element 115 is not given the name Elerium, in honour of the fictional element used to power the spacecraft in the XCOM series. Ununpentium is dull and doesn't really roll off the tongue!
Maybe it's about time you guys start electing people who are ready to make radical changes to the education system.
In the UK the recent changes to the higher education sector have made changes to allow universities to decide on tuition fees (something I strongly disagreed with), but thankfully imposed a 9000 pound cap. Maybe you guys across the pond should consider something similar to prevent the spiralling costs? Allowing something as vital as education to be governed by greed is asking for trouble.
Really? If you don't use a piece of software frequently enough that it's automatic update has failed to patch it past beta stage, are you really going to need the latest version when you're traveling? And where do you go that there is no net connection to update said important piece of software in a "OMG I really need $important_software version $latest RIGHT NOW!" moment?
Einstein had Faith that he was right, and had Faith that a challenge to his theories would even improve his understanding on them. He as well could have said: oki, forget it, it is not important, after all, who cares if the speed of light is always/everywhere the same.
Faith, trust, belief, all of these words mean taking something is true without any proof. None of these apply to science. Einstein looked at the results of experiments to understand the ether, postulated that the speed of light is finite and constant, and worked out the results. He then used his mathematical framework to make predictions and explain existing unexplained phenomena. Belief in the truth of what he discovered is entirely unnecessary, and should be discouraged as I mentioned previously. As a theoretical physicist I know many model builders who play the same sorts of games, and none of them believe that their model is correct (except maybe some string theorists but frankly the parameter space of those theories is probably large enough to contain any other theoretical model). They seek only to explore possibilities and try to explain previously unexplained phenomena.
Faith is also selfconfidence, sound foundation, trust in your own abilities, trust in your knowledge, and as you say: trust into your abilities to scrutinise what you think you know.
I see what you're getting at here, but they seem like word games to me. I'm sure most scientists are confident (have self-belief) in their ability to perform the mathematics and logical thinking required to explain B using A and predicting C, but that has no bearing on the correctness of A or even B.
You are perfectly right.
If scientists had no Faith into their science, they likely won't work in that field.
The rest is just a playing with words... science... faith... both don't necessarily have anything to do with religion.
Do you have faith that your child will pass his exams? If so: what has that to do with religion?
I have to disagree with you there. Faith is absolutely not required for science. In fact the scientific method requires the exact opposite. A true scientist questions everything, even the fundamentals. It is true that you usually work within a framework established over centuries of rigorous testing, but you should always be prepared, even encouraged to challenge that framework.
One famous example of a successful challenge to a widely held assumption is the constancy of the speed of light. Accepting the possibility of this, at the time, very strange idea led Einstein to his famous theories of special and general relativity.
Another example is the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. Even Einstein had trouble swallowing this one, adhering strongly to the assumption that the universe is deterministic, yet all hidden variables explanations have been discounted and now the probabilistic explanation is accepted.
Seriously? A look at wikipedia yields the following:
'The country houses 23 of the top 100 successful studios in the world'
'the country houses many of the world's most successful franchises such as Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto, Fable, DiRT and Total War'
Heard of those?
I find it very hard to believe that a for-profit healthcare provider would want to reduce the number of hospitalisations. What's in it for them? A sudden outbreak of conscience seems the least likely reason.
From the EU the US looks like its run by a bunch of bickering children, attacking rival politicians personal lives and blocking effective legislation out of petty spite, not to mention being entirely in the pockets of major corporations. Long live the benevolent tyrants!
I'm all for eco-everything, nature protection, responsible development. But the idea of the national (or, in the case of the EU, supra-national) government brutally interfering in the affairs of local administration is just horrible. Totalitarian to the bone.
I agree that the EU directorate does stick its nose where it doesn't belong on a few issues, although I agree with their proposal in this case. However concerning your comment on totalitarian behaviour by national governments, remember that in most EU countries the strong sense of independence of local regions (English counties for example) felt by many Americans towards their states has not existed for centuries for the most part, and local government is in general rather limited in power.
Your free market ideology only works when there is lots of competition. In the case of Apple; fine. You can buy a different computer. With Visa/Mastercard it gets more difficult, as there is not so much competition. If they discriminate against you for some trivial matter it seriously affects your life. What if you lived in New York and the NYC transit authority refused to serve you because they didn't like your skin colour, politics or some other triviality? You're screwed.
Also remember that only 12 grams of carbon contains 6*10^23 carbon atoms, and the processes that formed these chemicals went on for billions of years. On those sorts of scales, even mind-bogglingly small probabilities become almost certainties.
Maybe you can next tell me precisely what electricity actually is, what the "charge" of charged particles actually comes from and not merely how it behaves now that it's here.
Try reading any moderately advanced physics textbook on the subject of quantum field theory and you will see that the concept of charge (electric charge, colour in QCD, etc) arise simply from symmetries of the universe. In the case of electric charge, the symmetry is a local U(1) phase transformation.
Really? If gravity is so ordinary and non-mysterious, tell me precisely what it is then. Tell me what causes it. Not how it behaves, but what its actual origin is. Can't do that? Finding that this is a controversial subject with several competing explanations?
Gravity is a force that acts between objects of mass and also is likely associated with a symmetry of the universe, albeit a more complex and less well understood one. Yes there are many competing theories, but they are usually alot more well thought out than 'God dun it'.
Below these comments you attack current theories of gravity and the origins of mass due to lack of observations of gravitons and the Higgs boson. It is true that there is some leeway as to whats going on there, but always remember that any theory posited *must* be consistent with massive amounts of experimental data which puts serious limits on what you can do without building an overly complex (and thus less likely) theory.
Yet if I take a handful of metal parts and shake them up and toss them in the air, I don't expect that a fully-assembled, fully-functional watch is going to land in my lap. You need something like that to get life from non-life.
Oversimplification. Those metal parts do not self-reproduce, nor is a metal watch a useful evolutionary configuration for a set of metal parts if they could. I doubt you will find any scientific disagreement with the origin of life as being anything other than a self-sustaining chemical reaction arising naturally from a potent stew of chemicals in a turbulent environment.
Well, no, they solicited them from the disgruntled soldier, and promised him glory and fame.
Evidence?
I'm the one here who knows the difference between properly classified information and improperly classified information, and how to get improperly classified information declassified properly, so that it doesn't harm anyone who shouldn't be harmed.
I'm not talking about leaking documents from the 1950s about UFO sightings or some bollocks, I'm talking here about current and relevant secrets about the people in power who will do their utmost to prevent those secrets from getting out. I'd like to live in your happy little world where the government will willingly release this information in exchange for a politely worded letter.
My precious democracy is already fascist, since the Supreme Court, which is packed with fascists, declared that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns without revealing anything about it.
I agree with you on this one. Tell me then why you aren't out there fighting to change this? Julian Assange is.
Well no. They did not solicit any secrets. They were given them by a disgruntled soldier.
Are you really so blind as to believe that people in government don't do unlawful and unethical things all the time under the cover of national security? Remember that power corrupts. Wikileaks provide a vital service in allowing whistleblowers to expose these practises, now that most of the old newspapers are too gutless to do this. Without these organisations you will find your precious 'democracy' moving ever closer to fascism.
Granted they are not a brick and mortar establishment but I disagree that they are not a journalistic organisation.
Also I doubt Wikileaks gave a crap about the governments opinion of its redactment policies, more likely they were concerned about putting people in danger.
You're missing the point. Because it is not falsifiable it is not science. The parent poster made no comments about whether it actually happened.
Also, 100ft rogue waves may have seemed impossible to those scientists you mention, but it is clearly testable - you just have to wait for or even stimulate a 100ft wave! Perhaps you could model it on a computer. Lots of possibilities. It is therefore science.
You cannot test creationism. You cannot model it or do experiments. It is therefore NOT SCIENCE.
Apples and Oranges. You can't compare downloading software for personal use with stealing other people's source code to use in your own paid-for application.
You might have apples and pears (green at least) if you compared people who sell pirate software to those who steal source code./p?
In the UK at least, if you do badly in your high school tests you can often resit the exam at a later date, although universities will often demand that people resitting exams score higher on the resit than during the first sitting. If you fail twice then you are not likely to be good enough for university anyway.
There are other routes however; people who did not do well at school can do courses at a community college to gain the equivalent of a high school diploma, which they can then used to apply to universities. There is also the Open University, which is a well respected institution offering degree level courses to anyone, which you study for in your spare time. People often take this route if they want to further their education without giving up their job.
I do not like the idea of these for-profit colleges as they will cut corners in order to reduce costs and will exploit their students.
There will always be people who are just not insured. This is life, nobody said it was going to be pleasant.
This is exactly the attitude that I find abhorrent. We don't have to accept the 'life is tough, deal with it' mentality that seems so ingrained in US society. All I see is just a bunch of greedy selfish people who are content to let the world fall apart around their ears, just as long as the gub'ment isn't taking away their money.
Once the public money was introduced into the system, it immediately created an incentive for the insurance companies and health care providers to jack up the prices.
The government didn't have to let them raise the prices. The problem is not the government involvement, but the fact that they tried to get away with half-measures.
Do I see government as the ultimate solution to this problem? A resounding NO! NEVER!
In my home country, the UK, we have had free universal health care for all citizens since the end of the Second World War, and while the system has its warts it is far better than the US system which leaves so many people to their deaths. The French universal health care system is also excellent.Government control of health care can and does work.
The only correct solution is to make health insurance and health care affordable. This is only possible through competition and complete abolition of all government involvement into the medical insurance and care.
While ideally one might imagine that complete abolition of government involvement in health care might lower prices, it has been shown time and time again that in fact it just leads to monopolies and price-fixing, both of which in the health industry will mean people DYING. How is it that a system driven by the need to pursue money without any morals or qualms will result in anything other than evil? No, the only correct solution is for the government to take over and manage the system in the interests of the people. However, with the rabid lunatics in the Republican party throthing at the mouth every time someone mentions increasing taxes, there is no way this will happen in the US.
I'm sure they're doing a great job for those who can afford it. But what about the estimated 45,000 people who die every year for lack of health insurance? Somewhere around 45 million Americans are uninsured, or almost 15% of the population! Do you not see anything wrong with this picture?
Personally I find it abhorrent to trust the health of my country to corporate entities that treat lifesaving medicines as 'products' and dying people as 'consumers', and who have proved time and time again that they are willing to drop all dregs of morality that once existed in their black souls for a quick buck.
I would much rather have the government in charge, because at least in principle they care for the well-being of every citizen and not just the selfish pricks who are happy to let thousands of their fellow countrymen die as long as it doesn't affect their income.
Slashdot Mirror
element 115 is not given the name Elerium, in honour of the fictional element used to power the spacecraft in the XCOM series. Ununpentium is dull and doesn't really roll off the tongue!
Maybe it's about time you guys start electing people who are ready to make radical changes to the education system.
In the UK the recent changes to the higher education sector have made changes to allow universities to decide on tuition fees (something I strongly disagreed with), but thankfully imposed a 9000 pound cap. Maybe you guys across the pond should consider something similar to prevent the spiralling costs? Allowing something as vital as education to be governed by greed is asking for trouble.
Really? If you don't use a piece of software frequently enough that it's automatic update has failed to patch it past beta stage, are you really going to need the latest version when you're traveling? And where do you go that there is no net connection to update said important piece of software in a "OMG I really need $important_software version $latest RIGHT NOW!" moment?
Einstein had Faith that he was right, and had Faith that a challenge to his theories would even improve his understanding on them. He as well could have said: oki, forget it, it is not important, after all, who cares if the speed of light is always/everywhere the same.
Faith, trust, belief, all of these words mean taking something is true without any proof. None of these apply to science. Einstein looked at the results of experiments to understand the ether, postulated that the speed of light is finite and constant, and worked out the results. He then used his mathematical framework to make predictions and explain existing unexplained phenomena. Belief in the truth of what he discovered is entirely unnecessary, and should be discouraged as I mentioned previously. As a theoretical physicist I know many model builders who play the same sorts of games, and none of them believe that their model is correct (except maybe some string theorists but frankly the parameter space of those theories is probably large enough to contain any other theoretical model). They seek only to explore possibilities and try to explain previously unexplained phenomena.
Faith is also selfconfidence, sound foundation, trust in your own abilities, trust in your knowledge, and as you say: trust into your abilities to scrutinise what you think you know.
I see what you're getting at here, but they seem like word games to me. I'm sure most scientists are confident (have self-belief) in their ability to perform the mathematics and logical thinking required to explain B using A and predicting C, but that has no bearing on the correctness of A or even B.
You are perfectly right. If scientists had no Faith into their science, they likely won't work in that field. The rest is just a playing with words ... science ... faith ... both don't necessarily have anything to do with religion.
Do you have faith that your child will pass his exams? If so: what has that to do with religion?
I have to disagree with you there. Faith is absolutely not required for science. In fact the scientific method requires the exact opposite. A true scientist questions everything, even the fundamentals. It is true that you usually work within a framework established over centuries of rigorous testing, but you should always be prepared, even encouraged to challenge that framework.
One famous example of a successful challenge to a widely held assumption is the constancy of the speed of light. Accepting the possibility of this, at the time, very strange idea led Einstein to his famous theories of special and general relativity.
Another example is the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. Even Einstein had trouble swallowing this one, adhering strongly to the assumption that the universe is deterministic, yet all hidden variables explanations have been discounted and now the probabilistic explanation is accepted.
Seriously? A look at wikipedia yields the following: 'The country houses 23 of the top 100 successful studios in the world' 'the country houses many of the world's most successful franchises such as Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto, Fable, DiRT and Total War' Heard of those?
I find it very hard to believe that a for-profit healthcare provider would want to reduce the number of hospitalisations. What's in it for them? A sudden outbreak of conscience seems the least likely reason.
From the EU the US looks like its run by a bunch of bickering children, attacking rival politicians personal lives and blocking effective legislation out of petty spite, not to mention being entirely in the pockets of major corporations. Long live the benevolent tyrants!
I'm all for eco-everything, nature protection, responsible development. But the idea of the national (or, in the case of the EU, supra-national) government brutally interfering in the affairs of local administration is just horrible. Totalitarian to the bone.
I agree that the EU directorate does stick its nose where it doesn't belong on a few issues, although I agree with their proposal in this case. However concerning your comment on totalitarian behaviour by national governments, remember that in most EU countries the strong sense of independence of local regions (English counties for example) felt by many Americans towards their states has not existed for centuries for the most part, and local government is in general rather limited in power.
Your free market ideology only works when there is lots of competition. In the case of Apple; fine. You can buy a different computer. With Visa/Mastercard it gets more difficult, as there is not so much competition. If they discriminate against you for some trivial matter it seriously affects your life. What if you lived in New York and the NYC transit authority refused to serve you because they didn't like your skin colour, politics or some other triviality? You're screwed.
Maybe the cooler cases allows them to overclock to CPU while still retaining decent stability?
Also remember that only 12 grams of carbon contains 6*10^23 carbon atoms, and the processes that formed these chemicals went on for billions of years. On those sorts of scales, even mind-bogglingly small probabilities become almost certainties.
Maybe you can next tell me precisely what electricity actually is, what the "charge" of charged particles actually comes from and not merely how it behaves now that it's here.
Try reading any moderately advanced physics textbook on the subject of quantum field theory and you will see that the concept of charge (electric charge, colour in QCD, etc) arise simply from symmetries of the universe. In the case of electric charge, the symmetry is a local U(1) phase transformation.
Really? If gravity is so ordinary and non-mysterious, tell me precisely what it is then. Tell me what causes it. Not how it behaves, but what its actual origin is. Can't do that? Finding that this is a controversial subject with several competing explanations?
Gravity is a force that acts between objects of mass and also is likely associated with a symmetry of the universe, albeit a more complex and less well understood one. Yes there are many competing theories, but they are usually alot more well thought out than 'God dun it'. Below these comments you attack current theories of gravity and the origins of mass due to lack of observations of gravitons and the Higgs boson. It is true that there is some leeway as to whats going on there, but always remember that any theory posited *must* be consistent with massive amounts of experimental data which puts serious limits on what you can do without building an overly complex (and thus less likely) theory.
Yet if I take a handful of metal parts and shake them up and toss them in the air, I don't expect that a fully-assembled, fully-functional watch is going to land in my lap. You need something like that to get life from non-life.
Oversimplification. Those metal parts do not self-reproduce, nor is a metal watch a useful evolutionary configuration for a set of metal parts if they could. I doubt you will find any scientific disagreement with the origin of life as being anything other than a self-sustaining chemical reaction arising naturally from a potent stew of chemicals in a turbulent environment.
Well, no, they solicited them from the disgruntled soldier, and promised him glory and fame.
Evidence?
I'm the one here who knows the difference between properly classified information and improperly classified information, and how to get improperly classified information declassified properly, so that it doesn't harm anyone who shouldn't be harmed.
I'm not talking about leaking documents from the 1950s about UFO sightings or some bollocks, I'm talking here about current and relevant secrets about the people in power who will do their utmost to prevent those secrets from getting out. I'd like to live in your happy little world where the government will willingly release this information in exchange for a politely worded letter.
My precious democracy is already fascist, since the Supreme Court, which is packed with fascists, declared that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns without revealing anything about it.
I agree with you on this one. Tell me then why you aren't out there fighting to change this? Julian Assange is.
Well no. They did not solicit any secrets. They were given them by a disgruntled soldier.
Are you really so blind as to believe that people in government don't do unlawful and unethical things all the time under the cover of national security? Remember that power corrupts. Wikileaks provide a vital service in allowing whistleblowers to expose these practises, now that most of the old newspapers are too gutless to do this. Without these organisations you will find your precious 'democracy' moving ever closer to fascism.
Wikileaks is not a journalistic organization
Granted they are not a brick and mortar establishment but I disagree that they are not a journalistic organisation.
Also I doubt Wikileaks gave a crap about the governments opinion of its redactment policies, more likely they were concerned about putting people in danger.
The New York Times, Guardian, Der Spiegel, El Pais and La Monde also printed the US Embassy cables. If Wikileaks committed a crime then so did they.
This wouldn't be a problem if your restaurants paid their workers a decent wage rather than relying on tips.
You're missing the point. Because it is not falsifiable it is not science. The parent poster made no comments about whether it actually happened.
Also, 100ft rogue waves may have seemed impossible to those scientists you mention, but it is clearly testable - you just have to wait for or even stimulate a 100ft wave! Perhaps you could model it on a computer. Lots of possibilities. It is therefore science.
You cannot test creationism. You cannot model it or do experiments. It is therefore NOT SCIENCE.
Better than being copied directly from last week's Slashdot listings!
Apples and Oranges. You can't compare downloading software for personal use with stealing other people's source code to use in your own paid-for application.
You might have apples and pears (green at least) if you compared people who sell pirate software to those who steal source code./p?
In the UK at least, if you do badly in your high school tests you can often resit the exam at a later date, although universities will often demand that people resitting exams score higher on the resit than during the first sitting. If you fail twice then you are not likely to be good enough for university anyway.
There are other routes however; people who did not do well at school can do courses at a community college to gain the equivalent of a high school diploma, which they can then used to apply to universities. There is also the Open University, which is a well respected institution offering degree level courses to anyone, which you study for in your spare time. People often take this route if they want to further their education without giving up their job.
I do not like the idea of these for-profit colleges as they will cut corners in order to reduce costs and will exploit their students.
There will always be people who are just not insured. This is life, nobody said it was going to be pleasant.
This is exactly the attitude that I find abhorrent. We don't have to accept the 'life is tough, deal with it' mentality that seems so ingrained in US society. All I see is just a bunch of greedy selfish people who are content to let the world fall apart around their ears, just as long as the gub'ment isn't taking away their money.
Once the public money was introduced into the system, it immediately created an incentive for the insurance companies and health care providers to jack up the prices.
The government didn't have to let them raise the prices. The problem is not the government involvement, but the fact that they tried to get away with half-measures.
Do I see government as the ultimate solution to this problem? A resounding NO! NEVER!
In my home country, the UK, we have had free universal health care for all citizens since the end of the Second World War, and while the system has its warts it is far better than the US system which leaves so many people to their deaths. The French universal health care system is also excellent.Government control of health care can and does work.
The only correct solution is to make health insurance and health care affordable. This is only possible through competition and complete abolition of all government involvement into the medical insurance and care.
While ideally one might imagine that complete abolition of government involvement in health care might lower prices, it has been shown time and time again that in fact it just leads to monopolies and price-fixing, both of which in the health industry will mean people DYING. How is it that a system driven by the need to pursue money without any morals or qualms will result in anything other than evil? No, the only correct solution is for the government to take over and manage the system in the interests of the people. However, with the rabid lunatics in the Republican party throthing at the mouth every time someone mentions increasing taxes, there is no way this will happen in the US.
I'm sure they're doing a great job for those who can afford it. But what about the estimated 45,000 people who die every year for lack of health insurance? Somewhere around 45 million Americans are uninsured, or almost 15% of the population! Do you not see anything wrong with this picture?
Personally I find it abhorrent to trust the health of my country to corporate entities that treat lifesaving medicines as 'products' and dying people as 'consumers', and who have proved time and time again that they are willing to drop all dregs of morality that once existed in their black souls for a quick buck. I would much rather have the government in charge, because at least in principle they care for the well-being of every citizen and not just the selfish pricks who are happy to let thousands of their fellow countrymen die as long as it doesn't affect their income.