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Comment "Right to be forgotten" treads.... (Score 3, Interesting) 193

... too closely to history revisionism, IMO.

If you have put something unpleasant behind you, then really it should not matter if details of it are still available for other people to read... In fact, if it does, then the matter isn't really behind you at all. if other people are going to judge you by your past, that's unfortunate, but that's also just life... It shouldn't be up to legislation to change how liable people are to judge books by their covers, as it were.... That's a moral failing on their part.

People need to live their lives the best that they can... everyone fucking makes mistakes, and we learn to live with them. I used to know somebody who was crippled for life as a teenager because he was being reckless. he could easily still be reminded every single day of his life, even now over 30 years later, of what he should have done... so you can't somehow say that the Internet is somehow different just because something online can last forever, because there's other stuff that can be just as interminable.

Comment Re:What if I told you there's a cure? (Score 1) 244

BTW... had it ever occurred to you actually link to the things you are talking about instead of just pretending to sound like you know what you are talking about by just expecting everyone else to do the same research that you allegedly did?

If you are going to claim to know something, then post the friggen links to the relevant material instead of just saying to other people that they should just go do it themselves like you claim you did... otherwise, for all anyone else knows, you're just full of a lot of hot air... which to be honest, is how your post comes across. Particularly since there is at least one factually incorrect statement. Specifically, the claim that no americans have died from the virus is false... one has, to date. While that's still a small number, the claim of none is still factually incorrect. Of course, even being factually incorrect is not necessarily unforgivable, if you show that you at least made an honest attempt to do some reseearch on the topic, and the detail about which you are incorrect does not detract from your main point. But again, this too requires that you cite your sources, so that people will be able to replicate your research. Typing stuff into google doesn't replicate anything because a page rank can easily change.

Comment Re:What if I told you there's a cure? (Score 1) 244

Any idea why of the Americans in America who caught EBOV, a disease that's 70.8% fatal not one died?

Of the 17 cases of Ebola that have occurred outside of Africa, 4 of them have died. One of them was in the USA.

Granted, a lot lower than 70% mortality rate, but by no means are Americans immune.

Comment Re:Ebola = an intelligence test for the human race (Score 1) 244

While I wouldn't ordinarily excuse the ad-hominem, when you feel like you might need to resort to a physically violent confrontation just because someone's challenged your credibility online, it only kind of affirms the possibility that they may actually have been right

Comment Re:Let's do the math (Score 1) 307

Ah, but here you're falling into one of the common misconceptions about cosmology. The universe isn't expanding *into* anything -- if it were, the universe would have a centre

First of all, I never suggested that the universe actually *was* expanding into anything... I only offered the notion that even if it *were*, the fact that it has only been doing so for a finite amount of time still makes the universe finite, even if the space it were expanding into were infinite.

Second of all, if it were expanding into an infinite space, there is no reason to conjecture that this space would be limited to three dimensions, so no "center" to our expanding universe can necessarily be found - any more than you could find the center of a soccer ball on the surface of the soccer ball. A center definitely exists, but it's not going to be found on the restricted topology of the soccer ball, and the center of the universe exists, but you can't find it at a point in space... it would therefore be most correct to say that the center of the universe is actually the instant in time of the big bang.

Comment Doesn't do enough, IMO (Score 1) 82

It appears to only be able to tell if something is missing from the toolbox, which is perhaps useful because you can have an external indicator on the box that shows that the toolbox does not contain everything, and may reduce the occurrences of having a toolbox stored away before it has been properly restocked, but it does not do anything to actually locate the tools that were once in the box. Even if the range were limited to a few hundred meters within the box, that would still be extremely useful because you would still generlaly be able to locate it as long as it is still at the same work site.

So it's doing half a job... which however better than no job at all that may be, is still not a full job.

Comment Not impossible, just ruddy expensive (Score 1) 652

Which is what being fully environmentally conscious always amounts to.

They are right... renewables can't compete with coal economically, and it's foolish to try.

Where they *DO* compete with coal is in longevity.... in partictular, being sustainable for durations that are many orders of magnitude longer than any fossil fuel based system can hope to achieve while still keeping the planet's ecosystem unaltered. Yes, it costs more, but until somebody finds another habitable planet for us to live on and a way for us to actually get there, even a more expensive option is more desirable than no option at all.

Comment Re:The universe is not 13.8 billion light years wi (Score 1) 307

I said it was 13.8 billion years old, I never once suggested it was 13.8 billion light years across, I am well aware that the observable universe is actually much larger than that... what I've always found interesting, however is that the ratio between the proposed estimate of 93 billion light years in diameter and the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years is within 8% of the value of 2pi. That could be a coincidence. of course, but hey.... maybe it's something to think about?

My point remains. The universe is finite.

Comment Re:Let's do the math (Score 2) 307

For what it's worth, Olber's paradox uses the wrong formula for the volume of a shell some distance R from earth... The formul as I remember it from Olber's paradox is 4*Pi*R^2*dr, where dr is the thickness of the shell. However, this value only approaches accuracy as R approaches infinity. It is wrong for all finite values of R.

And I was not double counting anything. The actual volume of such a shell is: 4/3*Pi*(r+dr)^3-4/3*Pi*r^3. This is a value that is admittedly less than proportional to R^3, but more than proportional to R^2 for any finite value of R greater than zero. This volume is actually even greater than the value that Olber was utilizing, and dividing it by R^2 to calculate the expected intensity of radiation in that entire shell that reaches a point at distance R does not approach 0 as the distance approaches infinity.

But the real problem with Olber's paradox is not the miscalculation of the volume of the shell at some distance from earth,and in turn the number of elements within that volume which will emit radiation,but rather with the assumption that the universe is somehow actually infinite in the first place.

Olber's paradox revealed that trying to make an assumption that the universe might be infinite is flawed, and by my understanding helped to serve as an impetus at the term to find alternative explanations for what we observed, eventually leading to the widely accepted big bang hypothesis.

And observed red shift means that objects are moving away from each other, which means that at some point they were much closer together, and rewinding the clock even further suggests that the universe began at a single point, and has been expanding outward ever since (although you can no more find a point in space that is the center of it than you can find the center of an inflated balloon anywhere on the surface of the balloon).

Bottom line: the universe is finite. Even if it were ever found to be expanding into an infinite unbounded space.

Comment Re:Let's do the math (Score 2) 307

What evidence is there of an infinite universe that had no beginning?

Bear in mind also that if an infinite universe exists, which had no beginning, then light would also have had infinite amount of time to travel to here from absolutely everywhere else, and although the intensity of radiation that reaches a point is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that point. the volume of space that is an average of some given distance away from a point is greater than an amount proportional to the square of the distance from that point, and so the number of things in that volume which produce radiation at that distance would be be correspondingly greater, more than cancelling out the inverse square relationship to the intensity of radiation reaching a point some fixed distance apart. Every point in the universe would be perpetually saturated in radiation that is reaching it from every other point in the universe, infinitely far away, and certainly things like life bearing planets could not exist.

Critical observation suggests that the universe is finite.

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