The ice is in bins near melting point rather than fresh from a freezer which is warmer. When the slightly warmer soda hits it, some melts diluting the too sweet soda.
As it comes out the spigot, much of the CO2 is lost as bubbles. Soda right from a fresh bottle is always too fizzy and too sweet.
Possibly taste of plastic bottle remains in soda from bottle.
The exception is that most 'convenience store fountain soda' tastes like the cleaning fluid used to clean the machines. Fast food joint and restaurant soda never has this problem. It's too bad, because convenience store fountain soda is usually cheaper and available in larger quantities.
What is meant by this is that American Workers are using the big tools. For instance an American Worker driving a back-hoe is a much more productive digger than a Dirkadirkistani Worker wielding a garden spade. They are both diggers, yet the American is more productive, even though the Dirkadirkistani may be working 25 hour days 8 days a week.
Just starting your career eh? No it's not unique to your industry, it's common across hierarchys. Newscientist had a couple of good articles recently about bureaucracy/heirarchy/cube-life etc:
"You have no idea how much wealth is involved, Feyd," the Baron said. "Not in your wildest imaginings. To begin, we'll have an irrevocable directorship in the C.H.I.N.A. Company
Manufacturing expertise as well as obtained a credit financed trade deficit.
China's control over the exchange rate means that to buy something from china, you exchange your currency for yuan at a great rate, then buy the thing. The chinese government has your simoleons which they instead of buying yuan, use to buy simoleon denominated assets such as treasury bonds. The buying power goes to the chinese government, rather than to those ( such as chinese workers ) who are being paid in yuan. It's basically a hidden tax. It's one way the chinese government ( the elite ) keeps the average chinese worker down.
That '<insert your favorite country here> is falling behind in math/science!' is blared by those looking for more simoleons for education, but what the heck does that really mean?
Any science worth a damn is published in acedemic journals that can be purchased by anyone anywhere in any country. If a country is 'ahead' it loses it's 'lead' the minute someone in another country reads about it.
I have trouble imagining how not having enough <insert favorite technical profession here> within your borders could limit you. Technical folk aren't needed en masse. They are needed here and there, sprinkled about in vital areas. Hence they are easily imported from whereever they happen to be by paying them a little extra. It's cheap enough to do, since they aren't needed en masse.
There is no need to worry that <insert foreign discovery here> might not be available in your country. You can always buy it, or if it makes the most economic sense for it to be manufactured in your country then it will be manufactured there. Where the discovery is made makes no difference at all.
The only exception to this is military technology. That technology will be developed and used where the government funds a sufficiently large military industrial complex. It's about the money, not about who has the most scientists. A few scientists go a LONG way.
Hmm, it wasn't clear to me why the aliens were refugees. I'll have to watch it again to see if it had anything to do with the 'Scientist Boy'. I thought he was just another refugee.
And as for the odd collection of weapons, I was under the impression that they were manufactured in the refugee camps out of empty cat food cans and stuff.
I have to agree that CGI has been mostly bad for movies, at least where it is noticeable, but the novelty will wear off. As the novelty of CGI effects themselves wear off to the point where adding them doesn't add to the box office totals, then artists will create novelty that's actually worthwhile. Avatar might be tending this way - there's never really been an alien world in a movie before. I want to go see it, even if the Na'vi I've seen in trailers do look way too human.
Last night I saw District 9. Now that was an alien done well with CGI, with character development to boot. Sure it was primarily humanoid, but quite far enough from humanoid to be a real alien. You start out revolted by them, but actually come to identify with them in a realistic way.
People always think they understand other people's jobs - including programmers, and salesmen and bricklayers.
For instance a salesman who sells his customers only what they need rather than trying to boost his short term sales figures may have customers who buy from them again and again, are satisfied with their purchases and stay in business to be repeat customers. Often the customers will follow the salesman not stay with the company when the salesman changes jobs. This is the kind of tradeoff explained to me by my father who was a salesman.
I'm sure there are similar tradeoffs known to bricklayers. Maybe counting bricks layed doesn't take into account other factors such as quality and how their laying activities effect the productivity of their coworkers.
As a programmer, I know it's possible to produce more short term whilst messing things up for yourself and everyone else long term ruining maintainability and expandability for short term productivity. When everyone is messing up the codebase, trying to clean it up makes you look real bad and others look good by comparison.
Think about it: All the codebase is crap. It takes you forever to understand the impact of changes. It's like trying to pull out a stick from a pile of sticks without moving any other sticks. Good luck with that, and you will be moving slowly and making mistakes. If you try to clean things up you will be slower than everyone else, and step on all their egos, making them threatened by you, and angry at you. In real life Gregory House gets fired. You aren't that stupid. You keep your mouth shut.
Meanwhile, the new code you produce is easy to understand and expand upon, so other developers look great when they work on something you created.
This rotation of responsibilities occurs because nobody wants to be dependent on any one developer who might leave to maintain the code they have produced.
The same thing with salesmen - You work on cultivating a group of customers, and then they decide to mix it up - they don't want customers loyal to the salesmen, but to the company. This results in short sighted sales tactics at the expense of tactics that would boost long term sales numbers.
Bricklaying - I don't know anything about bricklaying other than that I tried to fix my brick steps and found it to be harder than it looks.
Fuck Mickey. We have Mickey so we don't get 'the next Mickey' since Disney builds more shit around Mickey. Mickey is Old. Have the decency to let him die. Are we to keep dangling his undead bones around like some kind of emaciated puppet, haunting the minds of children forever and ever?
My gut agrees with you, but I can't say why... Maybe it's the language that falls behind in basic research falls behind in history... If that's the case then funding translation into your language of basic research should be cheaper and have the same effect.
Or else maybe it has to do with having the people doing basic research in your country... I dunno... Maybe the proposition is false or not..
I didn't bat an eye because I thought Ireland was not the same country as the UK. Is it part of the UK, or is only part of Ireland?
Hmm, a quick trip to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK gives: " United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" commonly known as the United Kingdom...
Ok, so "NORTHERN" Ireland is part of the UK... So which Ireland was it that passed the anti-blasphemy law? Although I generally expect the UK to be a free speech country, I'm even more ignorant about Ireland. Maybe Ireland sucks or not, I don't know... So I wasn't that suprised to hear that 'Ireland passed anti-blasphemy laws' I already knew they were more religious than most of Europe, and religion + the state makes that state stupider than normal.
But this was NORTHERN IRELAND? And Norther Ireland is part of the UK? If both of those are true then I'm starting to bat an eye. I'm learning now that my concept of 'The Free World' has mostly been formed by 'Nato' in ancient Nato vs the Warsaw Pact maps. It sorely needs re-evaluating.
You'd accept a check for a payment on something like a car?
You're game.
Ok, suppose I'm a Meth addict who stole a book of checks from somebody's mailbox. I write you one of them for your car. Now I am in posession of a stolen car no less than if I hotwired it. I can't sell it, or register it or do anything with it because I will never have the title to it. Seriously, I feel safe leaving a car that would sell for under twenty thousand dollars unlocked with the keys, if not in it, maybe under the visor. There's just no incentive to steal it.
It seems that if you have a cheque ( even without a funny guarantee card ) and access to the internet, then you ought to have all the information you need to deposit the cheque and have it clear immediately at the point of sale BEFORE the customer gets a reciept. What possible event could happen once the cheque clears? Why aren't cheques cleared IMMEDIATELY. Then there is no possibility of a bounced cheque - if there are insufficient funds, then NO SALE.
Most people who buy a game that doesn't work would rather have a patch than a refund, or else they wouldn't have bought the game. That said, if a game doesn't work, then isn't it already a consumer's right to get a refund? Doesn't the consumer already have the right to examine a product before the sale is final? In the case of software, this means installing it.
URLs are supposed to be usable in links. Extra indirection without caching introduces more opportunities for a link to break. Also, url shortening hides information that is useful, for instance, the domain name. Are you going to follow a link to urlshorten.com from slashdot at work? How do you know it doesn't really lead to goatse or nambla.org org or whatever?
And linking through somewhere else gives that somewhere else an opportunity to do annoying things like frame the content etc. It has the potential to give the shortening site the means to hold millions of links hostage. If you want to use the link, you have to first view an ad, or whatever. Fsck that! Don't give these people the value of your intellectual property by using their 'shortening service'. Your opinion that a site is worth linking to can be published so that nobody can collect a toll from it if you just use the real url. There may be some value in mirroring however, and linking to mirrors, but url shorteners don't do that.
This is what allows it ( maybe ) to jive with google's 'Do no evil' motto. Since the scope is limited to google products, then it doesn't break the web at large. Without google there are no google products anyway, so who cares if they are full of shortened URLs. URL shortening is, in general, evil.
That's a really nice description of what is supposedly happening, but I would still like a 'Popular Science' level picture of how the heck this works showing the machine, and the fields and how they would react...
I need a wearable butt kicking machine powered by my own footsteps that will kick my butt continually. I should wear one today as penance for not reading comments before replying to them.
Incredulity is the healthy default stance. Credibility must be earned, and in science it is by making predictions based on a theory that turn out to be correct time and again. Climate science, which is about long term trends is too young a field to have earned much of this kind of credibility.
Some examples where scientific communities have deluded themselves by failing to apply the scientific method are:
Cosmology: The universe is so because the bible/Aristotle says so ( appeal to authority )
Psychology: You repress a desire to have sex with your mother. If you think you don't, then you are in denial ( untestable theories )
I'm sure there are many more. Both these disciplines have earned more credibility than they deserved years ago by adhering better to the scientific method of late and producing theories that better fit observations. An example of a scientific discipline that has failed to do this is phrenology. Another is numerology. Another is astrology. Because of persistent failure to follow the scientific method, and failure to make useful and accurate predictions about the real world, these disciplines have been demoted to pseudoscience. Although if you consider the state of the art in phrenology to be: Bumps on the head don't predict a damn thing,
and the state of the art in Numerology to be numerical patterns have no magical powers, and the state of the art in Astrology to be, the movements of the planets and the positions of the constellations have no apparent effect on much of anything, then maybe these disciplines too can be considered science. Climate Science will earn credibility as a science to the extent that it adheres to the scientific method. Doing so will enable it to make better and better predictions about the climate which will be born out in time. Succumbing to the temptation to stray from the scientific method will fail to produce useful results.
Climate scientists know high CO2 levels are associated with hot climates and they want to know whether human generated CO2 causes climate change. Let's leave this for a minute and consider another similar problem.
Knowing that Cigarrete Smoking is associated with Lung Cancer, consider the problem of investigating whether or not Cigarette Smoking CAUSES Lung Cancer in Humans. The obvious way is to imprison 60 random people, forcing 30 of them to smoke, and keeping cigarrettes away from the other 30, and then look at lung cancer rates after 20 years.
This in unethical. Instead scientists do the next best thing which is to experiment on a model - the mouse. They imprison 60 mice, and force 30 of them to smoke and supply the others with smoke free air. Then they look at lung cancer rates in the mice. Are mice people? No. Mice might react differently to cigarrette smoke than people. However the experiment rules out the possibility that there is a gene in mice that both causes lung cancer and the propensity to smoke. Assuming people react similarly to the model, then this has some hard to quantify bearing on whether Cigarrette Smoking causes Lung Cancer in humans. It's important to note that the mice are just regular mice. Nowadays mice for experiments are commonly genetically engineered so there is the possibility that the scientists themselves might use mouse models 'designed' to behave as expected. This would be a fallacy because it would support whatever hypothesis the scientists were testing.
Like the medical researchers, Climate Scientists are unable to perform the experiment they want to perform, namely pollute 30 earths with CO2, and leave 30 pristine, and then see what happens to the climate. They must instead perform the experiment on models of the climate. These models are mathematical and/or computer models. The problem is that the models are designed and built by the very scientists that are using them to test their theories such as the theory that CO2 emmitted by people causes global warming.
Slashdot Mirror
It could very well be that vital things about you are there because one of your ancestors got a brain virus.
Although in this case, they actually proved causation.
I can think of a few reasons:
The exception is that most 'convenience store fountain soda' tastes like the cleaning fluid used to clean the machines. Fast food joint and restaurant soda never has this problem. It's too bad, because convenience store fountain soda is usually cheaper and available in larger quantities.
"American workers are the most productive"
What is meant by this is that American Workers are using the big tools. For instance an American Worker driving a back-hoe is a much more productive digger than a Dirkadirkistani Worker wielding a garden spade. They are both diggers, yet the American is more productive, even though the Dirkadirkistani may be working 25 hour days 8 days a week.
Just starting your career eh? No it's not unique to your industry, it's common across hierarchys. Newscientist had a couple of good articles recently about bureaucracy/heirarchy/cube-life etc:
Or you could watch Office Space, or better yet, do what you are doing now: live it.
... And he who controls the NEODYMIUM controls the universe.
Combine Honnete Iber Nercantiles Advancer (C.H.I.N.A.)
The Neodymium must flow.
Manufacturing expertise as well as obtained a credit financed trade deficit.
China's control over the exchange rate means that to buy something from china, you exchange your currency for yuan at a great rate, then buy the thing. The chinese government has your simoleons which they instead of buying yuan, use to buy simoleon denominated assets such as treasury bonds. The buying power goes to the chinese government, rather than to those ( such as chinese workers ) who are being paid in yuan. It's basically a hidden tax. It's one way the chinese government ( the elite ) keeps the average chinese worker down.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2008/01/how-does-china-control-the-exc.html
That '<insert your favorite country here> is falling behind in math/science!' is blared by those looking for more simoleons for education, but what the heck does that really mean?
Any science worth a damn is published in acedemic journals that can be purchased by anyone anywhere in any country. If a country is 'ahead' it loses it's 'lead' the minute someone in another country reads about it.
I have trouble imagining how not having enough <insert favorite technical profession here> within your borders could limit you. Technical folk aren't needed en masse. They are needed here and there, sprinkled about in vital areas. Hence they are easily imported from whereever they happen to be by paying them a little extra. It's cheap enough to do, since they aren't needed en masse.
There is no need to worry that <insert foreign discovery here> might not be available in your country. You can always buy it, or if it makes the most economic sense for it to be manufactured in your country then it will be manufactured there. Where the discovery is made makes no difference at all.
The only exception to this is military technology. That technology will be developed and used where the government funds a sufficiently large military industrial complex. It's about the money, not about who has the most scientists. A few scientists go a LONG way.
Hmm, it wasn't clear to me why the aliens were refugees. I'll have to watch it again to see if it had anything to do with the 'Scientist Boy'. I thought he was just another refugee.
And as for the odd collection of weapons, I was under the impression that they were manufactured in the refugee camps out of empty cat food cans and stuff.
I have to agree that CGI has been mostly bad for movies, at least where it is noticeable, but the novelty will wear off. As the novelty of CGI effects themselves wear off to the point where adding them doesn't add to the box office totals, then artists will create novelty that's actually worthwhile. Avatar might be tending this way - there's never really been an alien world in a movie before. I want to go see it, even if the Na'vi I've seen in trailers do look way too human.
Last night I saw District 9. Now that was an alien done well with CGI, with character development to boot. Sure it was primarily humanoid, but quite far enough from humanoid to be a real alien. You start out revolted by them, but actually come to identify with them in a realistic way.
People always think they understand other people's jobs - including programmers, and salesmen and bricklayers.
For instance a salesman who sells his customers only what they need rather than trying to boost his short term sales figures may have customers who buy from them again and again, are satisfied with their purchases and stay in business to be repeat customers. Often the customers will follow the salesman not stay with the company when the salesman changes jobs. This is the kind of tradeoff explained to me by my father who was a salesman.
I'm sure there are similar tradeoffs known to bricklayers. Maybe counting bricks layed doesn't take into account other factors such as quality and how their laying activities effect the productivity of their coworkers.
As a programmer, I know it's possible to produce more short term whilst messing things up for yourself and everyone else long term ruining maintainability and expandability for short term productivity. When everyone is messing up the codebase, trying to clean it up makes you look real bad and others look good by comparison.
Think about it: All the codebase is crap. It takes you forever to understand the impact of changes. It's like trying to pull out a stick from a pile of sticks without moving any other sticks. Good luck with that, and you will be moving slowly and making mistakes. If you try to clean things up you will be slower than everyone else, and step on all their egos, making them threatened by you, and angry at you. In real life Gregory House gets fired. You aren't that stupid. You keep your mouth shut. Meanwhile, the new code you produce is easy to understand and expand upon, so other developers look great when they work on something you created. This rotation of responsibilities occurs because nobody wants to be dependent on any one developer who might leave to maintain the code they have produced.
The same thing with salesmen - You work on cultivating a group of customers, and then they decide to mix it up - they don't want customers loyal to the salesmen, but to the company. This results in short sighted sales tactics at the expense of tactics that would boost long term sales numbers.
Bricklaying - I don't know anything about bricklaying other than that I tried to fix my brick steps and found it to be harder than it looks.
Fuck Mickey. We have Mickey so we don't get 'the next Mickey' since Disney builds more shit around Mickey. Mickey is Old. Have the decency to let him die. Are we to keep dangling his undead bones around like some kind of emaciated puppet, haunting the minds of children forever and ever?
I wonder if it would see anything worth while once its cameras are coated with tarry goo.
My gut agrees with you, but I can't say why... Maybe it's the language that falls behind in basic research falls behind in history... If that's the case then funding translation into your language of basic research should be cheaper and have the same effect.
Or else maybe it has to do with having the people doing basic research in your country... I dunno... Maybe the proposition is false or not..
I didn't bat an eye because I thought Ireland was not the same country as the UK. Is it part of the UK, or is only part of Ireland?
Hmm, a quick trip to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK gives: " United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" commonly known as the United Kingdom ...
Ok, so "NORTHERN" Ireland is part of the UK... So which Ireland was it that passed the anti-blasphemy law? Although I generally expect the UK to be a free speech country, I'm even more ignorant about Ireland. Maybe Ireland sucks or not, I don't know... So I wasn't that suprised to hear that 'Ireland passed anti-blasphemy laws' I already knew they were more religious than most of Europe, and religion + the state makes that state stupider than normal.
But this was NORTHERN IRELAND? And Norther Ireland is part of the UK? If both of those are true then I'm starting to bat an eye. I'm learning now that my concept of 'The Free World' has mostly been formed by 'Nato' in ancient Nato vs the Warsaw Pact maps. It sorely needs re-evaluating.
Ok, suppose I'm a Meth addict who stole a book of checks from somebody's mailbox. I write you one of them for your car. Now I am in posession of a stolen car no less than if I hotwired it. I can't sell it, or register it or do anything with it because I will never have the title to it. Seriously, I feel safe leaving a car that would sell for under twenty thousand dollars unlocked with the keys, if not in it, maybe under the visor. There's just no incentive to steal it.
It seems that if you have a cheque ( even without a funny guarantee card ) and access to the internet, then you ought to have all the information you need to deposit the cheque and have it clear immediately at the point of sale BEFORE the customer gets a reciept. What possible event could happen once the cheque clears? Why aren't cheques cleared IMMEDIATELY. Then there is no possibility of a bounced cheque - if there are insufficient funds, then NO SALE.
Most people who buy a game that doesn't work would rather have a patch than a refund, or else they wouldn't have bought the game. That said, if a game doesn't work, then isn't it already a consumer's right to get a refund? Doesn't the consumer already have the right to examine a product before the sale is final? In the case of software, this means installing it.
URLs are supposed to be usable in links. Extra indirection without caching introduces more opportunities for a link to break. Also, url shortening hides information that is useful, for instance, the domain name. Are you going to follow a link to urlshorten.com from slashdot at work? How do you know it doesn't really lead to goatse or nambla.org org or whatever? And linking through somewhere else gives that somewhere else an opportunity to do annoying things like frame the content etc. It has the potential to give the shortening site the means to hold millions of links hostage. If you want to use the link, you have to first view an ad, or whatever. Fsck that! Don't give these people the value of your intellectual property by using their 'shortening service'. Your opinion that a site is worth linking to can be published so that nobody can collect a toll from it if you just use the real url. There may be some value in mirroring however, and linking to mirrors, but url shorteners don't do that.
For good reading about causality check out http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/home.htm, in particular the slides from a lecture on the subject as it relates to robotics. Read down to the part about smoking and cancer. I think he has a pretty good handle on Causation vs Correlation.
This is what allows it ( maybe ) to jive with google's 'Do no evil' motto. Since the scope is limited to google products, then it doesn't break the web at large. Without google there are no google products anyway, so who cares if they are full of shortened URLs. URL shortening is, in general, evil.
That's a really nice description of what is supposedly happening, but I would still like a 'Popular Science' level picture of how the heck this works showing the machine, and the fields and how they would react...
I need a wearable butt kicking machine powered by my own footsteps that will kick my butt continually. I should wear one today as penance for not reading comments before replying to them.
Why?
It's like saying: Chewbacca is a wookie, Wookies live on Endor, so therefore your Monkey was your Uncle.
Incredulity is the healthy default stance. Credibility must be earned, and in science it is by making predictions based on a theory that turn out to be correct time and again. Climate science, which is about long term trends is too young a field to have earned much of this kind of credibility.
Some examples where scientific communities have deluded themselves by failing to apply the scientific method are:
I'm sure there are many more. Both these disciplines have earned more credibility than they deserved years ago by adhering better to the scientific method of late and producing theories that better fit observations. An example of a scientific discipline that has failed to do this is phrenology. Another is numerology. Another is astrology. Because of persistent failure to follow the scientific method, and failure to make useful and accurate predictions about the real world, these disciplines have been demoted to pseudoscience. Although if you consider the state of the art in phrenology to be: Bumps on the head don't predict a damn thing, and the state of the art in Numerology to be numerical patterns have no magical powers, and the state of the art in Astrology to be, the movements of the planets and the positions of the constellations have no apparent effect on much of anything, then maybe these disciplines too can be considered science. Climate Science will earn credibility as a science to the extent that it adheres to the scientific method. Doing so will enable it to make better and better predictions about the climate which will be born out in time. Succumbing to the temptation to stray from the scientific method will fail to produce useful results.
Climate scientists know high CO2 levels are associated with hot climates and they want to know whether human generated CO2 causes climate change. Let's leave this for a minute and consider another similar problem.
Knowing that Cigarrete Smoking is associated with Lung Cancer, consider the problem of investigating whether or not Cigarette Smoking CAUSES Lung Cancer in Humans. The obvious way is to imprison 60 random people, forcing 30 of them to smoke, and keeping cigarrettes away from the other 30, and then look at lung cancer rates after 20 years.
This in unethical. Instead scientists do the next best thing which is to experiment on a model - the mouse. They imprison 60 mice, and force 30 of them to smoke and supply the others with smoke free air. Then they look at lung cancer rates in the mice. Are mice people? No. Mice might react differently to cigarrette smoke than people. However the experiment rules out the possibility that there is a gene in mice that both causes lung cancer and the propensity to smoke. Assuming people react similarly to the model, then this has some hard to quantify bearing on whether Cigarrette Smoking causes Lung Cancer in humans. It's important to note that the mice are just regular mice. Nowadays mice for experiments are commonly genetically engineered so there is the possibility that the scientists themselves might use mouse models 'designed' to behave as expected. This would be a fallacy because it would support whatever hypothesis the scientists were testing.
Like the medical researchers, Climate Scientists are unable to perform the experiment they want to perform, namely pollute 30 earths with CO2, and leave 30 pristine, and then see what happens to the climate. They must instead perform the experiment on models of the climate. These models are mathematical and/or computer models. The problem is that the models are designed and built by the very scientists that are using them to test their theories such as the theory that CO2 emmitted by people causes global warming.
Climate scientists construct their models s