JaKiri

And does, from your point of view, and the point of view of any rest frame that has it non-stationary (which when acceleration is involved is all of them by definition. He didn't use the term "appears", though (not least because he was writing in German). He was also far from the first to describe the Lorentz transformations. It appears to contract, and does. It's not some optical illusion, it's a mathematical consequence of the speed of light being constant for all observers. The first statement does not exclude the possibility that it does "actually happen", which it does. If it does not, there is no way to explain, for example, the huge discrepencies between the decay rates particles moving at different velocities with an otherwise predictable decay rate, like muons. As it is, muon decay agrees with SR - both from the point of view of the muon, and from the point of view of the lab (in non-mathematical analysis, the muon "gets further" than it should travelling in the lab either because it's time dilated (from the lab's point of view) or because the lab has spatially contracted (from the muon's point of view)).

Even if you're enormously rabidly antiterrorism to the exclusion of civil liberties, then the patriot act is still terrible. It's taking things away from the populace for no gain.

Well, Energy is not photons, photons don't have a "mass equivilent", blah blah blah

Hillary Clinton caring about public perception more than anything else? WELL I NEVER That being said, it was a huge document that was hoisted on people and COME ON LETS VOTE NOW NOW NOW WHAT ARE YOU A COWARD? It doesn't prevent terrorism, though. America was doing just fine (except when it chose to ignore things for political reasons) in any case.

Just so we're on the same page, you do realise that this is gibberish, right?

It's very dependent upon the software side of things as well, as it's pretty obvious that a single threaded application (as most "home" software is at this point) is still going to be limited by single core performance and, although it might be a bit of a truism, that the only things that will stress the processor will be things that require a lot of number crunching, and only real time programs (rendering, usually) make that into a significant technical challenge. Going by the way the home market any improvements will only be observable on most computers by the latest version of spider solitaire using full 3d spinnionvision rather than the boring 2d of yesteryear. In purely practical terms, AMD need a big hit in either the graphics card or processor markets soon. Losing the amount of money they're losing cannot be sustainable.

Pssst. If we assume intelligence follows a gaussian distribution*, the median is the same as the mean! *Which it almost certainly doesn't, for the same reasons that height doesn't.

What you want is the MSDS (material safety data sheet). Google finds quite a few, of which http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s2666.htm is the first, searching for (chemical name) MSDS.

It's me, I'm the essence of masculinity.

Eeeee (by gum)

It was just a bit of a play on words, rather than a serious question per se.

I'm not saying that clock speed is irrelevent, just that, by and large, in recent times improvements in single core performance have come by an improvement in architecture rather than simply upping the clock speed. All other things being equal, an improvement in clock speed is definitely advantageous and were we seeing claims about how the new Core2's would be running at 4GHz plus I'm sure everyone would be very excited. However, it doesn't really mean anything because we can't assume that all other things are equal. The point about failure rates is a good one, especially given this would exaggerate the vast differences in yields between AMD, Intel and Nvidia. WRT clock speeds, I would make the distinction between theoretical chips and actual chips - enormously high clock rates can and have been produced, but not on today's chips, even with absurd levels of cooling.

Ad hominem is claiming that the argument is invalid due to the personal flaws of the proposer. What I did is claim that you had personal flaws because your argument was invalid. There are a huge number of case studies, extending to this day, of companies balancing the cost of litigation against the cost of fixing a flawed product. The Ford Pinto is probably the best example of this. There are already things that bind them to law, they still break them. Everyone can sleep safely knowing that Action News is on the case, assuming they manage to investigate the products before they're sold! So you want government to regulate industry... without regulations? A free market without government regulation, government created monopolies and the like is the very definition of liassez-faire capitalism. I must point out that you didn't answer my question.

Rules? I wrote the rules! (Well, not really)

I don't have that in my bible, is it in the apocrypha?

Why is a "what" question?

That's just misunderstanding how it works, though. It's like the futility of bringing up Special Relativity against that nuclear hoaxer from the other day.

The concept of the null hypothesis is generally got wrong by everyone (including me at points). It's not helped that it's misused more than it should be by people who should know better. You're perfectly correct in saying that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but that's not the end of the story. If you would prefer, how's the statement "the existance of god is neither required nor suggested by any predictive model we have yet been able to produce that fits with the evidence we have gathered, within the bounds of experimental error"? Me saying "science says god doesn't exist" (or whatever words I used) is just shorthand for that. Remember that Occam's Razor still applies. (I must point out at this point that I'm a fairly hard-line empiricist, you'll probably get more agreement from one of those wishy-washy string theorists)

The problem here is that unless you regulate what can and can't be sold (especially as medicine), the people who sell dangerous things don't become tortfeasors until the harm is done. If people sold fish that could only be used to slap you, then you would presumeably prefer people not to be allowed to buy the fish in the first place rather than waiting for them to come up and slap you, and then getting some marginal compensation. Of course, that's assuming that it's something as mild as a slap. If these fish killed you, you wouldn't really be getting anything back from the courts now, would you. Yep, that's why I think we should try not to kill people. Because I want more laws. How do you know if they're lying or not, without clinical trials? So either we have the guy suing (or his family, if the guy in question snuffed it) being forced to perform expensive clinical trials if he wants to be able to prove that the thing he took did not actually do what it said on the tin or we need some kind of government agency to do it. And it's not the first one of these options. So this amazing solution of yours is to have an equivilent of the FDA only test "medicines" after they start being sold, and to let the bodies pile up in the streets till then! Hurray! Market corrections occur when a product is found to be substandard. Without clinical trials, the only way to find out when a medical product is substandard is when you get a sufficiently large pile of bodies. So, in summation: the changes you are supporting would either a) not change anything, except to have people die or b) give companies free reign over what they put out, and have people die. I thought when people discussed politics it was on the topic of what things they'd like, at a basic level, to happen. The way they want society to be run. I want people to stay alive, you want people to die. I can understand dismissing the importance of political discussion if my chosen path ended up with the previously mentioned pile of corpses, so fair enough I suppose. That's not ad hominem, you idiot. Lets take a week old foetus out of its mother and see how well it gets on, shall we? It's a moot point anyway, legally life is defined in the US to start at birth. Last I checked, being an extremist was not a good thing. He does not get a pass card for wanting to increase freedom because you ignore the ways that the things he proposes decrease freedom. You might as well say that shooting a gun wildly into a crowd of people is supporting their right to live because noone gets killed until the bullets actually hit them. I could say he was a racist for saying that the Civil Rights act has done "nothing but harm", calling black youths "fleet-footed" and saying that only 5% of blacks had sensible political opinions and then defending these statements. In any case, you're allowed to refuse anyone into your home you like, with the exception of people with court orders. Unlike your claim of an ad hominem, this actually is an example of a strawman fallacy. The freedom to discriminate against black people is the most important freedom of all. Could you please clarify how this relates to the difference between laissez-faire capitalism and a socialist government on the topic of promoting or reducing the effect of monopolies? It seems a just a little bit like a non sequitur, given that this was started by you complaining about the US government encouraging monopolies, which socialism does (according to you) and laissez-faire capitalism does not.

That's what I said, though? The lack of evidence for a god makes it empirically, and thus scientifically, true that there isn't a god, just as is the case for everything else (I wouldn't classify god as a null hypothesis by any definition). It's not absolutely true, but science doesn't deal in absolute truths so I see no contradiction.

If you gather evidence, you're hardly beleving it because someone tells you it's true, are you?

Looking back, it's a bit of a pathetic diagram all round. I should really have drawn the acceleration due to gravity on it.

General Relativity is a mathematical nightmare. Don't be worried if you don't understand it, and unless you're doing something postgrad that deals with it I doubt it'll be presumed. No, they do actually slow down, or contract. From our point of view, which is just as valid as theirs. Ever heard of the Twin paradox? It's a metaphor that approximates the way gravity works in terms that can be understood by the layman. The rubber sheet analogy is one that I've seen time and time again, at every level of study.

Easier to read, although I doubt that "most people who have a time display on their PC screen set it a standard clock with a face", as the default Windows one is digital.

You appear to be a bit hung up on raw clockspeed, which is odd given that an E6320 (for example) is a lot faster at around 1.8GHz than my old 2GHz P4 from 2002.