Sorry, no. Moral relativism is complete bullshit. Some things are morally wrong ABSOLUTELY. One of them is supressing your populace's ability to communicate. I'm sick and tired of people justifying morally corrupt behavior just because it's state-sanctioned. Sorry, forcing women they have to wear a head-dress is absolutely not acceptable. Denying them basic human rights is absolutely not acceptable. Persecution of homosexuality is absolutely not acceptable. EVEN IF ALL THESE THINGS ARE STATE SANCTIONED. I'll take that one step further and say that it is even absolutely morally unacceptable for a radical state to possess nuclear weaponry, even more absolutely morally unacceptable for such a regime to have such unabashed hatred based on another people's religion.

The difference between a state and a mob is that one controls the military and one does not. Simply being a group does not magically grant anyone moral superiority or the ability to redefine basic human rights. Saying that its ok for ANYONE to do that is fucking retarded, and something that is continued by apologists. Your moral 'relativism' is the reason why atrocities like this are allowed to perpetrate.

I was under the impression that there was nothing to be gained by doing the schrodinger's cat experiment. The idea is that in collapsing the probability wave of any object, the "observer"-object (really anything that the collapsing object interacts with, conciousnes not required!) essentially becomes a superposition of states. This forms an outward expanding wave of super position with the individuals caught within the wave observing it as collapsed and those outside the event observing all those that interact with the superpositions becoming superpositions themselves.

For example scientist-A is in an isolated box and has a cat in an isolated box. The cat is a superposition either dead or alive, is definately one or the other when he opens the box. Let's say for him, the cat is dead when he opens it and that makes him sad. However the scientist-B, outside the larger box which contains scientist-A can now say that the box is filled a superposition of A-with dead cat (sad scientist), and A-with live cat (happy scientist). This is because scientist-B does not know the result of scientist-A opening the box,only that room now contains a superposition of a sad or happy man with a dead or live cat. Only when B opens this larger box does it the superposition of A collapse for scientist B. Now B is in the same position - he is now be a superposition of states of scientist-B seeing sad-man with dead cat, and scientist-B seeing happy-man with live cat. So the idea is that ALL quantum events function in this way. Performing this on any object, be it virus or molecule or cat. Of course because the real world has no such isolation boxes, these wavefronts of collapse and local superposition happen continuously and undetectably.

So what will happen is they'll go through all this difficulty to superpose two states. Then view the virus, seeing it in one state - all the while oblivious that they are now intertwined with that superposition to an outside observer.

This is a basic business fact, has been known for decades, and is one of the big reasons why people are justifiably against increased taxes.

It happens on every level of government - city, county, state and finally country. Tax increases at any of these levels tend to drive away businesses, lower taxes and incentives draw them in. The only thing that makes this news-worthy is that cloud-computing is a fairly new industry. Surprise, surprise they react to taxes like any other business.

Of course, every level of government NEEDS taxes, but tax increases to pay for various social services ultimately have to be finely balanced between driving away business with the need for those services. Heavily taxing business to provide for such services helps the community in the short term, but drives away the business and hurts the community through job loss in the mid to long term. Did the social service help the community greater than the loss of the jobs hurt it? There-in lies the delicate balance that is illustrated by the issue of taxes and business migration. Again, nothing new.

I think there's a little typo. When they wrote Cyclone they actually meant Cylon.

Obviously I mean the fact that shuttles have had a hand in making them "become increasingly visible." I'm sure there's some natural processes that can create them, but are more rare than shuttle launches - i.e. large volcanic eruptions (such as the one in the late 1800s) or something else we haven't identified.

Aren't they caused by the space shuttle? I could swear there was an article a couple weeks ago on slashdot about it. Basically they found that they tend to form hours after the shuttle launch, particularly around Antarctica. The shuttle's boosters release X tons of water into the high atmosphere, at altitudes water can't regularly attain, which gets caught by high moving winds that drive it south, where they crystallize.

Interestingly enough we just had a shuttle launch just a couple days ago.

No it won't. The damaged is caused by radiation which destroys DNA. Radioactive particles that are helium or larger are stopped by your skin. Smaller particles ionize organic molecules within your body producing highly reactive radicals. Maybe its these radicals you call energetic particles? Anyway even if you remove them the DNA damage from the radiation is still there, and often the extent of the radical damage is beyond the coping mechanism of the cell. Acute damage is in the radiation, radical damage is the slow damage of aging.

Like the GP said, the methods of radiation damage are diverse, it is impossible for there to exist a single pill that treats it from all these aspects. The pill would need to be a cluster of several different types of DNA repair enzymes (to repair DNA damage from all the possible ways of bond damage), as well as being an antioxidant (to absorb radicals) and some sort of protein 'digestant' (to remove the denatured proteins). Since the body took 3+ billion years to come up a couple dozen enzymes to fulfill these purposes, it seem unlikely (downright impossible!) that a single molecule could be created to take their place.

I really don't know why your post is filled with such vitriol. Anyway there is nothing secret about the "scientific means" behind it (as much as you wish there was by the fact that you used quotes...). The test is valid because they used an enormously large sample size and a library of several hundred pictures, which through its massive sample size, were able to distill down using statistics to those 10 pictures which had the highest positive predictive value!

Those 10 pictures were specifically chosen because they were the most deterministic pictures. If I took all of Pollock's works and showed them to tens of thousands of people, and recorded all the responses I'm sure I could produce a handful of pieces by Pollock which have a high correlation among viewers to a specific object - i.e. that one piece is viewed as a 'bat' by 80% of viewers. Taking it one step further, Pollock's art was never even designed to be used in such a way, however the inkblots were from the onset intentionally designed to maximize their correlation, and thus future predictive value.

I've taken the exam myself with a group of about 10 others as a learning experience. On average, the answers correlated completely except for one individual. By the end, it seemed each person had answered one "wrong" i.e. hadn't seen the "right" image. However, that didn't mean the group had any psychological pathology, as the incorrect answers were not given consistently. A 90% correlation means on average, the average (healthy) person will agree with an image 90% of the time. If a person answers 6 out of 10 wrong, the statistical likelihood of that occurring in a healthy individual becomes suspiciously small.

That is the power of the inkblots and the science behind them - science without quotes.

You were really really close...

      1. Get a series of inkblots together
      2. Gather and correlate data on how healthy people describe blots
      3. Gather and correlate data on how people with known problems describe blots
      4. Show inkblots to patients
      5. See how their results line up with previous correlations
      6.1 Verify validity of inkblots with strong correlation thus establishing the utility of the inkblots
      6.2 Sell to to psychiatrists/psychologists as a diagnostic tool
      7 profit

      Or conversely
      6.2 Doctor uses statistical results on real patient.
      6.3 Results help to diagnose patient.
      6.4 Payment from patient for services rendered leads to:
      7. profit

Incorrect. There actually ARE correct answers to the inkblots - no quotes necessary around that 'correct'. The correctness is assigned a number which aggregates over the course of all the blots and assigns a statistical analysis of the level of pathology of the patients psyche. It's actually very robust scientifically and leaves no room for psychological interpretation and is comparable to recall, spelling, or reverse counting tests.

Rorschach inkblots are not used for projection - on TV they are however. In real life, projection is used as an evaluative tool using a different kind of test. The projective test involves pictures with a very open setup and the patient is allowed to fill in the circumstances of the picture. For instance, one image can be of 3 people sitting around a table with a tree outside, the patient then can fill in what they believe to be occurring, what the characters are saying etc.

Yup, easiest diet in the universe. Also, hot water has more mass than cold.

I know, incredible right? All those people from just 2 counties!

It seems to me that the same people that would be all for a techy solution like this are the very same people who are unlikely to even own a landline. Nearly universally, everyone who I know in their mid 20s - early 30s don't have a landline and have only one number - their cellphone.

I can see a market for this for intense businessmen who might have 2 lines at home, a private line at work, and another line at their second home. But is there a demand from the tech savy young google user?

As an aside for something I just realized:

The video game market crash of the early 80s was caused by the quantity of poor titles and lack of quality control - eventually driving away costumers who had been burned too many times buying shitty games. Of course, this took years to occur since games were expensive and it took a certain threshold of shitty games before the consumer just gave up.

In this way the digital distribution actually hurts iPhone brand as a gaming machine, because you can reach the point of no longer purchasing games much faster due to ease/low cost of downloading games. You can rack up 5 terrible games in a row within the course of a day/week and swear off purchasing anymore for the 'system.' What took Atari gamers years to realize an iPhone gamer can realize in a matter of days.

Or in my case was about 1 month.

The games are pretty incomparable. Xbox360/PS3 games are entirely apart from the hand-held games both in terms of graphics and gameplay.

Compared to the DS, iPhone games are terribly shallow and comparable to regular cell phone games. They are designed to be played for 1-2 minutes at a time and not touched again for days. The games have no "continuity" in that they rarely have progression - tending instead to be levels that you can choose from or the same objective over and over again.

I've always found the iPhone games to get boring very quickly both due to the lack of complexity and lack of depth. They've burned me enough times that I'll only download free games, play them a handful of times and move on.

An apt analogy would be comparing internet based flash games to multimillion high budget PC games. Sure they're both "games" but I would be pretty hard pressed to actually consider flash based games what I call "true games," since high budget and flash games have no overlap and usually completely separate audiences (gamers vs non-gamers). In the same sense, iPhone games are the flash game of the hand-held world; I feel the don't really represent any sort of actual competition for "real games," rather serving as a quick time waster when you're bored and you have your phone handy (just think of it as every other phone based game).