And if that's not enough, I imagine that these early humans probably didn't do much in the way of bathing. Nothing says "I just tossed my lunch" than being downwind from a large pack of primitive humans.
So you're saying that geek hygiene is an evolutionary advantage?
But I'd rather these services died a market death than a technolocial one.
In either case companies would just claim that they died because of rampant piracy, and lobby congress for more restrictive legislation and increased powers with which to go after file sharers.
I'm not incredibly knowledgeable about copyright law, but could one way of stopping these RIAA suits be to prove downloading a copy of a song you own to be legal? If its true that the damages are for every person who might have downloaded a song from you, then wouldn't the RIAA have to give the court a reason to believe that all of those people did not own the song?
...*then* tell me if you don't mind the black woman beating up the white one.
Well, if you want to look at it from the perspective of race, the ad with the black woman dominating portrays African Americans as a naturally violent and cruel people. Given that members of oppressed minorities, especially African Americans, are considered to be inherently more likely to be a criminal in many parts of the country--you mention it yourself--should we, as a society, really be perpetuating that image in the mainstream media?
Its easy to see racism everywhere if you look hard enough. We can argue endlessly over where the line should be drawn (you're buying a white toaster, hmmm?), but I don't think that this ad--I found it more sexually suggestive than anything else--which was ran in another country with drastically different standards, should be it.
The article isn't all that descriptive of the methods to be used for this experiment, but from what I gather it has nothing to do with space exploration. It has everything to do with testing predictions of theory. While both are important, and often overlap, this experiment really has no direct relation to the ISS, the shuttle program, or the moon missions.
You may be right about being able to perform such experiments for less with a solid presence in space, but that is a very long way down the road yet, and is likely dependent on the very advances in theoretical physics that you claim should be de-prioritized. Plus, I really doubt there's enough grant money for everybody to be working on a space presence, to the rest of the physicist need something to keep them busy.;)
I agree with you that there is way too much emotional meaning placed on the word "socialism"--the same is true for communism, for that matter. They aren't inherently good or evil, they are simply philisophical ideals that we should all feel free to pick and choose ideas from. As you said, there's nothing wrong with mixing a bit of socialism in with our capitalism.
The real problem starts with public education. They should present each of these philisophical ideals in turn, allowing for discussion of the merits of each. Afterwards, the difficulties associated with real world implementations of these ideals should be discussed. Instead, we get "America is capitalist, the USSR was communist, and look what happened to them". I don't recall any of my high school history teachers bothering to teach us the meaning of "socialism" (hopefully most of you had a better social science education than I did).
I never played Planescape: Torment, but both of the examples you cited at the beginning of your post were in Baldur's Gate 2. They might be in both games, but, as I said, I wouldn't know.
If any of you at all have watched "Numbers" you'd know that CSI is a drop in the inaccuracy bucket. I recall one episode of Numbers where they read a hard drive by taking the cover off and waving what looked to be a stylus with a wire attached over the platter to read it. I cried a little bit.
True, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking when I wrote the original post. I think your post does prove my statement for the general case, however. By Gen-2, as you say, the mutation will have a fairly low--not quite 0 as I orignally made it sound, but low--representation in the population if the mutation is present in only one of the gen-0 animals. It is very unlikely that any given mutation would survive many generations.
Genetic mutations only propagate through to the descendants if they all have the same mutation. For a mutation that began with a single individual to propagate through any significant portion of the species would be rare, and all the more rare if it wasn't somehow beneficial to the species. Plus, the piling of mutation upon mutation that you mention would only occur if the level of radiation is above normal for a long period of time, and doesn't decrease like with the Chernobyl fallout.
The "conflict" that you mention between 1024 bytes and 1000 bytes is purely manufactured. The only people that need to deal with that difference on a regular basis are people in the computer field who need to do exact calculations with it. I very much doubt that the average computer user knows how many bits are in a gigabyte. Instead, they tend to base their etimate of size on relative measurements of, say, the size of a movie file, or that pie chart of hard drive usage that Windows gives you.
The only reason that hard drives use the normal values for SI prefixes is to make their drives seem larger than they are. The normal user sees an 80 x 10^9 byte drive, labelled as 80 GB, and equates that with the 80 GB = 2^30 bytes as measured by their computer.
Almost all new discoveries come from one of two places: a theorist postulating an effect that is tested and found to be true or false by an experimentalist, or an experimentalist finding an undocumented effect for which a theorist then tries to find a model to explain. The part you regard as speculation is a very neccessary part of the discovery process.
The problem here is that there is too much product on the market to support a cd distribution system. P2P and iTunes services provide a fast and convenient way to both find and listen to new music. Every spent an hour and a half at a record store looking for a particular album? Lord knows I have and its annoying as hell. Of course the only reason I was willing to spend that time to find it was because I had listened to a few songs I downloaded. It is a weak justification but I am provided no alternative. The one exception is of course satellite radio; the last place I can listen to new music without being inundated with advertising.
Try out www.pandora.com Enter in a song/band you like, and get a whole lot of music of a similar vein, much of which (if you are like me) you had no idea existed. There's a vertical add on the page, but the listening is ad-free. It takes a bit of listening to get a station that you really like (you vote "like" or "don't like" on each song), but I find that its definitely worth it.
Based on everything that the music industry has complained about with fixed pricing, though, they would want that price to go up, not down. This implementation would also kill the small-name, lesser known bands, as all of their music would remain fairly expensive in comparison.
The person who buys that $1700 home theatre system at Wal Mart will either:
1) Be attracted to the "bigger, shinier" approach to gaming and spring for an Xbox 360 or PS3
2) Buy all three anyway. Why not? He's got $1700 to burn on a TV.
Nintendo has been very consistent on their position to the avoid getting in a power=quality pissing contest with the other two consoles, and full 1080i support is just that.
I mean, this quote sums it up for me......some unknown energy source is involved.... Wow, so basically, they did this experiment, which resulted in a breaking of one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, and resulted in a gas billions of degrees higher than expected?
You contradict yourself on the second law of thermal dynamics. You say that this experiment broke the second law, but your quote, "some unknown energy source is involved", implies that the energy is coming from *something*, though the researches are not certain what that is.
GMO crops, artifical black holes, supercolliding particles ( of which sometimes we don't even know what will happen until we do it)... I mean, I am beginning to think man is not going to be obliterated through war, or disease, or a nuclear holocost, but just in an instant flash of some experiment gone wrong.
The GMO crops are by far the most dangerous thing you mention, in my opinion, because the ecosystem reacts much quicker to subtle changes than does the Earth as a whole, though its still pretty unlikely that some mutant plant would somehow destroy the entire ecosystem before we figured out a fix. The "supercolliding particles" part is almost assuredly safe. Consider the Large Hadron Collider, which, when they're done building it, will produce collisions with energies up to 1.4x10^10 eV. That may sound like a lot, but compare it with cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are much, much more energetic (on the order of 10^20 eV), and we're bombarded by a lot of them every second. The idea goes that if a cosmic ray hasn't started some sort of planet-destorying chain reaction over the past 6.5 billion years, a little LHC particle collision probably won't hurt.
But science has progressed to a state where we are starting to venture into areas where there are huge swaths of unknowns, in physics, genetics, and nanotechnology.
Its the fundamental nature of science to venture into the unknown. That's kind of the whole point, actually. Science has ventured into far more worrisome unknowns in the past--like the first atomic bomb, when nuclear physics was essentially in its infancy--and we've come through fine. Maybe its a false sense of security, and we really are on the point of our own destruction. I just chalk it up to the cost of existence, myself.
The Live result was just as relevant to your keyword as the Google result. Expecting psychic powers from search engines is a fools game, a search engine can only go on your keywords, it can't know which of the many contexts you happen to be thinking about for those keywords at the time.
It is certainly not a fools game. People will judge the quality of a search engine based on how well the results match what they were searching for. If a search engine seems to read people's mind, then they will use it, since it gives them what they were looking for without a lot of hassle. While both results might be equally relevant to the keyword, people will decide which search engine is better for them based on which results were the best match for what they wanted to find.
The competition doesn't lie in who can turn up the best results based on a rigorous definition of relevancy, but who can most consistently deliver the results that the user was looking for.
The way that the temperatures of things like plasmas are measured is to measure the radiation emitted by them as they cool. The way a spectrometer works is by measuring the properties of radiation, wavelength for instance, and use whatever various physical laws to work out the temperature of the plasma based on that measurement. The spectrometer is never really in the plasma like a thermometer in water.
As far as the submitter's comments about whether we want such a hot thing on earth, it may be high temperature, but most experimental plasmas are extremely low density. Even if the plasma somehow ruptured its container and shot out around the lab, you'd never notice a change in temperature--especially since the plasma would only be around for something on the order of nanoseconds (going from memory here, might be less than that).
But is it really a free market? Corporations want all of the benefits of a free global market such as outsourcing, but at the same time, they want the ability to control regional markets (think region codes on DVDs). So, when President Bush says that U.S. Corporations should benefit from a free global market, does he take the time to state the importance of protecting the consumer's right to benefit from such a market as well? Or does he simply hand the collective consumer the lube?
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So you're saying that geek hygiene is an evolutionary advantage?
There you have it, folks: proof-positive that people can be elitists on any subject. Next up - 10 reasons why Miracle Whip is vastly superior to Mayo.
But I'd rather these services died a market death than a technolocial one.
In either case companies would just claim that they died because of rampant piracy, and lobby congress for more restrictive legislation and increased powers with which to go after file sharers.
I'm not incredibly knowledgeable about copyright law, but could one way of stopping these RIAA suits be to prove downloading a copy of a song you own to be legal? If its true that the damages are for every person who might have downloaded a song from you, then wouldn't the RIAA have to give the court a reason to believe that all of those people did not own the song?
No, its because 2 tons of styrofoam weighs a lot less than 2 tons of concrete. Duh.
...*then* tell me if you don't mind the black woman beating up the white one.
Well, if you want to look at it from the perspective of race, the ad with the black woman dominating portrays African Americans as a naturally violent and cruel people. Given that members of oppressed minorities, especially African Americans, are considered to be inherently more likely to be a criminal in many parts of the country--you mention it yourself--should we, as a society, really be perpetuating that image in the mainstream media?
Its easy to see racism everywhere if you look hard enough. We can argue endlessly over where the line should be drawn (you're buying a white toaster, hmmm?), but I don't think that this ad--I found it more sexually suggestive than anything else--which was ran in another country with drastically different standards, should be it.
The article isn't all that descriptive of the methods to be used for this experiment, but from what I gather it has nothing to do with space exploration. It has everything to do with testing predictions of theory. While both are important, and often overlap, this experiment really has no direct relation to the ISS, the shuttle program, or the moon missions.
;)
You may be right about being able to perform such experiments for less with a solid presence in space, but that is a very long way down the road yet, and is likely dependent on the very advances in theoretical physics that you claim should be de-prioritized. Plus, I really doubt there's enough grant money for everybody to be working on a space presence, to the rest of the physicist need something to keep them busy.
Gentleman, you're missing the key point here; we didn't "invade" Iraq, we liberated it.
(sarcasm intended)
I agree with you that there is way too much emotional meaning placed on the word "socialism"--the same is true for communism, for that matter. They aren't inherently good or evil, they are simply philisophical ideals that we should all feel free to pick and choose ideas from. As you said, there's nothing wrong with mixing a bit of socialism in with our capitalism.
The real problem starts with public education. They should present each of these philisophical ideals in turn, allowing for discussion of the merits of each. Afterwards, the difficulties associated with real world implementations of these ideals should be discussed. Instead, we get "America is capitalist, the USSR was communist, and look what happened to them". I don't recall any of my high school history teachers bothering to teach us the meaning of "socialism" (hopefully most of you had a better social science education than I did).
AT&T: "Haha! Its our Social Security Number now, bitch!"
In short, "God bless everyone...no exceptions".
Except the gay people, but I guess if they're not supposed to be given equal rights as human beings then they don't count as an exception?
Disclaimer: Not a personal attack.
I've tried to help mug someone before, and the mugger was only willing to split 90/10. Its honestly not worth the effort.
I never played Planescape: Torment, but both of the examples you cited at the beginning of your post were in Baldur's Gate 2. They might be in both games, but, as I said, I wouldn't know.
If any of you at all have watched "Numbers" you'd know that CSI is a drop in the inaccuracy bucket. I recall one episode of Numbers where they read a hard drive by taking the cover off and waving what looked to be a stylus with a wire attached over the platter to read it. I cried a little bit.
True, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking when I wrote the original post. I think your post does prove my statement for the general case, however. By Gen-2, as you say, the mutation will have a fairly low--not quite 0 as I orignally made it sound, but low--representation in the population if the mutation is present in only one of the gen-0 animals. It is very unlikely that any given mutation would survive many generations.
Genetic mutations only propagate through to the descendants if they all have the same mutation. For a mutation that began with a single individual to propagate through any significant portion of the species would be rare, and all the more rare if it wasn't somehow beneficial to the species. Plus, the piling of mutation upon mutation that you mention would only occur if the level of radiation is above normal for a long period of time, and doesn't decrease like with the Chernobyl fallout.
The only reason that hard drives use the normal values for SI prefixes is to make their drives seem larger than they are. The normal user sees an 80 x 10^9 byte drive, labelled as 80 GB, and equates that with the 80 GB = 2^30 bytes as measured by their computer.
Almost all new discoveries come from one of two places: a theorist postulating an effect that is tested and found to be true or false by an experimentalist, or an experimentalist finding an undocumented effect for which a theorist then tries to find a model to explain. The part you regard as speculation is a very neccessary part of the discovery process.
Try out www.pandora.com Enter in a song/band you like, and get a whole lot of music of a similar vein, much of which (if you are like me) you had no idea existed. There's a vertical add on the page, but the listening is ad-free. It takes a bit of listening to get a station that you really like (you vote "like" or "don't like" on each song), but I find that its definitely worth it.
Based on everything that the music industry has complained about with fixed pricing, though, they would want that price to go up, not down. This implementation would also kill the small-name, lesser known bands, as all of their music would remain fairly expensive in comparison.
1) Be attracted to the "bigger, shinier" approach to gaming and spring for an Xbox 360 or PS3
2) Buy all three anyway. Why not? He's got $1700 to burn on a TV.
Nintendo has been very consistent on their position to the avoid getting in a power=quality pissing contest with the other two consoles, and full 1080i support is just that.
You contradict yourself on the second law of thermal dynamics. You say that this experiment broke the second law, but your quote, "some unknown energy source is involved", implies that the energy is coming from *something*, though the researches are not certain what that is.
GMO crops, artifical black holes, supercolliding particles ( of which sometimes we don't even know what will happen until we do it)... I mean, I am beginning to think man is not going to be obliterated through war, or disease, or a nuclear holocost, but just in an instant flash of some experiment gone wrong.
The GMO crops are by far the most dangerous thing you mention, in my opinion, because the ecosystem reacts much quicker to subtle changes than does the Earth as a whole, though its still pretty unlikely that some mutant plant would somehow destroy the entire ecosystem before we figured out a fix. The "supercolliding particles" part is almost assuredly safe. Consider the Large Hadron Collider, which, when they're done building it, will produce collisions with energies up to 1.4x10^10 eV. That may sound like a lot, but compare it with cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are much, much more energetic (on the order of 10^20 eV), and we're bombarded by a lot of them every second. The idea goes that if a cosmic ray hasn't started some sort of planet-destorying chain reaction over the past 6.5 billion years, a little LHC particle collision probably won't hurt.
But science has progressed to a state where we are starting to venture into areas where there are huge swaths of unknowns, in physics, genetics, and nanotechnology.
Its the fundamental nature of science to venture into the unknown. That's kind of the whole point, actually. Science has ventured into far more worrisome unknowns in the past--like the first atomic bomb, when nuclear physics was essentially in its infancy--and we've come through fine. Maybe its a false sense of security, and we really are on the point of our own destruction. I just chalk it up to the cost of existence, myself.
It is certainly not a fools game. People will judge the quality of a search engine based on how well the results match what they were searching for. If a search engine seems to read people's mind, then they will use it, since it gives them what they were looking for without a lot of hassle. While both results might be equally relevant to the keyword, people will decide which search engine is better for them based on which results were the best match for what they wanted to find.
The competition doesn't lie in who can turn up the best results based on a rigorous definition of relevancy, but who can most consistently deliver the results that the user was looking for.
The way that the temperatures of things like plasmas are measured is to measure the radiation emitted by them as they cool. The way a spectrometer works is by measuring the properties of radiation, wavelength for instance, and use whatever various physical laws to work out the temperature of the plasma based on that measurement. The spectrometer is never really in the plasma like a thermometer in water.
As far as the submitter's comments about whether we want such a hot thing on earth, it may be high temperature, but most experimental plasmas are extremely low density. Even if the plasma somehow ruptured its container and shot out around the lab, you'd never notice a change in temperature--especially since the plasma would only be around for something on the order of nanoseconds (going from memory here, might be less than that).
But is it really a free market? Corporations want all of the benefits of a free global market such as outsourcing, but at the same time, they want the ability to control regional markets (think region codes on DVDs). So, when President Bush says that U.S. Corporations should benefit from a free global market, does he take the time to state the importance of protecting the consumer's right to benefit from such a market as well? Or does he simply hand the collective consumer the lube?