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Comment Re:well.. (Score 1) 760

Right. Because people become wealthy by being foolish with their money.

Not sure who it was but a physicist showed that; if you model US income by assuming that everyone has a pile of money and everyone goes out for a few hours a day and throws/catches random amounts at each other based on the size of their pile, the resulting income distribution mirrors that of the US population as a whole. Further, it does not matter how much each individual starts with, the same result occurs even if all piles are all equal at the start.

Comment Heroin (Score 1) 2

Assuming you actually want to execute people, I'd favor heroin. There are frequent pieces in the news about drug busts yielding some quantity of heroin, and about accidental heroin overdoese.

So execute with intentional heroin overdoses, if there's that much laying around. I'm sure legislation could make that purpose legal when performed by authorized agents, due process, etc.

I suspect the stumbling block is that some people wouldn't want the convicted getting high on their way out.

Submission + - Godwin Interviewed

theshowmecanuck writes: CBC Radio in Canada has just posted an interview with Mike Godwin, the originator of the famous (infamous?) Godwin's Law. Unbelievably it comes after a week where politicians started flinging the H word at each other. If you haven't been on Slashdot pretty much ever, say lived under a rock for the past 15 or 20 years, you will understand the interest to this site. :) So as a matter of that interest, enjoy.

Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 1) 283

no one was really targeting the civilian population as a matter of intent

Yeah right, tell that to the people of London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Manchester, Nagasaki, Auschwitz, etc, etc, the only reason Paris was spared was because Hitler valued the architecture and wanted to keep it intact.

Even the most bloody wars (such as the English civil war) kill less than 5% of the population, OTOH the black plague regularly killed ~50% or more of the people in the cities/regions it infected. People who survived the plague had a brief period of high living standards due to all the abandon property lying around.

There are a lot of environmentalist who think the world is over populated

As a science based "greenie" my "agenda" is to be a part of a sustainable, peaceful, disease free species. Wars, plagues, and mass starvation are what I want to avoid. Science and common sense tell me that the main factor in obtaining what I want (for my 3 grandkids) is population. There's plenty of evidence we can achieve humane population control by educating and allowing women to control their bodies, and providing security of living standards in old age.

Or we can continue to behave like fermenting yeast, expanding to consume our available resources and killing each other for access to untapped/unguarded resources (territory, water, food). AGW is the #1 mid (and long) term threat on the pentagon's list of threats to global stability and it has been that way for almost a decade. The reason is that AGW will dramatically change the current (territory, water, food) map, and it will do so this century - even if we all stop emitting GHGs today.

Syrian civil war - Canary in the coal mine? - "There is evidence that the 20072010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. It was the worst drought in the instrumental record, causing widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers. Century-long observed trends in precipitation, temperature, and sea-level pressure, supported by climate model results, strongly suggest that anthropogenic forcing has increased the probability of severe and persistent droughts in this region, and made the occurrence of a 3-year drought as severe as that of 20072010 2 to 3 times more likely than by natural variability alone. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict."

Comment Re:Life (Score 5, Interesting) 117

The four Galilean moons are interesting from an evolutionary POV.
Io - Molten sulphur on the surface, purple volcanoes all over it.
Europa - Deep water ocean, thin crust, very active plate tectonics.
Ganymede - Europa with a deep dish crust and cooler core.
Callisto - A rock.

So it would seem that gas giants may have their own "goldilocks zone" when they are orbiting in the colder regions of their host system. So the "average" solar system may have 3-4 "habitable zones" rather than just one.

Comment Re:Unfair comparison (Score 1) 447

accept the fact that there is in fact a vastly important, and quite scientific role which the mind plays in the processes of health and healing

Yes, the people who push Homeopathy and other forms of medical voodoo are also very likely to fuck with the victims mind, the aim of the brainwashing is make sure the victims avoid real doctors and keep coming back. The well known skeptic James Randi lost his father to one of these charlatans.

Comment Re:Unfair comparison (Score 1) 447

Often people taking placebo, homeopathy, etc. will *report* feeling better - but this does not mean they are better in any meaningful sense of the word.

Curiously, I'd say that's the only meaningful sense of "feel better".

If I took treatment which genuinely cured me of some physical ailment but didn't make me feel better, I honestly wouldn't care for it and wouldn't do it again. If I took a placebo which didn't cure the physical ailment but made me feel better, I'd be all over it. I guess I'd just assumed that this was obvious and everyone would have the same reaction. Apparently you don't.

Maybe I'm influenced by endurance sports (e.g. I've done many 10+ mile swims) where I think many people can physically accomplish it, but their state of mind is the only thing allowing them or preventing them from achieving it.

Submission + - How the solar neutrino problem was solved 1

StartsWithABang writes: For nearly all of human history — well into the 20th century — we really didn’t know how the Sun worked. Could it have been combustion, like we see on Earth? Or perhaps gravitational contraction, like that which powers white dwarf stars? No, it turned out to be nuclear fusion. Yet when we built our best models and went to test what we expected to see with what we actually observed, it was the smallest particles that didn’t add up: the neutrino. For decades, we kept observing only a third the number we expected. Here’s the story of how we solved that mystery, only in the early 2000s, and finally figured out what goes on inside the Sun!

Comment Re:I don't get it (Score 2) 157

Aliens with gigantic neutrino cannons is the obvious answer.

Having said that, chaotic systems are often statistically very stable, mathematically a stable non-linear system is known as a strange attractor, a strange attractor is always a fractal. The golden ratio pops up in all sorts of fractals, especially spirals.
It's said that our own sun has at least two internal spiraling magnetic fields that "wind themselves up into knots" for the peak of the 11yr sunspot cycle. Who said it I don't recall, but it wasn't the "electric universe" guy. ;)

Comment Re:Syntax and typo errors compile (Score 1) 757

Aside from effort and portability, it doesn't really matter what language(s) or framework(s) you use to get the job done. A basic understanding of the algorithms and concepts that have emerged from computer science and logistics over the last ~80yrs is the secret to being a "good" programmer, consistently knowing where, when, and how to apply them is the secret to being a "top-notch" programmer.

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