears to have been prescribed in the Telegraph article, Avastin is an approved drug with supporting clinical evidence.
I'm not sure what exactly you think we have that is going to kill every living thing on earth. Weaponized biological agents are engineered to infect humans. The majority of species are immune to them, just as we humans tend to be immune to diseases that infect trees or fish. These are also things that have been around for ages without destroying the biosphere. We modern humans didn't create anthrax; we merely engineered some more lethal strains of it. Besides which, many such agents are themselves biotic in nature. Even if anthrax somehow managed to kill off every other species on the planet, there would still be life on earth in the form of anthrax.
As for the world's nuclear arsenal, many weapons would probably decay over time rather than spontaneously detonate. If detonations did occur, the effects would be highly localized. Even if these resulted in thousands of years of local contamination, that is still an extremely short time on the biological scale, and the rest of the world would be minimally affected.
A nuclear war would be another story, but even then the bombs would be focused on the human population centers, not spread evenly across the globe. Nobody is likely to target Antarctica or the ocean floor for nuclear destruction. A nuclear war would cause severe global climate change, and this would lead to mass extinction, but life has survived plenty of mass extinctions before, and it would survive again were this to happen.
Is a stable micro black hole even dangerous? The numbers I've seen show a black hole like this would behave more or less like a neutrino. Maybe hitting an atom every few thousand or million years. The sun will enter its red giant stage, destroy Earth, and shrink down to a white dwarf before the black hole gains any significant mass. I don't think we will care much at that point.
It sounds like one stable micro black hole would not be dangerous. From the estimates I've heard, the LHC could produce as many as 1 black hole per second. I'm not clear on what proportion of its time the LHC would actually be running, but suppose that over the course of its lifetime, it spends 1 full year colliding particles.
One stable micro black hole might be safe. What about 30,000,000 of them?
What makes it a black hole isn't the absolute strength of its gravity. It's the fact that it's compressed, which means that you can get much, MUCH closer to its center of mass. Remember, the force of gravity is inversely proportional to the square of distance, and that makes the force skyrocket as you get closer and closer.
Conceptually, take your lead ball and place a particle at the surface, say a centimeter away from its center of mass. The gravitational force on the particle is negligible. Now collapse the lead ball into a black hole - its radius is now something like 10^-30 meters. While the particle is still a centimeter away, the force it experiences remains unchanged - but move it to the surface (the event horizon) once again, and it is now 10^28 times closer than it was before. The gravitational force on it increases by a factor of 10^56!
As an aside, a stellar mass black hole isn't the size of an atomic nucleus. It's about 30 km in radius, or about the size of Rhode Island.
So ironically, the earth would actually be destroyed by its own gravity, not that of the black hole.
They do. 47 + 28 + 20 + 18 + 11 + 6 = 130, which sounds about right to me.
There's some overlap caused by projects that use multiple languages. I wouldn't expect either set of numbers to add up to 100%.
Nope. Try following the link in the actual article: "IPv6 address space given out: 143645.78 /32s in 3090 blocks out of 536870912 possible /32s in the currently defined global unicast space (2000::/3) = 0.027%."
0.027% of the IPv6 address space has been given out. Since the addresses are given out in large blocks, that doesn't mean that each and every address given out is actively being used.
Okay, firstly, a 23% sales tax isn't going to add $6 to the price of a $5 item, so it should be immediately obvious that your numbers are off. The actual final prices will be $5 * (1 + .06 + .23) = $6.45 and $6 * (1 + .06 + .23) = $7.74.
Secondly, assume for the moment your figures were correct. Then Wal-Mart does have the advantage, because what is important is the difference between the percentages, which grows, and not the fact that both percentages increased by the same factor. However, since the percentages actually decrease by the same factor, the difference shrinks, and Wal-Mart in fact appears to be losing advantage under FairTax.
I think that's a bit of a stretch. De Sphaera Mundi was one of the most influential astronomical textbooks of the middle ages. Anyone in the intended audience for Copernicus' work would be likely to have read it and would already know exactly where the ideas came from.
Did you even read cbv's post before responding? The claim wasn't that Copernicus borrowed from Galileo, but rather from Johannes de Sacrobosco, whose Tractatus de Sphaera was published in 1230. If you're going to denounce the post, at least try to say something relevant.
The length of your post and your belief that you can characterize someone on the basis of 1000 or so words written on a single subject makes me believe that you are a troll.
You know the exact state of the air around you and exactly how you would need to interact with it in the past in order to change it? I sure don't.
To the best of my knowledge, the laws of thermodynamics have never been tested with respect to time travel, so how can you possibly make that assertion? That's like some 19th century scientist arguing that relativity is impossible because it's not accounted for by Newton's laws of motion. The laws of thermodynamics have held up so far, but that may be only because we have so far been unable to observe the exceptions.
- The government are the bad guys. (not cool in the post-9/11 world)
Sure is a good thing then that Fox didn't produce The X-Files. :-)
Then again, Clinton was in office almost the entire time X-Files was running, so maybe you have a point.
Unless you're a relatively new user on that system, it's going to take a lot of low-demand torrents to hurt your share ratio that severely, and in my experience with seeding, this occurs very infrequently. I suppose I could have just been lucky up until now, though. Obviously, it's important to be lenient to the new users while they establish a share ratio, but beyond that I just can't see this as a potential problem.
True, but as a file transfer system becomes easier for novices to use, it is likely to draw users who aren't "serious", who cancel the upload as soon as the download completes. And if you try to enforce share ratios on a registered tracker, remember that the mean share ratio across all users is exactly 1.0; therefore not everybody can have a cumulative ratio >= 1.0. What happens when demand falls off for a file, and though you leave the upload going, nobody downloads more than a couple megabytes for days?
Then you're out of luck, and your share ratio suffers a little bit. Fortunately, this only becomes a problem if the enforced ratio is too high and/or it happens repeatedly to the same user.
I have no experience administering any sort of torrent-based file repository myself, but I imagine that the equation R' = (1 - R * G) / (1 - G) should hold, where G is the fraction of "good" users, R is the average ratio those "good" users, and R' is the average ratio over the other users necessary to maintain the system. R and G can both be easily measured using some simple assumptions about what constitutes a "good" user. R' can thus be used as a starting point for setting the enforced ratio, although it really should be set a bit less than R' to permit some spread in the distribution. Note the following two properties that hold under the reasonable assumptions that G > 0 and R > 1:
I'm not sure I see your point. If there's no longer any demand for the file, then there's no bandwidth problem to speak of.
Or from their handwriting. That one is still used occasionally.
So you put the evil function call in plain sight later on in the source, and in the entangled evil-looking comments you hide the code that disables it.
Just FYI, both bash and tcsh do the same thing with backticks. There's no reason this couldn't be a shell script with only slightly modified syntax.
I know exactly squat about Plan 9, so correct me if I'm quoting out of context or something, but according to the second site you linked:
In other words, it's only in user-space if you're not running Plan 9, in which case it does more or less the same thing that KDE does.