JaKiri

And they can take them if they like right now, it's just that they're labelled as dietry supplements. If they were labelled as medicines, then you'd get people taking them who wanted things that actually cured cancer, rather than things that only claim they do and have no evidence for it. I can't think of a single example of a mother being endagered because you wouldn't kill a two-month old, other than the old fashioned "What if the world was going to be destroyed if you didn't torture satan himself for 30 seconds, are you in favour of torture now?" kind of jazz. Not everyone has the same morals when it comes to free speech, or the seperation of church and state. Doesn't mean those should become state issues. Generally the religious right who oppose those things as well, oddly enough (except in the case where someone's talking about suppressing their free speech). Oh I'll be sure to keep right on topic, I don't know even why I mentioned Ron Pa... Oh. Wait, so because business can subvert the regulations, business should be unregulated? It's so obvious, that's the last thing those guys would want! Anyway, assuming that businessmen are all guys who go around eating babies and the socialist government is all made up of christ-like chaps, socialism is obviously better! If you remove the things that make producing drugs expensive, most notably the R&D, then you remove the economic incentive for making new drugs compared to just producing any old hogswash and claiming it does anything you like. If it doesn't actually do anything, then that's ok as well - because neither does alternative medicine, so unless you want arbitrary restrictions on what's "alternative" and what's "useless" there's no way to stop that kind of nonsense. If you keep the requirements but remove patents, then again: where's the economic incentive? You spend hundreds of millions of dollars creating a drug, and some other guy comes along and sells it for just above production cost because he didn't have to pay any of that.

Radioactivity is different from nuclear power, if you don't understand how atoms work in terms of energy.

That's only for convenience, though. We don't have any evidence of a god, and indeed the church itself (depending on your church) points to faith not requiring evidence, so scientifically there is no god. This is, of course, subject to change if we do find evidence. The point is that believing that evolution exists because someone tells you is about as good as believing that god exists, because someone tells you.

God no, I don't have a K6 (for example), and it depends how you define "every CPU ever made". I've certainly had one of most of the significant iterations in the last 4 years though (which is only a handful by my reckoning)

For most of the young atheists in his classroom, the glory of science would almost certainly not have been routed in reading on the scientific methodolgy that got us the evidence, or the evidence itself. It's certainly not based on reading the bible, as the quote shows. Quite often in classrooms, science is presented as mystical truths from on high. To use an example given by Feynman when he made a talk on the topic of science education, "What makes a dog move? Energy makes it move!" That's not science, it's not teaching people about the world or how we reached that conclusion.

I was 14 when I read it, so probably not best placed to critique, but I found it entertaining enough. Although his measurement of the number of hard drives required to hold all the information about the human body, ignoring the uncertainty principle, might be out by quite a few orders of magnitude by now, and probably a few more in a few years.

The best way to do most mechanics problems at this level is to sketch a diagram, (ideally without the huge amount of dead space I have on mine) eg: you know that acceleration in the, horizontal, x direction, x'' is zero. Acceleration in the verticle, y, direction, y'' is -g. You can work out the initial velocities from basic trigonometry, the initial positions are at 0 and 0, and you now have all the information you need to plug into the kinematics equations to get equations for how the horizontal and vertical distances, x and y, and velocities, x' and y', change with respect to time. When the speed of the projectile is 3/4 its original, the squareroot of x'2 + y'2 will be equal to 3v/4 (on my diagram). You can find out how much half the height is using the kinematics equations, equate them and you get an equation in phi, which gives you the answer.

It's a lovely question, it really gets you thinking about what is actually going on in the system.

I have a nice Pentium III I could lend you for that. Faster processors are for things like video encoding and games playing, at least for home users. Multiple cores helps both of these enormously, although the coding for real time games is a non-trivial problem that the solution for is not yet universal across the industry and that's a hideously tangled sentence, I apologise.

He did. Thanks for the update, don't know if I'd have come across that otherwise.

It has come a bit of a rhetorical battle at this point, hasn't it. Hi5 It doesn't make it ok, but it would happen. Radium water (and its ilk) existed before government regulation, and there are enough examples of people believing a generic person in a shiny suit to purchase it. And yes, they'd be sued, but companies would either take that into account or mysteriously go out of business when they didn't. Either way, the populace still gets a heady dose of radiation, heavy metals or whatever cheap or magical product people get an impressive looking front man to sell. These are exactly the problems that bodies like the FDA were set up to prevent. That's a fairly sensible opinion, depending on how much market influence you're worried about. Not much else to say about that. You can buy all forms of poison right now. I could go down to the shops and get some warfarin and be dead by dawn. Could cause fatal liver damage with paracetamol. The thing is that these things aren't being sold as miracle cancer cures, and in the cases where they do have beneficial effects have been tested to ensure that, if I follow the guidelines, I'll have an extremely safe dosage. I call people fools all the time, although I don't see a problem being emotionally invested with saving peoples' lives, even if I were. Very hard to be free when you're dead. Certain loss of liberty if someone makes you blind, or deaf, or paraplegic. These things can all happen naturally of course, but that's the way the world works. Doesn't mean we should encourage it. In 2000, he voted to ban it even if it would save the mother's life. The 2003 vote may be defensible on those grounds, but the 2000 one: less so. I admit that it may be a selection bias here as they're the more obvious talking points, but so far the areas of interest seem to be banning abortion (he's definitely for that), allowing schools to select by race (he's for that too), severely reducing the seperation of church and state and letting people ban evolution in the curriculum. I must also mention at this stage that I'm not an american, so the day to day social stuff passes me by. On the issue of states, remember that We The People would make SCOTUS rulings not apply, so one of the most significant of the checks and balances of the federal government would be removed. On the issue of monopolies, I haven't studied economics sufficiently to give an answer of what is the lesser of the two evils. Overall, I think a socialist government might be better equipped to limit their effects, by controlling or price fixing certain goods and contributing to large amounts of blue sky research (the latter of which most governments seem to have given up on, which is a great pity).

He says I'm a genius, we were wrong to ever doubt him guys. I here and now start a campaign to get him unbanned. FREE THE CHUCK WEST ONE

He's twisting the burden of proof there, somewhat. There's some blind faith from both sides, but from the sound of it he was trying too hard to present both sides as incorrect. That may have been the point, quite often if you want to teach you argue for effect, rather than necessarily what you believe.

Your home internet could go at 1TB/s now, if the support was in place to allow it to.

Actually, a lot of things are a results of SCOTUS interpretation, something that Ron Paul wants to get rid of (at least where it applies to states). We won't all agree, like the two sides never agree. Unless the church changes, but that's generally something that the religious right thinks is dumb and so goes on trucking. Like I said earlier, a lot of people believe that meat is murder, but the only sensible position is to allow people to eat meat. Tyranny of the majority is such fun. Freedom doesn't mean half the country telling the other half what to do, or all but one member of the country telling that guy what to do. I thought Ron Paul was supposed to be the freedom candidate. Although he says he wants to go back to the way the constitution originally was so I presume he wants black people to only count as a fraction of a person. I'm indeed dismissing people's opinions, if the only thing you're allowed to have an opinion over is personal freedoms. But it isn't. So I'm not.

Part of the supposed cost is from the deaths "caused" by the FDA not giving us the beneficial drugs instantaneously multiplied by the value of a human life. You then divide this by the cost of saving a human life, which is less. BUT GASP If you then convert THIS number of "deaths" into money using the value of a human life and then divide by the cost of saving a human life, then even more people die! BUT GASP! YOU CAN DO THIS AGAIN! From this, the only rational interpretation is that regulation kills an INFINITE number of people! WE'RE ALL DOOOOOOOMED OK then Oh hey lets just ignore the rest of the argument that gives evidence that the wait times in socialised health care are not necessarily worse, noone will notice and I'll look like a player to the hot girls reading Radium water. If you cannot understand why this is an issue then you don't understand one or all of 1. Why medicine is tested. 2. What companies do when you remove legislation protecting their customers. 3. What companies do when you HAVE legislation protecting their customers. 4. Why medicine is tested. The freedom to not drink something which may kill, blind or cripple you is quite important. Some may say more important. I would, for example. It's not about projecting a morality code you fool, it's about protecting companies from people who want to sell them inadequately tested medicine because it makes them a much bigger profit than something that may not be dangerous. Of course, in libertarian world that's ok because I'll just spin up my home mass spectrometer to make sure it doesn't contain any thallium... In 2003 he voted yes on banning partial birth abortion. Voted yes on banning it in 2000 as well. Spin that please. Which is why he supports state rights, because a state government isn't a government! It's hilarious how it always comes back to cannabis. And yes, it is wrong for the federal government to choose what you ingest. But they don't. I have no idea why you think they do. Lack of government regulation is pretty good at encouraging monopolies as well. Some would say better. I would, for one. History would too.

If it's finite, then we're getting closer all the time!

E = mc2 only applies in very specific circumstances. The correct equation remains E2=m2c4 + p2c2.

A negative force is just a force in the opposite direction. In your example, you've got the positive force direction in the diretion of travel - ie one that causes the head to speed up.

Where did that go, anyway? It was entertaining.

Then why did you suggest that we could?

e-t/2 has an indefinite integral, it's -2e-t/2. Did you mean e-t2? (Although you can use various tricks to create definite intregrals of it)

Think about the U tube shown here as a set of scales for liquids. Choose a horizontal line, and if the liquids aren't moving the weight above both side must be the same. An example of a horizontal line above which the weight of the liquids must be the same:

It's rubbish.