Comment Re: Metric units (Score 1) 282
No more imperial shit.
Oh, just wait until the NeoCons hear about this rocket.
Look what happened to the British Empire.
No more imperial shit.
Oh, just wait until the NeoCons hear about this rocket.
Look what happened to the British Empire.
The whole concept of "duplicate you" just smacks of new age bullshit "spirituality" which suckers in the weak-minded and ill-educated with baffle gab and fancy words.
Nine out of ten mes agree!
FDA...? Do they consider mosquitos food or drugs?
Oh, and nice assumption. Suburban soccer mom? Nice one kid.
I wasn't aware that I'd grown ovaries and acquired children and a decade in age overnight. Who knew!
Time to pop some kids out and buy some mom jeans because I disagreed with someone on slashdot. Man, you have to be careful about this shit.
How servile and feeble minded.. "bu bu but the sign said!"
Are you stupid, trolling, or just argumentative?
If you cannot honestly see how sticking a 20-25 mph zone in the middle of an arterial (that has speed of 45) is somewhere between a feel good policy (IE, think of the children!) and existing entirely for revenue generation, i really don't know what to tell you.
Further, if you don't 'get' how it could be more of a safety risk to focus on dropping your speed in half, watching out for kids, the jackhole behind you who doesn't get what a 'school zone' is AND of course the cops who hunt motorists who are over the limit by even one MPH in such zones (the fine is double of course, go figure) -- someone should really break your fingers to give you a mandatory 6 week no-typing vacation.
People like are you (suburban soccer mom perhaps?) are the reason we don't get nice things. As soon as someone trots out anything safety related, logic and risk assessment go completely out in the window in lieu of fluffy feel good nonsense. Never mind the ACTUAL FUCKING EFFECTIVENESS OF WHAT YOU SUGGEST.
Wow. Who pissed in your chips?
Your argument was that you'd be "too busy checking your speedometer" (quote) to look out for children. I'm saying that if such a task is so distracting that you can't look at the road ahead then you're a poor driver and would likely fail a driving test.
If the speed drops by half on a road, with posted signs, and you think that's dangerous then we're clearly not on the same page at all. These sorts of things are common in the UK, for example, (and I'm sure in many countries that have roads) where an arterial route goes from the high speed limit (60 mph in the UK on non-motoways) down to 30 mph when passing through a small built up area. The signs are clearly marked, and there's plenty of warning.
When you see those signs you change speed. The obsessive checking of your speed to the exclusion of all other road perception is just nonsense. Roads have speed limits. Being able to drive your car at or below those limits without tunnel vision on the speedometer is one of the primary skills necessary to operate a vehicle safely. If you cannot do this (such that you feel you wouldn't be able to look out for children in a crossing while also being able to drive at the posted speed limit) then you have no business driving a car.
Of course what you're really angry about is that cops bust people for speeding.
GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.
The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.
So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.
If you can't drive a vehicle at a specified speed (designated by road signs) without being so distracted by the speedometer that you might crash then you should not have been issued with a driving licence and have no business operating a motor vehicle on a public road.
In the UK all the money from speed cameras and speed traps is used exclusively for public safety; digital speed warning signs, traffic calming, improvement of crossings etc. It's not used as a general police revenue source.
what with the rabble's concerns boiling over and impinging on the fringes of their attention.
Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.
As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)
Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.
And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.
It's like the old Texan saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can't get fooled again."
I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".
(Is this really a regional saying?)
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall
