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Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 162

A bartender is under no obligation to refuse an alcoholic a drink. An alcoholic might arrive in the bar, 15 years sober and ask for a drink. How is the barman to know? Either way, it's not illegal for him to serve the alcoholic.

Robots should be programed to obey the law. There is no law against serving alcoholics, there is a law against serving people underage.

Your point seems to be different to the topic of the article, which isn't about serving people already dangerously drunk.

Comment Re:Sweet F A (Score 2) 576

The second point is not really relevant, given that the thought experiment is about our ability to detect something that was invading us. If they are invading us, then they have found us.

So you now have to explain 2 discrepancies in technology. 1) They are sufficiently advanced to have found us. 2) They are sufficiently advanced to get to us.

The more you add to the list of things they would have to have in order to invade us, the less and less likely they are missing the things required to eliminate us undetected. For example, you would have a hard time explaining how they can move their fleet across the vast void of space, but can't move a sufficient number of asteroids from an asteroid belt to populous locations on Earth's surface.

This is why I dislike most alien invasion movies.

Comment Re:Heat Death of the Universe (Score 2) 54

Yes, you were joking, however, it made a number of shocking omissions in the few minutes it actually did run. It was as if, realising they had nil for a SFX budget, they decided that Lews Therin did himself in with a knife instead of overdrawing on the source and creating Dragonmount. Also, there was no rippling of floors and walls in after-shock from him using the power to murder his entire family.

The other bits weren't that bad though. No, wait, they were. They got Ilyena "Sunhair"'s hair colour wrong.

Comment Re:what about skinny people? (Score 1) 378

I don't like to quote something possibly over-used, but "Absence of proof is not proof of absence."

To adequately prove psychopaths don't thrive in a primarily psychopathic society, we'd have to run several experiments where varying groups of people try to form a society with a range of ratios between normal and psychopathic people.

I'd hate to be the one normal guy in that group!

Comment Re:Aging? (Score 1) 183

True.

The same is said of AIDS. People don't die of AIDS, they die because their immune system is so compromised that the flu kills them or something else.

I agree that there are things that kill you easier when you are older than when younger, but there are a lot of things totally unrelated to age that are already killing us, things like an unhealthy lifestyle leading to obesity and diabetes. You'll probably agree that there are very few fat old people (like _really_ old).

While there's a lower risk of heart disease in younger people, this might likely be because they just haven't had enough time to do the full amount of damage required to finally cause it to fail.

So we should see (purely for the sake of argument) what causes of death are due to an otherwise healthy body being old, and what causes of death are due to an accumulation of time doing something that may kill you.

Comment Re:Still Doesn't Explain... (Score 1) 239

If they were all pumped up with the same piece of equipment then it is possible that there was a upward trend in temperature as they inflated each ball. If, as time goes by, the compressor used to pump the balls heated up, then the first balls would have been fine, while the last balls would have ended up deflated to the largest degree. All that has to happen is for the Patriots to have gotten the first 1/2 of the balls and the Colts the second half.

If the Colts balls ranged from "Fine" - "a 'tic' below 12.5 psi" - "a few 1 psi under the limit" - "one that was 2 psi under the limit" it reinforces my belief that the air could have been getting hotter as pumping progressed.

The question is, how hot would the air inside the ball have to have been for there to be a 2 psi loss. The pressure drop from 12.5 psi to 10.5 psi equates to a drop of 3.36 degrees Celsius. It is entirely possible for this to happen over the course of pumping a number of balls with a compressor that doesn't maintain constant temperature.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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