So basically, you only have PRIVACY when you are in PRIVATE. When you're in PUBLIC, you have no privacy. What's the problem, exactly? That you can't use public spaces without being accountable for your actions?
Science Against Evolution is a California Public Benefit Corporation whose objective is to make the general public aware that the theory of evolution is not consistent with physical evidence and is no longer a respectable theory describing the origin of life.
Considering that the theory of evolution does not say anything about the origins of life (merely how new species arise from old ones, where at least one species already exists), it's hard to see how this statement is of any use whatsoever.
The three main "claims", further down the page, sound just like every other bit of creationist nonsense I've read. "Like begets like"? Give me a break. Scales would have had to evolve into hair? Uh, yeah, I'd like to see you point out where evolutionary scientists make that claim.
Television is analogous to alcohol. Too much of it is bad for you; not in the same way, certainly, but passively absorbing entertainment is as mentally degenerative as chugging liquor is bad for your liver. Experiencing it socially, with friends or family, in limited quantities, is okay, but more than that and it's basically an unhealthy addiction.
And yeah, some people can resist it better; I know at least one person who probably watches 20 hours of TV a week, and is also insanely intelligent, interested in vast numbers of things not related to TV, always has lots of energy, etc. But most people are not like this.
Do what I did. Pick one or two shows you really like, and watch only those. Leave your TV off the rest of the time. Read more books. Go for a run. Go to the gym. Play a sport. Write your senators and representatives, and tell them what political issues you're angry about!
Re:American Culture Not That Bad
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Always remember this: The opposite of "pro-choice" is not "pro-life." It is "anti-choice."
Except that Dr. Brown wants to use the idea to disprove the theory of evolution. The amount that the speed of light would need to change to be of any use to creation "science" (which is about as far from scientific as you can get) is orders of magnitude higher than what's been detected here.
There is no logical reason why an author of a work should have any control over what someone who has legally obtained a physical copy of that work (or the physical original, in the case of unique works) does to it in private. If I take a copy of "Armageddon," modify it so that Ben Affleck is now Vin Diesel, and watch it at home, I have in no tangible way harmed the author of the work. At worst, the author's feelings might be hurt that I didn't think their work was good enough, but that is not sufficient reason to establish a law.
Additionally, this kind of supposed "crime" (modifying copyrighted works in the privacy of your own home) is unenforceable. You would need constant Big Brother-style invasions of privacy into every home in the country to make sure nobody was modifying a copyrighted work. What if I decided to throw it away, or rip it in half? Nope, I can't even dispose of it -- because that's a form of modification.
If I try to redistribute the work in certain ways, then yeah, he should have the legal power to stop me -- but what I do, privately, with my own physical property, is none of his business. Privately modifying such a work in no way harms him.
Now, the Constitution says that authors are reserved the "exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Well, this presumably means that the author has, by default, *all* rights regarding his created work, and anyone else has none. You have no rights regarding someone else's copyrighted work, unless they specifically grant you those rights...
...except that there's this thing called Fair Use. The idea there is that you DO have certain rights to others' copyrighted works, that they CANNOT keep from you, and that you receive merely by virute of legally acquiring the work or a copy of the work. Whether something is Fair Use has been mostly decided by case law, not statute, and a lot of it depends on what the use is. If the use is entirely noncommercial and personal (i.e. only you ever see it), usually that's considered Fair Use. Why? Because it doesn't harm the author, or the author's "exclusive Right".
I hope nobody with a photographic memory gets to go to the movies, then. They'd only ever have to see a movie once, thus depriving the hard-working movie industry of any repeat business, which, as we all know, is equivalent to not only stealing, but ROBBING, RAPING, AND MURDERING PEOPLE ON THE HIGH SEAS!!
Now we know where whirlpools come from: Blackbeard spinning in his watery grave fast enough to create a new subduction zone.
Although to be fair, Torvalds is not a standard Swedish surname.
Linus Torvalds is Finnish, not Swedish. Regardless, it's simple laziness to make assumptions about peoples' names like that -- there are far too many people with very slightly "nonstandard" names. A ten-second search on Google would have returned more than 600,000 hits for "Linus Torvalds" versus 8,000 for "Linus Torvald", but apparently that was too much effort.
Well, here in the real world, people usually call themselves by their country of origin. Do you honestly exepect us to believe that Brazilians, Cubans, Columbians, Canadians, and Mexicans think of themselves as "Americans" at all, let alone taking priority before "Brazilian", "Cuban", "Columbian", "Canadian", and "Mexican"? Please.
I hate to be pedantic (aw, who am I kidding, I love being pedantic), but in general, saying "it's just a theory" is... well... not a good idea. (The page you referenced has a lot of bullshit new-agey stuff about higher dimensions and so on, but that's neither here nor there. Remember, "newage" rhymes with "sewage".:) )
To a scientist, a "theory" is something that explains all or most of the known evidence, is well-supported by facts, and makes testable predictions. Many well-established things like universal gravitation, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and so forth, are all "theories".
The word you're probably looking for is "hypothesis", which means "an idea that potentially explains the facts, but isn't yet well-supported and well-tested enough to be considered a theory."
Of course, it's a pretty smooth continuum between the places where an idea is considered a "hypothesis" and where it becomes a "theory" but dismissing a scientific theory as "just a theory" is misguided at best.
It's interesting to note the fairly casual attitude everyone in the thread has toward this potential bug. Basically, they seem to be saying, "Yeah, it'll be an issue, I guess, but people will deal with it then, hey here's a funny story..."
Not that there's anything wrong with that attitude, but it does indicate two things: One, that even hardcore geeks (i.e. people who had email addresses in 1985) can be complacent about things that seem a long way off (rather than fixing it long before it'll become a problem, as would be "ideal", for suitable definitions of ideal); and two, that computers were not the societally pervasive force that they've become in the last decade. A lot of the reason people didn't see the Y2K bug having that much potential impact that far in advance was because this kind of omnipresence of computers was just beginning. (In AD 1985, personal computerization was beginning...) These days, even an average Joe on the street would probably be astonished to hear that any kind of, say, large utility wasn't thoroughly computerized, but in 1985, such a revelation would have been met with mostly blank stares.
Your sig should really say, "Everything in the universe blows", not "sucks". A friend's physics teacher in high school taught his class the phrase, "Physics doesn't suck. It blows." If you're in a pressurized ship in space (i.e. vacuum), and you open a door to the vacuum, the actual newtonian force that moves you out of the ship is the atmosphere pushing you out. There's no "sucking" force. ("Suction" is really just the effect of a high-pressure area pushing into a low-pressure area.)
A number of seemingly-CG shots in AOTC were actually not quite. For example, in the scene where Obi-Wan is being given the tour of the cloning facility, he's walking along with the Kaminoans down this long, curving hallway, looking out the windows at the clones being trained below. Naturally, when I saw the movie, I figured that the hallway background was itself CG, but it wasn't. It was a miniature. There were a number of other incidents like this, where things that were "obviously" CG, were, in fact, miniatures.
LOTR had a huge advantage in that almost all of its backgrounds were Earth-type areas. Hills, mountains, forests, plains, etc. almost all of which were found in New Zealand, allowing Peter Jackson to avoid having to use CG to construct them. Where is George Lucas gonna find a droid factory on Earth, or the giant (unearthly) rock formations on Tatooine or Geonosis, or the countless megaskyscrapers of Coruscant?
Actually, I already had one idea for avoiding this (potential) problem... if the flywheels are rotating around an axis perpendicular to the ground, then you can place the flywheel in a pit dug into the ground. That way, if the flywheel "crashes" or spins off, it will (in theory) embed itself a few meters into solid rock. Seems better than having it above-ground, anyway.
I personally love the idea of using flywheels to store energy in this manner -- it seems very elegant to simply transfer the energy into rotational motion, rather than simply losing it all as heat.
There's one safety concern I have that I haven't yet seen addressed, though I've probably just missed it. If a flywheel is spinning at several tens of thousands of RPM (such as the 36,000 RPM flywheel mentioned in the story), what happens if the flywheel's physical supports are damaged or destroyed?
Basically, let's say a truck crashes into the building storing a spinning flywheel. The flywheel's housing is hit and breaks, putting the flywheel into physical contact with other materials. What happens? I have visions of a thousand-kilo ceramic disc either spinning off like the Tazmanian Devil, leaving a disc-shaped cartoon hole in whatever it encounters, or shattering upon impact and spraying shards of material at hundreds of meters per second in sundry directions.
The problem is, I don't know if this is actually true or not. Can anyone with an actual knowledge of such things answer? Thanks.
Actually, the Pledge of Allegiance ruling won't take effect for several months, and even when it does, it will only be in effect in the 9th Circuit Court's jurisdiction -- namely, several western states.
EXCEPT, they day after the ruling was announced, the judge who wrote the ruling basically put it on hold pending a review by the full 9th Circuit Court. So at this point, the ruling effectively does not exist and everyone in every state can legally go around saying "under God" in classrooms. Even if the full Court does approve the ruling, not until the Supreme Court of the United States has its say will anything apply to the entire country (if SCOTUS confirms the ruling, then it will be illegal for teachers to recite "under God" in classrooms, and if they deny the ruling, then it will still be legal -- unfortunately so).
Tangentially... It pisses me off whenever I hear someone claim this country was founded on "Christian values". That is utter bullshit. The founding fathers were, almost without exception, Deists, not Christians -- they very specifically excluded religion from the government (haven't you fundies ever even HEARD of the First Amendment?) because they knew the kind of horrible atrocities that ended up getting perpetrated when government was in bed with religion, as had happened countless times in the European theocracies of their forefathers.
Forget SETI -- contribute to a project with a more guaranteed payoff, like Folding @Home, which is basically a distributed protein folding program. You'll be contributing to Alzheimer's research, and other medical breakthroughs... I personally think this is much more valuable than SETI (and much more likely to produce something useful).
So what I'm wondering is, wouldn't it be possible to invent a disk addressing scheme which basically self-extends, so that you would never really need to manually change things to support disk sizes beyond a certain size? In other words, depending on how big your hard drive is, the addressing method would change to address sectors of a certain size, keeping the need for indexes/tables/whatever down to a certain size, etc.?
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So basically, you only have PRIVACY when you are in PRIVATE. When you're in PUBLIC, you have no privacy. What's the problem, exactly? That you can't use public spaces without being accountable for your actions?
The three main "claims", further down the page, sound just like every other bit of creationist nonsense I've read. "Like begets like"? Give me a break. Scales would have had to evolve into hair? Uh, yeah, I'd like to see you point out where evolutionary scientists make that claim.
Television is analogous to alcohol. Too much of it is bad for you; not in the same way, certainly, but passively absorbing entertainment is as mentally degenerative as chugging liquor is bad for your liver. Experiencing it socially, with friends or family, in limited quantities, is okay, but more than that and it's basically an unhealthy addiction.
And yeah, some people can resist it better; I know at least one person who probably watches 20 hours of TV a week, and is also insanely intelligent, interested in vast numbers of things not related to TV, always has lots of energy, etc. But most people are not like this.
Do what I did. Pick one or two shows you really like, and watch only those. Leave your TV off the rest of the time. Read more books. Go for a run. Go to the gym. Play a sport. Write your senators and representatives, and tell them what political issues you're angry about!
Always remember this: The opposite of "pro-choice" is not "pro-life." It is "anti-choice."
Similarly, Voidmaster's law: Bandwidth expands to fit the waste available. :)
Computer? If I put one of those in my cup holder, the whole damn car will tip over.
Except that Dr. Brown wants to use the idea to disprove the theory of evolution. The amount that the speed of light would need to change to be of any use to creation "science" (which is about as far from scientific as you can get) is orders of magnitude higher than what's been detected here.
Additionally, this kind of supposed "crime" (modifying copyrighted works in the privacy of your own home) is unenforceable. You would need constant Big Brother-style invasions of privacy into every home in the country to make sure nobody was modifying a copyrighted work. What if I decided to throw it away, or rip it in half? Nope, I can't even dispose of it -- because that's a form of modification.
If I try to redistribute the work in certain ways, then yeah, he should have the legal power to stop me -- but what I do, privately, with my own physical property, is none of his business. Privately modifying such a work in no way harms him.
Now, the Constitution says that authors are reserved the "exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". Well, this presumably means that the author has, by default, *all* rights regarding his created work, and anyone else has none. You have no rights regarding someone else's copyrighted work, unless they specifically grant you those rights...
I hope nobody with a photographic memory gets to go to the movies, then. They'd only ever have to see a movie once, thus depriving the hard-working movie industry of any repeat business, which, as we all know, is equivalent to not only stealing, but ROBBING, RAPING, AND MURDERING PEOPLE ON THE HIGH SEAS!!
Now we know where whirlpools come from: Blackbeard spinning in his watery grave fast enough to create a new subduction zone.
A Trident spokesperson had this to say:
"BRRAAAIIINNNNSSSSSSS....."
Well, here in the real world, people usually call themselves by their country of origin. Do you honestly exepect us to believe that Brazilians, Cubans, Columbians, Canadians, and Mexicans think of themselves as "Americans" at all, let alone taking priority before "Brazilian", "Cuban", "Columbian", "Canadian", and "Mexican"? Please.
I always preferred the Boulevard of Broken Limbs, myself.
Offtopic reply:
:) )
o de7.html, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.htm l, and http://www.eugeneres.org/scientificmethod.htm, for they all explain it far better than I do.
I hate to be pedantic (aw, who am I kidding, I love being pedantic), but in general, saying "it's just a theory" is... well... not a good idea. (The page you referenced has a lot of bullshit new-agey stuff about higher dimensions and so on, but that's neither here nor there. Remember, "newage" rhymes with "sewage".
To a scientist, a "theory" is something that explains all or most of the known evidence, is well-supported by facts, and makes testable predictions. Many well-established things like universal gravitation, aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and so forth, are all "theories".
The word you're probably looking for is "hypothesis", which means "an idea that potentially explains the facts, but isn't yet well-supported and well-tested enough to be considered a theory."
Of course, it's a pretty smooth continuum between the places where an idea is considered a "hypothesis" and where it becomes a "theory" but dismissing a scientific theory as "just a theory" is misguided at best.
Hope that helps, somehow. Check out http://phyun5.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/Notes_www/n
It's interesting to note the fairly casual attitude everyone in the thread has toward this potential bug. Basically, they seem to be saying, "Yeah, it'll be an issue, I guess, but people will deal with it then, hey here's a funny story..."
Not that there's anything wrong with that attitude, but it does indicate two things: One, that even hardcore geeks (i.e. people who had email addresses in 1985) can be complacent about things that seem a long way off (rather than fixing it long before it'll become a problem, as would be "ideal", for suitable definitions of ideal); and two, that computers were not the societally pervasive force that they've become in the last decade. A lot of the reason people didn't see the Y2K bug having that much potential impact that far in advance was because this kind of omnipresence of computers was just beginning. (In AD 1985, personal computerization was beginning...) These days, even an average Joe on the street would probably be astonished to hear that any kind of, say, large utility wasn't thoroughly computerized, but in 1985, such a revelation would have been met with mostly blank stares.
Perhaps he knows of some way for the editors to write besides using language. :)
TV Show Host: You can't use that kind of language on TV!
Beavis: We use language?
Offtopic reply:
:)
Your sig should really say, "Everything in the universe blows", not "sucks". A friend's physics teacher in high school taught his class the phrase, "Physics doesn't suck. It blows." If you're in a pressurized ship in space (i.e. vacuum), and you open a door to the vacuum, the actual newtonian force that moves you out of the ship is the atmosphere pushing you out. There's no "sucking" force. ("Suction" is really just the effect of a high-pressure area pushing into a low-pressure area.)
Well, that's enough physics for the day.
A number of seemingly-CG shots in AOTC were actually not quite. For example, in the scene where Obi-Wan is being given the tour of the cloning facility, he's walking along with the Kaminoans down this long, curving hallway, looking out the windows at the clones being trained below. Naturally, when I saw the movie, I figured that the hallway background was itself CG, but it wasn't. It was a miniature. There were a number of other incidents like this, where things that were "obviously" CG, were, in fact, miniatures.
LOTR had a huge advantage in that almost all of its backgrounds were Earth-type areas. Hills, mountains, forests, plains, etc. almost all of which were found in New Zealand, allowing Peter Jackson to avoid having to use CG to construct them. Where is George Lucas gonna find a droid factory on Earth, or the giant (unearthly) rock formations on Tatooine or Geonosis, or the countless megaskyscrapers of Coruscant?
Actually, I already had one idea for avoiding this (potential) problem... if the flywheels are rotating around an axis perpendicular to the ground, then you can place the flywheel in a pit dug into the ground. That way, if the flywheel "crashes" or spins off, it will (in theory) embed itself a few meters into solid rock. Seems better than having it above-ground, anyway.
I personally love the idea of using flywheels to store energy in this manner -- it seems very elegant to simply transfer the energy into rotational motion, rather than simply losing it all as heat.
There's one safety concern I have that I haven't yet seen addressed, though I've probably just missed it. If a flywheel is spinning at several tens of thousands of RPM (such as the 36,000 RPM flywheel mentioned in the story), what happens if the flywheel's physical supports are damaged or destroyed?
Basically, let's say a truck crashes into the building storing a spinning flywheel. The flywheel's housing is hit and breaks, putting the flywheel into physical contact with other materials. What happens? I have visions of a thousand-kilo ceramic disc either spinning off like the Tazmanian Devil, leaving a disc-shaped cartoon hole in whatever it encounters, or shattering upon impact and spraying shards of material at hundreds of meters per second in sundry directions.
The problem is, I don't know if this is actually true or not. Can anyone with an actual knowledge of such things answer? Thanks.
Actually, the Pledge of Allegiance ruling won't take effect for several months, and even when it does, it will only be in effect in the 9th Circuit Court's jurisdiction -- namely, several western states.
EXCEPT, they day after the ruling was announced, the judge who wrote the ruling basically put it on hold pending a review by the full 9th Circuit Court. So at this point, the ruling effectively does not exist and everyone in every state can legally go around saying "under God" in classrooms. Even if the full Court does approve the ruling, not until the Supreme Court of the United States has its say will anything apply to the entire country (if SCOTUS confirms the ruling, then it will be illegal for teachers to recite "under God" in classrooms, and if they deny the ruling, then it will still be legal -- unfortunately so).
Tangentially... It pisses me off whenever I hear someone claim this country was founded on "Christian values". That is utter bullshit. The founding fathers were, almost without exception, Deists, not Christians -- they very specifically excluded religion from the government (haven't you fundies ever even HEARD of the First Amendment?) because they knew the kind of horrible atrocities that ended up getting perpetrated when government was in bed with religion, as had happened countless times in the European theocracies of their forefathers.
...or at least, schedule the funeral ;)
Zaphod's been using this kind of drive for years to store his porn collection.
Forget SETI -- contribute to a project with a more guaranteed payoff, like Folding @Home, which is basically a distributed protein folding program. You'll be contributing to Alzheimer's research, and other medical breakthroughs... I personally think this is much more valuable than SETI (and much more likely to produce something useful).
So what I'm wondering is, wouldn't it be possible to invent a disk addressing scheme which basically self-extends, so that you would never really need to manually change things to support disk sizes beyond a certain size? In other words, depending on how big your hard drive is, the addressing method would change to address sectors of a certain size, keeping the need for indexes/tables/whatever down to a certain size, etc.?