Amazing how badly you misunderstood the very text you quoted. First of all that's 63,360 feet, not 63,360,000, which is definitely reachable by plane and most definitely doesn't take any special plane or pressure suit... And then, wtf, please tell me you're trolling, 12 miles for a missile is nothing, these days missiles get commonly fired from 20 miles away, not to mention that this is a very large and slow target. It would be so trivial to shoot down that it's not even funny.
But the most appalling part is that there's not even any point about talking about shooting them down, since "they would provide overlapping radar coverage of all maritime and southern border approaches to the continental U.S", that means flying over U.S./international territory/waters, not flying over China.
It would be about the size of the moon if it was more than 180 meters (590 ft) wide, assuming they'd be right above you (if not then it'd have to be even bigger to be as big as the moon). I'd expect they'd go for something slightly smaller..
Oh dear, so you really are a moron! I'm so sorry, I just assumed you weren't and knew just like anyone does what basic research is and how we cannot predict what future uses would emerge.
Are you a moron?? Of course you're not, you're just trolling, but let's assume for a moment that you truly are stupid.
How does it matter that people don't understand what basic researchers do, you blithering twit? What matters is that basic researchers understand what they do, which helps them continuously go forward in their research. Then, some other researchers pick up what the basic research produced, and research something more practical to be done out of it, be it a transistor or how to produce energy from a new phenomenon.
Then, engineers pick up what these researchers produced, to make useful stuff out of them. Basic transistors get turned into electronic chips, a new source of energy turns into a new kind of power plant, and so on. Then more engineers pick up where their peers left off, electronic chips become calculators, computers, iPods, while they put that new source of energy all over the power grid, into submarines, space stations and even your car.
The rest of the story consist in people who improve, promote, sell all of things to you, and people at all levels who bring all sorts of innovations from all over the place so that you, dear user of the Internets and consumer of nuclear power (probably not but you get the point), can troll the tubes by spouting drivel about the irrelevance of basic research.
There's something that amazes me about America's failed constant struggle to improve education, is how they seem to insist on trying new wild ideas (I've seen a guest on the Colbert Report giving money to students for good grades) while obstinately refusing to look at how other countries all around the world have non-failing education systems.
Maybe it's a typically European thing to go "oh look at Finland, they're doing good, maybe we can try something like them", but at the point where America is in education, sinking down the quick sands of failure, would it hurt you guys to look at us, listen and learn? Maybe school could end one hour later in the afternoon? Maybe you could stop teaching bullshit like sexual education (it's part of biology here and it's only one chapter in 7th grade. And we have 10 times less teen pregnancies than you guys (I'm talking about France)), or anything related to parenting, driving, or whatever you have in high school? Maybe all you need until the 10th grade is English, Maths, History/Geography, Science/Biology/Chemistry, Spanish/French/German, Music/Plastic Arts and Sports, and drop the rest of the bullshit? Maybe you need a bit more centralisation and authority in Washington regarding what you require kids all over the country to get? I don't know enough about education in the USA to go on, but there's more to it yet...
If you're doing it wrong, just look at the people who are doing it right.
I know that's a fair point, however I was raised in France, where we spent an awful lot of time learning the names and reign dates of our kings, or even learning poems just for the fuck of it (and believe me that memorising them took up a big part of your after school homeworks) and yet we have an educational system that produces good results, at least in the area where I'm from.
Well I'm obviously not qualified to say what's good or not about it, but looking back at it, it seems like up until a certain point you're supposed to stack up facts in your child brain, and later on you're learning how to use these facts and how to think. I may be wrong, I don't know..
In France from the equivalent of the 1st grade until the 9th grade we spend an infuriating long time learning grammatical rules. Any 8 year old can tell the difference between a complement d'objet direct and a complement d'objet indirect, and unless you have a kid who's that age range you'll hardly remember what any of that stuff was about.
To be honest, I know that the French language isn't simple and we don't want to let it go to waste by having people who massacre it, but most of the stuff is entirely forgotten by the time we're 18 anyways, so I'm not convinced it's such a good thing. Oh well at least we don't have a dysfunctional educational system, well, except in the "banlieues".
Oh I totally need something like that, I don't creep girls out efficiently enough with my greasy hair, body odor, extreme weight, dirty clothes, authentic UNIX guru beard, fascinating explanations of why software patents are evil and posters of RMS and Star Trek.
Plus keeping a USB key in your pocket is so cumbersome..
If this is the future of music, then the future is bleak indeed.
As opposed to... the very bright present of music? Oh noes, this funk doesn't match to a nostalgia-soaked idealised bygone era where half of the singer's lyrics would be directions for his musicians such as "hit me!", "to the bridge!", "1 2 3 4!". Instead we'll have to content ourselves with funk made from individual pieces of music put together by some guy on a machine. Teh horror, it's like the 80s, 90s and 2000s all over again!
Except it's a screen, not a window, so it's L'ecran blue de la mort (and damn Slashdot for not supporting accents, I mean, seriously, we're in 2009, not 1979, they could at least support extended ASCII)
lol, the art of reading between the lines, even when there's only one and that it doesn't say much (and didn't mean at all what you assumed)
Oh and way to know what you're talking about. Yeah, the base frequency of a note is rarely very high, but you see you have all these modes that some also call overtones or harmonics, they kind of make how the sound sounds like, and you need that stuff. Also, look at how high most drums go.
People hump speaker stacks because they can feel the low frequency sounds. The lowest frequencies in music (let's go with 30 Hz) are only about like 6 times the frequency of your forearm when you fap (random example) so that's on an order of frequencies that we are familiar with when it comes to physical vibration. Good luck feeling anything higher than a few hundreds of Hz.
Yeah, thanks very fucking much for rehashing my point that it's a good start for a researcher but no good to the public.
And don't fucking blame it on the public for failing at doing the job the researchers should have done before opening their mouths. They publish a half done job, period. That's as if you watched CSI and the investigation stopped at "forensics just confirmed that the weapon found in a trashcan 200 years from the crime scene was the crime weapon".
No no it's too easy. You can't say "if you put it into bars". It was meant to be nothing but an iPhone/iTouch app. There's no "if every bar west of the Mississippi could have it". You're just not going to make the OP's investment and commitment sound like any sort of sound risk taking. It was foolish and poorly done, just admit it. And my point remains that that's the type of experience that would only teach something to a fool, because only a fool would have something to learn from such an unwise venture.
But here's the thing: they did find "something", that is statistically significant. That means there *is* a direct relationship.
FAIL! It's not because there's a correlation that there's a direct relationship. Unless by direct relationship you mean A and B are linked by A<-C<-D->E->B, which I'd rather call "indirect". Let's say it goes like this : poor people are poor -> therefore their kids have a shitty education -> therefore they hardly know how to read or do anything creative -> therefore they spend their time watching TV. In parallel, they're poor -> therefore they live in shitty houses -> therefore they catch colds and infections because they have a poor insulation or whatever -> therefore they catch asthma (let's admit it makes sense).
Considered all of that, how the fuck does that help to know that watching TV is correlated to asthma? Maybe it can be somewhere to start off for a researcher, but it can't be the fucking conclusion of their research, if you'll admit my hypothetical scenario, they should look for the true direct reasons for asthma, which would be the conditions of living of a certain class of people (to which something could actually be done to remedy to that asthma problem, i.e. the President decides to fix the insulation of every house in the fucking country) and not content themselves with some vague bullshit that the general public that this press release is meant to be read by would interpret as "so turning the TV will keep my kids more safe from asthma?!".
Because that "business venture" is a stupid investment. No one is stupid enough to invest 32 G's of their own fucking money in the making of a crappy colour matching game anyways. How do you spend 32 Gs on that anyways? That's like spending that much on a lemonade stand, anyone with a bit of common sense could tell it's foolish. It's not about taking a sound risk, it's about taking an inconsiderate risk that has so little chance of delivering a desirable outcome that it's not even a matter of risk anymore but of predictable outcome.
Your point that later on you made something profitable out of your life doesn't change anything to the fact that no one needs to try something as stupid as investing a whole year of salary (well, depending on how young/qualified you are that's easily a whole year, to some that's even more like 2) into making a crappy game, mostly when you obviously don't understand shit about how it all works.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to take a big loan and buy some random real estate in a random place with it. And even that isn't as stupid as the OP's business investment, at least I have a chance to have more return on my investment rather than throw it all into a black hole of money and get a 70th of my money back.
Maybe you missed my point, my point is that it's like all these guys churn out is correlations. That's what you see in the news, correlations, "hey general public, we found a correlation, do whatever the fuck you want with it". It's not about the research so much as the results, mostly the ones we the general public are supposed to hear about.
OK no seriously now WTF. There's not a day without a health news story talking about some weird correlation between two factors that are obviously not directly related. What's a researcher these days, someone who gathers a whole bunch of data, looks for all the statistical correlation they can find and publish a paper as soon as they find "something", without using an ounce of critical thinking? It surely is how it sounds like.
"So we took a whole bunch of people, alright, we asked them a whole bunch of random questions about their weight, their diet, their asthma, their TV watching habits, then we cross plotted them, let the computer program give us a correlation index and the one with the strongest correlation was asthma vs TV so we wrote a paper about it. As to the whyness of this correlation, meh, we don't really know, nor did we bother to establish a few hypothesises like "oh maybe it's due to socio-economic conditions i.e. poor people watch more TV and live in houses with asbestos hey let's try and find out", nah, we just care about writing a paper and making it buzz for all it's worth cause it's gonna look good on our CVs and you know it's going to work because people love senseless sensationalist drivel like "new research shows that learning to play the violin will make you live 6 years longer!" or "can eating pineapple make you gain IQ points?"."
He learnt something most people already knew without having experienced it. It's called being a fool. That's like saying "I tried skateboarding on my rooftop and ended in the hospital, I learnt a valuable lesson".
No it's actually a (mostly) closed free market, which means it's hard to enter it, but inside of it it's very much free, i.e. people either buy or don't buy. Free isn't the same thing as open.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing how badly you misunderstood the very text you quoted. First of all that's 63,360 feet, not 63,360,000, which is definitely reachable by plane and most definitely doesn't take any special plane or pressure suit... And then, wtf, please tell me you're trolling, 12 miles for a missile is nothing, these days missiles get commonly fired from 20 miles away, not to mention that this is a very large and slow target. It would be so trivial to shoot down that it's not even funny.
But the most appalling part is that there's not even any point about talking about shooting them down, since "they would provide overlapping radar coverage of all maritime and southern border approaches to the continental U.S", that means flying over U.S./international territory/waters, not flying over China.
It would be about the size of the moon if it was more than 180 meters (590 ft) wide, assuming they'd be right above you (if not then it'd have to be even bigger to be as big as the moon). I'd expect they'd go for something slightly smaller..
Ooouh, supersamefag to the rescue!
Oh dear, so you really are a moron! I'm so sorry, I just assumed you weren't and knew just like anyone does what basic research is and how we cannot predict what future uses would emerge.
Are you a moron?? Of course you're not, you're just trolling, but let's assume for a moment that you truly are stupid.
How does it matter that people don't understand what basic researchers do, you blithering twit? What matters is that basic researchers understand what they do, which helps them continuously go forward in their research. Then, some other researchers pick up what the basic research produced, and research something more practical to be done out of it, be it a transistor or how to produce energy from a new phenomenon.
Then, engineers pick up what these researchers produced, to make useful stuff out of them. Basic transistors get turned into electronic chips, a new source of energy turns into a new kind of power plant, and so on. Then more engineers pick up where their peers left off, electronic chips become calculators, computers, iPods, while they put that new source of energy all over the power grid, into submarines, space stations and even your car.
The rest of the story consist in people who improve, promote, sell all of things to you, and people at all levels who bring all sorts of innovations from all over the place so that you, dear user of the Internets and consumer of nuclear power (probably not but you get the point), can troll the tubes by spouting drivel about the irrelevance of basic research.
There's something that amazes me about America's failed constant struggle to improve education, is how they seem to insist on trying new wild ideas (I've seen a guest on the Colbert Report giving money to students for good grades) while obstinately refusing to look at how other countries all around the world have non-failing education systems.
Maybe it's a typically European thing to go "oh look at Finland, they're doing good, maybe we can try something like them", but at the point where America is in education, sinking down the quick sands of failure, would it hurt you guys to look at us, listen and learn? Maybe school could end one hour later in the afternoon? Maybe you could stop teaching bullshit like sexual education (it's part of biology here and it's only one chapter in 7th grade. And we have 10 times less teen pregnancies than you guys (I'm talking about France)), or anything related to parenting, driving, or whatever you have in high school? Maybe all you need until the 10th grade is English, Maths, History/Geography, Science/Biology/Chemistry, Spanish/French/German, Music/Plastic Arts and Sports, and drop the rest of the bullshit? Maybe you need a bit more centralisation and authority in Washington regarding what you require kids all over the country to get? I don't know enough about education in the USA to go on, but there's more to it yet...
If you're doing it wrong, just look at the people who are doing it right.
I know that's a fair point, however I was raised in France, where we spent an awful lot of time learning the names and reign dates of our kings, or even learning poems just for the fuck of it (and believe me that memorising them took up a big part of your after school homeworks) and yet we have an educational system that produces good results, at least in the area where I'm from.
Well I'm obviously not qualified to say what's good or not about it, but looking back at it, it seems like up until a certain point you're supposed to stack up facts in your child brain, and later on you're learning how to use these facts and how to think. I may be wrong, I don't know..
Is it an American translation? I see Zs all over the place.
In France from the equivalent of the 1st grade until the 9th grade we spend an infuriating long time learning grammatical rules. Any 8 year old can tell the difference between a complement d'objet direct and a complement d'objet indirect, and unless you have a kid who's that age range you'll hardly remember what any of that stuff was about.
To be honest, I know that the French language isn't simple and we don't want to let it go to waste by having people who massacre it, but most of the stuff is entirely forgotten by the time we're 18 anyways, so I'm not convinced it's such a good thing. Oh well at least we don't have a dysfunctional educational system, well, except in the "banlieues".
Oh I totally need something like that, I don't creep girls out efficiently enough with my greasy hair, body odor, extreme weight, dirty clothes, authentic UNIX guru beard, fascinating explanations of why software patents are evil and posters of RMS and Star Trek.
Plus keeping a USB key in your pocket is so cumbersome..
If this is the future of music, then the future is bleak indeed.
As opposed to... the very bright present of music? Oh noes, this funk doesn't match to a nostalgia-soaked idealised bygone era where half of the singer's lyrics would be directions for his musicians such as "hit me!", "to the bridge!", "1 2 3 4!". Instead we'll have to content ourselves with funk made from individual pieces of music put together by some guy on a machine. Teh horror, it's like the 80s, 90s and 2000s all over again!
Except it's a screen, not a window, so it's L'ecran blue de la mort (and damn Slashdot for not supporting accents, I mean, seriously, we're in 2009, not 1979, they could at least support extended ASCII)
Excellent observation Sergeant Thicky. You didn't say "open", you just acted like "free" meant "open". Yes you did.
lol, the art of reading between the lines, even when there's only one and that it doesn't say much (and didn't mean at all what you assumed)
Oh and way to know what you're talking about. Yeah, the base frequency of a note is rarely very high, but you see you have all these modes that some also call overtones or harmonics, they kind of make how the sound sounds like, and you need that stuff. Also, look at how high most drums go.
People hump speaker stacks because they can feel the low frequency sounds. The lowest frequencies in music (let's go with 30 Hz) are only about like 6 times the frequency of your forearm when you fap (random example) so that's on an order of frequencies that we are familiar with when it comes to physical vibration. Good luck feeling anything higher than a few hundreds of Hz.
can you really hear past 44khz for the sample rate?
inb4 Nyquist!
Yeah, thanks very fucking much for rehashing my point that it's a good start for a researcher but no good to the public.
And don't fucking blame it on the public for failing at doing the job the researchers should have done before opening their mouths. They publish a half done job, period. That's as if you watched CSI and the investigation stopped at "forensics just confirmed that the weapon found in a trashcan 200 years from the crime scene was the crime weapon".
No no it's too easy. You can't say "if you put it into bars". It was meant to be nothing but an iPhone/iTouch app. There's no "if every bar west of the Mississippi could have it". You're just not going to make the OP's investment and commitment sound like any sort of sound risk taking. It was foolish and poorly done, just admit it. And my point remains that that's the type of experience that would only teach something to a fool, because only a fool would have something to learn from such an unwise venture.
But here's the thing: they did find "something", that is statistically significant. That means there *is* a direct relationship.
FAIL! It's not because there's a correlation that there's a direct relationship. Unless by direct relationship you mean A and B are linked by A<-C<-D->E->B, which I'd rather call "indirect". Let's say it goes like this : poor people are poor -> therefore their kids have a shitty education -> therefore they hardly know how to read or do anything creative -> therefore they spend their time watching TV. In parallel, they're poor -> therefore they live in shitty houses -> therefore they catch colds and infections because they have a poor insulation or whatever -> therefore they catch asthma (let's admit it makes sense).
Considered all of that, how the fuck does that help to know that watching TV is correlated to asthma? Maybe it can be somewhere to start off for a researcher, but it can't be the fucking conclusion of their research, if you'll admit my hypothetical scenario, they should look for the true direct reasons for asthma, which would be the conditions of living of a certain class of people (to which something could actually be done to remedy to that asthma problem, i.e. the President decides to fix the insulation of every house in the fucking country) and not content themselves with some vague bullshit that the general public that this press release is meant to be read by would interpret as "so turning the TV will keep my kids more safe from asthma?!".
Because that "business venture" is a stupid investment. No one is stupid enough to invest 32 G's of their own fucking money in the making of a crappy colour matching game anyways. How do you spend 32 Gs on that anyways? That's like spending that much on a lemonade stand, anyone with a bit of common sense could tell it's foolish. It's not about taking a sound risk, it's about taking an inconsiderate risk that has so little chance of delivering a desirable outcome that it's not even a matter of risk anymore but of predictable outcome.
Your point that later on you made something profitable out of your life doesn't change anything to the fact that no one needs to try something as stupid as investing a whole year of salary (well, depending on how young/qualified you are that's easily a whole year, to some that's even more like 2) into making a crappy game, mostly when you obviously don't understand shit about how it all works.
Now if you'll excuse me I have to take a big loan and buy some random real estate in a random place with it. And even that isn't as stupid as the OP's business investment, at least I have a chance to have more return on my investment rather than throw it all into a black hole of money and get a 70th of my money back.
Maybe you missed my point, my point is that it's like all these guys churn out is correlations. That's what you see in the news, correlations, "hey general public, we found a correlation, do whatever the fuck you want with it". It's not about the research so much as the results, mostly the ones we the general public are supposed to hear about.
Nope, but Slashdot is, or so you would believe sometimes.
OK no seriously now WTF. There's not a day without a health news story talking about some weird correlation between two factors that are obviously not directly related. What's a researcher these days, someone who gathers a whole bunch of data, looks for all the statistical correlation they can find and publish a paper as soon as they find "something", without using an ounce of critical thinking? It surely is how it sounds like.
"So we took a whole bunch of people, alright, we asked them a whole bunch of random questions about their weight, their diet, their asthma, their TV watching habits, then we cross plotted them, let the computer program give us a correlation index and the one with the strongest correlation was asthma vs TV so we wrote a paper about it. As to the whyness of this correlation, meh, we don't really know, nor did we bother to establish a few hypothesises like "oh maybe it's due to socio-economic conditions i.e. poor people watch more TV and live in houses with asbestos hey let's try and find out", nah, we just care about writing a paper and making it buzz for all it's worth cause it's gonna look good on our CVs and you know it's going to work because people love senseless sensationalist drivel like "new research shows that learning to play the violin will make you live 6 years longer!" or "can eating pineapple make you gain IQ points?"."
He learnt something most people already knew without having experienced it. It's called being a fool. That's like saying "I tried skateboarding on my rooftop and ended in the hospital, I learnt a valuable lesson".
No it's actually a (mostly) closed free market, which means it's hard to enter it, but inside of it it's very much free, i.e. people either buy or don't buy. Free isn't the same thing as open.