I take issue with your statement that our forefathers wanted us to be "on top". If you recall america's isolationist tenancies for the better part of the last 200 odd years, and the fact that they were fierce individualists, they most likely would have been saying something along the lines of "Fuck everyone else, let's just do our own thing."
Note that I'm not addressing the rest of your points - seeing blatant misattribution kind of pisses me off.
I know! Let's suck all the oxygen out of the air and charge world governments on a "per breath" basis. No, they might be hostile to that, their constituants wouldn't like it. I know! Let's get all the nitrogen instead, and every time someone tries to grow a plant, we can charge them 500 bucks!
How many people know about nitrogen? A hell of a lot less than about oxygen! Genius! Pure Genius!
On google earth, the LOC is about.1 mile, which is 160934.4 millimeters. So if they can measure a nickel (1.95 mm) at 384,403 kilometres (center to center distance of the earth to the moon) and assuming that's the limit of their ability (which is not necessarily true I neglected to RTFA).
If you draw out the triangle, you'll find the arctangent of 1.95/3.84403x10^10 = 2.91x10^-9 degrees.
so that means that knowing that angle, we can find the max distance we can see the LOC at.
dist = 160934.4/tan(2.91x10^-9) = 3.17x10^15 mm
Anyway, that means that if you wanted to measure the distance to the library of congress in terms of football fields away (100 yd = 300*.305 m = 91 440 mm):
3.17x10^15 mm / 91440 mm/football field = 3.47x10^10 football fields before you lose resolution on the library of congress
There you go, an order of magnitude less than the square root of a mole. Have your delicious/units. I hope they were good.
I have to agree with you, people who are 100% atheist can be asshats. By saying that they are 100% sure without any evidence, they are being intellectually dishonest, just like the religious folk. I'm about 99.999% sure that there is no god, at least as the organized religions tell it, but I'm open to argument if you have some new and interesting physical evidence. Agnostics might be the solution, they don't really have a reason to not be impartial.
Except that much of the Old Testament (which includes the book of Numbers) is considered outdated by the New Testament in Christianity. So essentially you're saying:
The BIBLE v1.0 is now superseded by THE_BIBLE v2.0
THE_BIBLE v1.0 was a valid source until the version update, but v2.0 conflicts with various modules.
All religious personnel are directed to utilize the doubleplusgood resources of minitrue to remove all history of the v1.0 past. v2.0 was always right and always will be right.
All personnel are directed to forget they read this.
NOTE TO ALL BELIEVERS: THE_BIBLE v3.0 - coming soon! Brought to you by sourceforge. A community effort.
Um, I think that's completely unrelated. As a wild guess, the selective pressure that made the ceiling thing happen is probably that humans are by default broad thinkers, but when you're in a tight situation, like climbing through trees, running through a forest, surrounded by a crowd, or what have you, you need to pay attention to the things around you. People who didn't pay attention to the missing branch/low branch/menacing stares were.... selected out.
I am so glad firefox came out with the spell checker. I'd used to have to open up word or something (I have a duel boot - don't worry slashdot) and paste the text in and check it. Man, that sucked.
LOL, back in the day, like 6th grade, my friend came up with a brilliant password. "Just use password!" he said, it's so obvious, no one will ever guess! Gone are those idealistic times...
Also, I double checked - at least./ isn't case sensitive:)
I dunno, something that isn't concentrated and totally fluid. I guess I'd have to go to a juice shop or something:-|
I just find it depressing I can't find anything that isn't sugar loaded without resorting to actual fruit (something like 10 apples in one 20oz bottle of apple juice iirc). Maybe if they kept the pulp in more often, it wouldn't be as sweet. Btw, am I regarded as some kind of psycho for wanting pulp? It seems to me that most people go eeew.
...and all they get is the usual, automated Slashdot moaning.
At least you've realized the truth, this being./, everyone owns a spambot that searches for keywords in stories. You get this particular crapflood when the bots realize that something with the words "revolutionary" and "internet" (and possibly also "semantic")has appeared. Everything here is just markov chain output. Welcome to the future.
Also, there's an intelligent thread further up where the lead researcher posted that no one seems to be responding too:(
Juicy juice... a little too sweet. I'm just looking for something with pulp, not from concentrate etc. There's practically nothing in the "Quick! I need a drink! I'm thirsty!" market that fits this description.
I think you're talking about the semantic web proposal that has a bunch of issues with it. I'm not very knowlageable about it, but you can probably wikipedia or Google it.
As an american, I believe I can say quite easily that our sports and pop culture suck. I don't give a crap about Britney spears, and our feverant love of professional sports is the most inane thing I can think of. That said, I think the relative merits of our political system are much more debatable despite the bad apples in it (at least you can point to the amended constitution for good clean fun). Also, if the Indians and the Chinese want to bring some competition, let them. If we can't compete with them, what's the point of being "superior"?
Eh, I never said the system was perfect. I'd prefer some greedy exec lines their pockets with gold at the expense of 30 people's lives than let some guy as crowd rousing as Hitler was take over.
No, you know what mob rule will do. Some politician will advocate a position that boils the blood of the good clean pure people, like homosexuality, and bam. What have you. This is why the US has a bicameral congress with representatives with short terms, and representatives with long terms. This way they can sit down and actually consider the issue objectively.
What might be fun is if we set up a digg like system to rate our politicians. If they get too far into the negatives for too long, then bam outta there.
Finally, after all those people were bitching about Diebold, and bringing up those same points approximately 5 billion times about local networks and such, I was shocked and amazed that people were actually considering this as a viable option. Man slashdot, do you have no memory?
From time to time I think of what would I have concluded about certain phenomena were I given only the data people of that era had, and only their machinery. For instance, the spontaneous generation you mentioned, no one had cameras, and no one had done the experiment before. Just sitting in an armchair, I probably would have concluded it was spontaneous as well, although if I didn't go and test that I'd be an ass.
Frankly, the ideas of the past are pretty logical when you only have what they know to go on. Why are some things "living" and some things "nonliving"? When you have only rocks and pointy sticks, it's hard to measure energy gradients, observe cells, and separate out chemical reactions. Therefore you tend to conclude there's a magic spirit inside that moves things around. From there its a fairly logical conclusion that these spirits might not die when the body dies - so you get ghosts.
Not a huge point, but you can see how culture is pervaded by logical ideas that have since been disproven.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't stop laughing, I think I had a hemmorage.
I take issue with your statement that our forefathers wanted us to be "on top". If you recall america's isolationist tenancies for the better part of the last 200 odd years, and the fact that they were fierce individualists, they most likely would have been saying something along the lines of "Fuck everyone else, let's just do our own thing."
Note that I'm not addressing the rest of your points - seeing blatant misattribution kind of pisses me off.
I know! Let's suck all the oxygen out of the air and charge world governments on a "per breath" basis. No, they might be hostile to that, their constituants wouldn't like it. I know! Let's get all the nitrogen instead, and every time someone tries to grow a plant, we can charge them 500 bucks!
How many people know about nitrogen? A hell of a lot less than about oxygen! Genius! Pure Genius!
Heh, no one else found this amusing? I thought it was clever.
been playing starcraft since 7th grade....
How is this even a story?
On google earth, the LOC is about .1 mile, which is 160934.4 millimeters. So if they can measure a nickel (1.95 mm) at 384,403 kilometres (center to center distance of the earth to the moon) and assuming that's the limit of their ability (which is not necessarily true I neglected to RTFA).
If you draw out the triangle, you'll find the arctangent of 1.95/3.84403x10^10 = 2.91x10^-9 degrees.
so that means that knowing that angle, we can find the max distance we can see the LOC at.
dist = 160934.4/tan(2.91x10^-9) = 3.17x10^15 mm
Anyway, that means that if you wanted to measure the distance to the library of congress in terms of football fields away (100 yd = 300*.305 m = 91 440 mm):3.17x10^15 mm / 91440 mm/football field = 3.47x10^10 football fields before you lose resolution on the library of congress
There you go, an order of magnitude less than the square root of a mole. Have your delicious /units. I hope they were good.
I have to agree with you, people who are 100% atheist can be asshats. By saying that they are 100% sure without any evidence, they are being intellectually dishonest, just like the religious folk. I'm about 99.999% sure that there is no god, at least as the organized religions tell it, but I'm open to argument if you have some new and interesting physical evidence. Agnostics might be the solution, they don't really have a reason to not be impartial.
NOTE TO ALL BELIEVERS: THE_BIBLE v3.0 - coming soon!
Brought to you by sourceforge. A community effort.
-Andre the Giant
There, fixed it for you.
I said it was painful. *cries at the memories*
Um, I think that's completely unrelated. As a wild guess, the selective pressure that made the ceiling thing happen is probably that humans are by default broad thinkers, but when you're in a tight situation, like climbing through trees, running through a forest, surrounded by a crowd, or what have you, you need to pay attention to the things around you. People who didn't pay attention to the missing branch/low branch/menacing stares were.... selected out.
I am so glad firefox came out with the spell checker. I'd used to have to open up word or something (I have a duel boot - don't worry slashdot) and paste the text in and check it. Man, that sucked.
LOL, back in the day, like 6th grade, my friend came up with a brilliant password. "Just use password!" he said, it's so obvious, no one will ever guess! Gone are those idealistic times...
Also, I double checked - at least ./ isn't case sensitive :)
There's just something weird about two human controlled entities spawning an AI controlled baby. Maybe it's just me.
Sadly, though, not at a store within easy walking distance :P But what brands?
I dunno, something that isn't concentrated and totally fluid. I guess I'd have to go to a juice shop or something :-|
I just find it depressing I can't find anything that isn't sugar loaded without resorting to actual fruit (something like 10 apples in one 20oz bottle of apple juice iirc). Maybe if they kept the pulp in more often, it wouldn't be as sweet. Btw, am I regarded as some kind of psycho for wanting pulp? It seems to me that most people go eeew.
...and all they get is the usual, automated Slashdot moaning.At least you've realized the truth, this being ./, everyone owns a spambot that searches for keywords in stories. You get this particular crapflood when the bots realize that something with the words "revolutionary" and "internet" (and possibly also "semantic")has appeared. Everything here is just markov chain output. Welcome to the future.
Also, there's an intelligent thread further up where the lead researcher posted that no one seems to be responding too :(
Juicy juice... a little too sweet. I'm just looking for something with pulp, not from concentrate etc. There's practically nothing in the "Quick! I need a drink! I'm thirsty!" market that fits this description.
I think you're talking about the semantic web proposal that has a bunch of issues with it. I'm not very knowlageable about it, but you can probably wikipedia or Google it.
As an american, I believe I can say quite easily that our sports and pop culture suck. I don't give a crap about Britney spears, and our feverant love of professional sports is the most inane thing I can think of. That said, I think the relative merits of our political system are much more debatable despite the bad apples in it (at least you can point to the amended constitution for good clean fun). Also, if the Indians and the Chinese want to bring some competition, let them. If we can't compete with them, what's the point of being "superior"?
Eh, I never said the system was perfect. I'd prefer some greedy exec lines their pockets with gold at the expense of 30 people's lives than let some guy as crowd rousing as Hitler was take over.
No, you know what mob rule will do. Some politician will advocate a position that boils the blood of the good clean pure people, like homosexuality, and bam. What have you. This is why the US has a bicameral congress with representatives with short terms, and representatives with long terms. This way they can sit down and actually consider the issue objectively.
What might be fun is if we set up a digg like system to rate our politicians. If they get too far into the negatives for too long, then bam outta there.
Finally, after all those people were bitching about Diebold, and bringing up those same points approximately 5 billion times about local networks and such, I was shocked and amazed that people were actually considering this as a viable option. Man slashdot, do you have no memory?
From time to time I think of what would I have concluded about certain phenomena were I given only the data people of that era had, and only their machinery. For instance, the spontaneous generation you mentioned, no one had cameras, and no one had done the experiment before. Just sitting in an armchair, I probably would have concluded it was spontaneous as well, although if I didn't go and test that I'd be an ass. Frankly, the ideas of the past are pretty logical when you only have what they know to go on. Why are some things "living" and some things "nonliving"? When you have only rocks and pointy sticks, it's hard to measure energy gradients, observe cells, and separate out chemical reactions. Therefore you tend to conclude there's a magic spirit inside that moves things around. From there its a fairly logical conclusion that these spirits might not die when the body dies - so you get ghosts. Not a huge point, but you can see how culture is pervaded by logical ideas that have since been disproven.