Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

That translated into martial arts is roughly the equivalent of a 4th DAN, but for that you need longer due to 'regulations regarding examinations', waiting periods between 2 examinations.

Depends on the martial art. The most modern practice recognizes natural talent while incorporating considerable traditional technique; I assure you, everyone does not walk into their first day of training on an equal basis -- I've been teaching for decades and I think I've seen about every level of beginner skill there is. Some people are simply gifted. Certainly from there on in we see the difference between the shows-up-once-a-week and the person who seems to be there every hour they can possibly manage.

Also, more on topic, I can definitely assure anyone who is curious that you're not doing high level thinking when executing advanced martial arts techniques.

All you really need to do to understand this is think about bike riding. When you learn, you learn, you think like crazy. Which does you very little good. But eventually, you internalize the process (that's what I call it, anyway) and you can do it while carrying on a conversation with someone else, paying almost no attention at all to the activity of riding the bike. Those near-instant balance corrections, the precise amount of handlebar control and lean for cornering, all of that comes from "underneath." Same thing for advanced MA.

That whole business about finding your calm center and holding it -- that's a real thing. If you start thinking under threat or pressure, your performance will drop like a stone. The best technique comes from a relaxed, centered condition, accepting of whatever comes.

This is kind of a double post, but it's important enough to warrant a separate post.

Unfortunately, Congress has dilly dallied on this issue for too long. We're now past the point where mandating carriers unlock phones will help. There are still phones which will work across a broad range of carriers, but they are now few and far between. Most of the newer phones are limited in their frequencies so they'll only work fully with one carrier. Take it to another carrier and you'll either suffer degraded service, or even lack certain service like LTE. So even if you can unlock your phone from the carrier, it won't do you any good because you'll lose 4g or even 3g capability if you try to use it with another carrier.

The only thing that will help now is a law mandating that carriers must provide service to any phone a customer brings with them that's capable of operating on their network. That will open up the markets so that manufacturers begin selling multi-carrier and world phones directly to customers (bypassing the carriers). You can still buy a phone from Verizon if you really want, and it'll be crippled so as not to work with any other carrier even if unlocked. But the smarter person would buy the version of the phone sold by the manufacturer at Best Buy or Amazon which supports enough frequencies that it'll work with any carrier. That's actually what Google did with the Nexus 5 - it supports enough frequencies to work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a bunch of other international carriers. It's technically capable of working on Verizon (with LTE in areas where Verizon provides band 4 - New York and Los Angeles from what I hear), but Verizon blacklists it so you can't use it on their network. What we need is a law making it illegal for Verizon to do that.

The "retarded" Verizon specific phones are actually some of the most compatible phones you can buy today. Not only do they work on the Verizon CDMA and "bastardized" LTE networks, but they include full functionality for GSM and HSPA networks. I have two Verizon phones, right at this moment, that I'm using full time on other networks with full capability. My Verizon iPhone 5S is currently being used on an AT&T postpaid plan. All LTE, HSPA, and GSM functions work with 100% compatibility. My Verizon LG G2 is being used on T-Mobile with full LTE, HSPA, and GSM services. Nearly every phone worth having today is fully compatible with the GSM/WCDMA (HSPA) network technology. Phones are becoming more compatible, not less.

That's not quite true. CDMA phones with LTE have GSM SIM cards because the LTE spec requires it. Most of them also have GSM capability, while the GSM-only versions don't have CDMA capability. So that respect you're right that Verizon and Sprint phones have better global compatibility than GSM-only phones.

However, a lot of newer phones are limited in which frequencies they support. Your Verizon G2 for example only supports LTE at 750 and 1700 MHz. Verizon's LTE bands are at 700 and 1700 Mhz. T-Mobile's and AT&T's are at 1700 Mhz. Sprint's however are at 800, 1900, and 2500 MHz. So your phone won't get LTE with Sprint.

Unfortunately, Congress has dilly dallied on this issue for too long. We're now past the point where mandating carriers unlock phones will help. There are still phones which will work across a broad range of carriers like your G2, but they are now few and far between. Most of the newer phones are restricted in their frequencies so they'll only work fully with one carrier. Take it to another carrier and you'll either suffer degraded service, or even lack certain service (like no LTE on your Verizon G2 with Sprint). So even if you can unlock your phone from the carrier, it won't do you any good because you'll lose 4g or even 3g capability if you try to use it with another carrier.

The only thing that will help now a law mandating that carriers must provide service to any phone a customer brings with them that's capable of operating on their network. That will open up the markets so that manufacturers begin selling multi-carrier and world phones directly to customers (bypassing the carriers). You can still buy a phone from Verizon if you really want, and it'll be crippled so as not to work with any other carrier even if unlocked. But the smarter person would buy the version of the phone sold by the manufacturer at Best Buy or Amazon which supports enough frequencies that it'll work with any carrier. That's actually what Google did with the Nexus 5 - it supports enough frequencies to work on AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and a bunch of other international carriers. It's technically capable of working on Verizon, but Verizon blacklists it so you can't use it on their network at all. What we need is a law making it illegal for Verizon to do that.

Incidentally, for anyone cursing CDMA in the U.S. complicating matters, don't. CDMA won the standards war. Your GSM phone uses CDMA - most HSPA implementations are wideband CDMA. It's only because the U.S. didn't mandate GSM and allowed carriers to try out different technologies that a superior tech - CDMA - was able to prove itself in the market and was eventually incorporated into the GSM spec. If CDMA hadn't been around, we'd probably be stuck with 1 Mbps or slower data speeds today. (LTE works very similarly to CDMA, except in the frequency domain instead of the code domain. Each phone is assigned an orthogonal set of frequencies, while in CDMA they're assigned an orthogonal set of codes.)

I can think of lots of reasons.

• It's expensive. Stamping or rolling a sheet of metal into a flat shape or single-curved is quick and easy. Adding lots of little dimples takes time and adds cost. While I can't say how much cost, some or most of the fuel savings may be offset by additional energy consumed during manufacturing.
• The mechanism for forming the dimples may not be cost-effective. A similar idea was tried with planes - NASA drilled lots of holes in the wing and attached suction tubes to keep the boundary layer attached, leading to laminar flow over the entire wing and better wing efficiency. That's the opposite of what you're doing here (the dimples disrupt laminar flow and cause the airflow to detach and become turbulent prematurely, which actually reduces drag because the air doesn't "stick" to the car as well). But the drawback may be the same - the weight and space of carrying all that sucking equipment completely offset any fuel and cost savings.
• People don't like it. Auto manufacturers would love to eliminate the cost of the shiny clearcoat layer on top of the paint. But buyers love smooth and shiny - it sells new cars. So they don't.
• It'd be a lot harder to clean. Dirt and other material like dead bugs and bird droppings would tend to collect and dry in the dimples. With a smooth surface, you can scrape these off. With dimples, the crud would collect inside, and you're going to take a lot more work to clean it out. Maybe enough for an owner to say "screw this, it ain't worth an 11% fuel savings." Deformable dimples may fare better, but the dried crud may prevent the dimple from completely flattening, leaving you with a similar problem.
• It causes lots of reflections. Most of your car's body is flat panels so you only see reflected sunlight at certain angles. You deal with this by temporarily covering your view of the offending car withy our hand, until you've changed angles so there is no more glare. But put a lot of small curved surfaces on a car and they will reflect sunlight into your eyes from almost any angle. Are you prepared to drive on a road where every car is covered with lots of little glare dots from the sun? It would be less of a problem if cars were painted with flat paint, but see two bullets above.
• Easier/more annoying to vandalize. Antisocial kids would run around popping these with a pin while your car was parked. You wouldn't notice it until you were up to speed and the dimple suction mechanism complained of reduced vacuum pressure, so the culprits are highly unlikely to be caught.

And those are just off the top of my head. That's not to say they're legit - maybe they won't turn out to be that big a problem in practice. But if you can't think of any reason why this hasn't already been done yet other than "it's an auto industry conspiracy!", then you haven't really put a lot of thought into it.

Bq seems a fair measure to me. It's a measure of radioactivity. Would you prefer pounds (or kilograms) of X, with no measure of the rate X is releasing radiation?

It's a bad unit to use in this context because it's a measure of individual atomic decays per second. It's kinda like you asking me how far you have to walk to get to the nearest bus stop and me telling you the distance in angstroms. The scale is just completely devoid of any common reference frame for the number to be intuitively useful (not that most people have a common reference frame for radioactivity). That's why Bq is commonly used by people trying to scare the public about radioactivity - when you're talking about a lot of material like, oh, a field, it results in really, really big numbers.

Let's put it this way. A block of soil one square mile by 1 foot deep (790,000 m^3) has a natural radioactivity of 653 billion Bq. If they excavated 1.1 trillion Bq of radioactive material from Fukushima, then they removed about as much radioactive substances as is naturally contained in 1.7 square miles of soil one foot deep. Of course the piece of information that we're missing (and no it's not in TFA) is how much volume of material they removed. If we knew that, we could come up with a ratio and say "Ah hah! The stuff they removed is x times more radioactive than the natural radioactivity of dirt!"

Yes, the point is that it's like MAD and other weapons policies: you don't want to put down your gun (or shield, for that matter) while the other guy is still holding on to his.

MAD doesn't work for self-replicating things like bioweapons. If you put your gun or nuke down, and the other guy still has his and decides to shoot at you, you're screwed.

OTOH, if you destroy your smallpox virus samples, and the other guy still has his and decides to use it on you, well he's just given you a smallpox sample you can use right back on him just as if you'd never destroyed your samples.

The only bioweapon for which MAD would work would be one which kills quickly enough that the target nation is killed off before it can collect samples and send them back to the attacker. But any bioweapon that kills that quickly would be useless because it would kill the victim before he could spread the contagion to others, thus defeating the very characteristic which makes a bioweapon a weapon of mass descruction.

"Getting ads is annoying, getting ads for African American hair styling products when you're a redhead is infuriating"

No it isn't for most people, because we got used a LOT for this with TV. TV nearly never showed us advertising targeted for us specifically but more to a watcher class. But you know to whom it is infuriating to not target ads ? Marketing people. Because targeted ads means a better probability to transform an ad into a sale. In fact if marketing people could totally break our privacy and put camera everywhere to enhance their probability to higher level, they would do it, and pretend people like it. That's justification post hoc. They enable msot amrketing people to never discuss their own moral and ethical choice. Just pretend people like it and are infuriated when ads are not targeted to them. As opposed to be totally creeped out.

These laws are toothless. "Must answer within 20 days"... or what? With no one held immediately culpable, the law is precisely meaningless.

Heard of anyone going to jail for this?

Heard of anyone paying a fine for this?

Even heard of anyone losing their job for this?

Compare: If you don't do something the government desires you to do, there will be consequences.

This is just like the constitution: "Highest law in the land" -- violate it -- as SCOTUS and congress have done over and over -- and the consequences? Nothing.

Just so you taxpayers know your place. The laws aren't for the government. Those are just laws "for show." The real laws are just for you. Because, you know, they care about you.

Back before PCI DSS we used to store everything we got during the booking process. And that include FOP (Form Of payment, CA cash, CC Credit Card, CH Checks, government card have another code etc...), FOID (Form of Identification - often Passport number nowadays but used to be FF card and CC card) confidential remarks (financial data) non confidential remarks (address, tel numbers, etc... And for a web based system , yes the IP you used). Everything you have directly or indirectly was saved i the PNR. And when CAPS 2 came up yes all that was sent indiscriminately to the US government , privacy be damned. Only recently when PCI DSS came up the airline started to blank our new PNR , but in some case for interline you may need to still send the CC (Can't recall which interline ticketing scenario - not refund as interline refund is not allowed by any airline i know of - maybe exchange to keep old FOP and new FOP in synch). Old PNR were never really corrected, especially all that was sent to the US government.

Bottom line : that's sadly a non story.

We all forgot that, perhaps because it is not true? I seem to recall a murderous kleptomaniac thug being evicted from power on the strength of popular protest.

Hy ! Be fair with the OP, from all what we know from Putin's bloody politics and underhanded tactic "murderous kleptomaniac thug" and "elected pro-russian government" could very well be identical in the average Russian mind ;)

1) the IFF was in mode 3 so it was quaking as a civilian
2) the radar system identified as a civilian but the operator chose to override the radar expert system report.

1) This is not about hydrogen bonding but whether the cage have been demonstrated to exists and form a cage of similar form than the replcaed molecule. There is no such demonstration for ethanol. The point was never about hydrogen bond , which as a chemist I am aware of, but about cage formation. Due to the nature of alcohol I would expect such cage to even be quickly gone, and the cage to even even a much rougher form than H2O.

2) protein folding is not the same phenomenon at all. The key zone where protein interract are identical, which is why some protein might be slightly different but still interrract. Protein which are utterly different do not itnerract the same way. There is no parallel at all with a *negative* form of a H2O cage having the same effect than the positive molecule. In fact protein shows quite clearly by their often key-key hole reaction that such cage CANNOT have the same effect as the molecules

3) look if you want to debate homeopathy and animal let's us gop to JREF.ORG and register on their forum and let us debate there. There is a wealth of information that most if (baring all) those study were bunk. And frankly if homeopathy WAS working, it would be pretty damn easy to demonstrate with a tight protocol. And yet it never is.

Yep, I think we can all agree that it's worth a few punkin' headed babies and/or a couple of deaths so the rest of us can have brighter colors and whiter whites.

That's the tradeoff we make with vaccination programs. A small percentage of kids who are vaccinated get sick, and a few of them die every year. But we still vaccinate everyone because the benefits far outweigh those costs.

The flaw in your reasoning (it's a pretty common flawed line of reasoning, not just yours, so I'm not picking on you) is that you're trying to compare against a nonexistent zero state. Radiation can cause death. If there were no radiation, there would be no deaths. Therefore we must avoid radiation. Likewise, if we didn't vaccinate, those kids who died from vaccination wouldn't die. Therefore we shouldn't vaccinate.

To do a correct comparison, you can't compare to a zero state. You must take into account opportunity costs; you have to compare with alternative equivalent states. Without vaccination, far more people would die from the diseases we're vaccinating against. Without nuclear power, the world loses 13% of its electricity. The harm from that far exceeds the few deaths from even Fukushima-level accidents. Or if you replaced that nuclear generation with the next most-viable alternative (coal/gas), the emissions from those are far more harmful than the radiation hazards from nuclear. Even if you managed to replace them with wind and solar, the number of deaths installing and maintaining all those turbines and rooftop panels (roughly 11,000 turbines for a Fukushima-level plant, or 4.8 million homes with 40 m^2 of panels installed on each of their roofs) far exceeds the number that nuclear has killed.*

* Math for the wind/solar comparison:

• The Fukushima plant had 4696 MWe of nominal generating capacity.
• Nuclear has a capacity factor of 0.9, so in a year it produced on average 90% of that, or 4226.4 MW.
• Average wind turbine generates about 1.5 MWe peak.
• Onshore wind's capacity factor is about 0.25 on the high end, so in a year that turbine produces an average 375 kW.
• You'd need 11270 1.5MW turbines to equal Fukushima's output.
• PV Solar using high-end 20% efficient panels generates about 150 W/m^2 peak.
• Average rooftop installation is about 20 m^2, but the roof size is about 40 m^2. So 6 kW peak.
• Solar's capacity factor in the U.S. is 0.145. So on average the rooftop would generate 870 Watts.
• You'd need 4.86 million rooftops to equal Fukushima's output.
• Working in high places is dangerous. Roofing is the 5th most dangerous job in the U.S., at 34.7 fatalities per 100,000 workers each year.
• If a solar installation requires 3 roof-top workers and they can do 100 installs per year, you'd expect 51 deaths per year vs. an estimated about 30 deaths from cancer caused by Fukushima's radiation release in a once-per-25-year accident.
• I can't find stats for turbine worker fatality rates, but wind already kills about 5-10 maintenance workers per year while providing less than 1/10th the world's electricity that nuclear does.

"This is an easy one. Entangled particles operate using the same physics as wormholes. If one of the entangled pair is accelerated to relativistic velocities, say in a particle accelerator, they will not exist in the same relative timeframe. (SNIP)"

That's a misunderstanding of entanglement. There is not per see communication between the particle. When you have an entangled particle there is not one "communicating" the other that it is getting observed. What happens is that *both* particle form a single system with the specific property that when the spin of one particle is measured , the other particle has the anti spin state. Using all sort of relativistic trick on one particle will not do anything whatsoever because there is no communication to the other particle therefor frame of reference do nothing whatsoever.

I dislike the analogy because it does not represent the true nature of QM entanglement , but think of this : you have a red ball and a yellow ball. Put one in a packet at random, keep another one hiddden in a safe on earth. Then send the packet at c speed somewhere. Openning the safe 10 years later will reveal the color of the safe ball and by extent the color of the packet ball no matter how far and that despite not being in the same frame of reference and 10 light years away.
What happens here in entanglement is similar. There is no "teleportation" at c speed of the state of one to the others. Read up on bell's inequality violation.