Mr Skeptic

The burnt residue is harder for the ecosystem to deal with.

Also, not a single Republican voted for it. Also, this was all completely partisan. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedStill, I've always wanted some proper consumer information, specifically info related to the more important attributes of a product, to be available to consumers. The power output of the cellphone is one of those important attributes: a stronger signal reaches further, while a weaker signal interferes less with other devices and uses less power.

Cheating in school allows you to trade integrity and learning, for higher scores (if you don't get caught) and experience at nefarious activities. It's a poor tradeoff unless you want to grow up to be a con artist or something.

You read it right: The estimate was raised, and the President went on vacation. Wait, what I read was that the estimate was lowered to a negligible level, and the President went on vacation. I must have read it wrong.

A thought has occurred to me: maybe we should ban people from videotaping disasters -- they make the government look bad, which could interfere with them doing their job.

And maybe you would like to point out where I demanded absolute forensic evidence? That doesn't even exist! The point is that you can't count on confessions being an indication of guilt either (like any other evidence). Both the police and courts acknowledge this fact, and will occasionally ignore someone's confession to a crime and go after someone else instead. I've already shown it (police abuse). But if you want to talk police state, how about the fact that we have more laws than anyone can possibly know and yet are expected to follow them all and not use ignorance as an excuse? And I was talking about loopholes being used for the legal obligations. And I've yet to see how videotaping police officers will let most criminals walk free. I understand that giving some people certain rights will by necessity conflict with other rights for other people. I don't like it, but its sadly unavoidable. My preference is giving rights to people rather than governments. Well this website estimates about 10% of the convicted are innocent. However, most of the info still comes from estimates based on the rates for murder and rape (because they leave plenty of DNA evidence and are higher stakes). Well it's a good thing they were videotaping instead of rescuing, wouldn't you agree? Right, but since this occurred in Seattle, that's where the status of jaywalking matters. Not criminal. Of course, there are plenty of things that the girls could have done after being accused of jaywalking that would be criminal, such as the girl on video fighting the officer (but one would have had to occur before this for the officer to be handcuffing her buddy). I'd agree, but most people also know that the media cannot be trusted. However, since police do routinely lie to aid their investigations, and this is in fact standard policy, there really is no reason to believe that the cops are being honest with you. Mostly this applies if you are a suspect. You are cheering on people who want the police to be able to act without any accountability for their actions -- in exchange for possibly not looking bad on some videos. I'd agree that almost all of them behave very respectfully when you are not a suspect. I believe you misunderstand/misrepresent my opinions. By all means, do go ahead and tell the police everything you know. Just don't come crying to me if you end up a suspect for your efforts and what you said used to convict you. I appreciate that many people are willing to do so regardless, but am disappointed that it is dangerous to do so. When Paraguay had a dictator (Strossner), the crime rate was incredibly low. Many of the people really did appreciate him if only for that, and some people didn't despite it. I'm not advising people to do this, just saying that this policy (no videotaping officers) would force that to be the only morally acceptable action that certain people could take in certain circumstances. Just because someone belongs to a gang which has the protection of local law enforcement and was hired to enforce some laws, does not mean they can do anything they like.

Well, it works against your favor in several ways. 1) This education is not optional, and failure to read someone their Miranda rights is grounds for dismissing a case or some of the evidence. Of course, the loophole is that even while they tell the people their rights, they tell them in such a way that they don't know how to invoke them via the magic phrase --essentially negating having told them at all. 2) Innocent people in jail cost you in several ways: the real criminal is out loose, you are paying for the guy's imprisonment, and the guy is no longer contributing to taxes and the economy. 3) Police being able to get away with this sort of abuse are much more likely to abuse others, such as yourself. It may or may not matter whether you know your rights. Well that's an interesting idea. Do you have any evidence that police abuses do not occur except in a police state? Or were you just misunderstanding/misrepresenting what I said? As far as I know, police abuses occur even without a police state. People on death row are investigated more thoroughly, in case you were wondering. How can you be sure similar percentages don't apply to other areas, just that there is not the data to show it? Think about just how much has to happen to get from suspect to death row. Interestingly, it seems the superiors did not review the tape. They relied upon the police report, and surprisingly found nothing wrong. Since jaywalking is, to my knowledge, not a criminal offense, I would be wondering why the police was trying to handcuff somebody for jaywalking. Incidentally, there are about 312 municipal codes in Seattle concerning pedestrians. These laws and their enforcement do not promote the safety of neither pedestrians nor traffic: for example it is safer, but illegal, to cross when there are no cars present but a "don't walk" light, than when there is heavy traffic including turning cars but the light says "walk". Incidentally, ignorance of the law does excuse breaking certain municipal laws. The proper course of action would have been for the girls to take the ticket and then give their reasons and request that it be canceled -- but this is not always possible to do. People don't respect law enforcement because quite frankly some of the officers and some of the laws they enforce are not worthy of respect. You seem to be encouraging some of the disrespectful things the police do. Being respectable is hard and sometimes inconvenient -- but in the end it pays off. If people are afraid to talk to the police, and in fact anyone who is smart will be afraid to, that also does a lot more damage to the police's ability to conduct investigations -- far more than their being allowed to do such things as trick people into confessing or talking enough that they say something that appears self-incriminatory. How so? People will tape the videos anyways, they will be shown on the news anyways. If not in the US, then elsewhere. What are they going to do, arrest the news agencies? I'm sure that will greatly improve people's respect of law enforcement. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged If I were with a group of people and we saw what appeared to be a police abuse, and were not allowed to videotape (and with the knowledge that police get believed far more than others), I would be much more likely to come to that person's aid. Which would most likely mean forcing the officer to release the person, and if we wanted to avoid getting in trouble, we'd also have to knock him unconscious so he can't arrest the lot of us for helping. If instead we could videotape, that itself would suffice (both rescuing the person we think is being abused, and not getting into trouble for doing so). Except now this law would remove that option.

Just to clarify, I'm not talking about ignorance of the law in general. I'm talking about ignorance of the law when it is known to be impossible to know the law, due to the law itself. This can be due to sheer volume of the laws, or because of secret laws. While legally speaking ignorance of the law being considered a valid excuse is unlikely to happen, morally speaking I think that, in these circumstances, the fault is with the law and not with the person who is ignorant of it since he necessarily has to be ignorant of it.

What if people forget to exercise their right to life? Can I just kill people who don't know the Constitution protects their right to life? What about the fact that people are supposed to be informed about their 5th amendment rights, yet never told that to actually exercise them requires a magic phrase that they would have to know beforehand? Of course. This is why it is so convenient to be able to claim a person confessed. Or, maybe it's about 15%. Apparently, the odds of being found innocent increase dramatically for those on death row, especially if it is actual death row rather than that silly death row but with little chance of being executed. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/99nov/9911wrongman.htm Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged So what? You seem to not care much if people are ignorant of their rights; surely it matters even less if they are ignorant of critical thinking skills or of proper police procedure.

Well, I had mean a singularity like a black hole has, with everyone falling toward it. On the other hand, we are all "falling" away from the singularity at the BB. Incidentally, what does a black hole look like if you reverse time?

Creditors don't need the government, ask any illegal loan shark.

What do you mean, go bankrupt? Are you suggesting that the government steal the debt money that the creditor is owed?

What about the fact that the criminals would be more likely to be interested in learning said rights (and benefiting from them) than would Joe Sixpack? What about the fact that most people don't know that the police can lie to them six ways from Sunday, and pressure them into a confession pretending that it will be better for them to due so, due to the lies and fabricated evidence they have shown and told them? What about the fact that this sort of behavior means we can't trust the police, that they are not our friends (unless of course we are not involved in talking to them)? Anyhow, you might want to think about why we considered the right to no self-incrimination so vitally important that we put it in the Constitution? I casually note that the existence of police themselves, is not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Oh, are people only entitled to have the rights that they know they have?

In any case, he does not appear to be part of this conversation anymore.

Taxation is a form of group cooperation for the greater good. The non-optional aspect is due to the fact that people are greedy cheapskates (see the free rider problem), and would not be willing to pay for the stuff if they could get away with everyone except them paying it. However, since nearly everyone will think this way, you'd end up with only good people paying.

That's OK. It probably is just a coincidence then.

Yes, along with all aerobic eukaryotes (that's pretty much life as most people know it). Obviously, each of us has their own mitochondria, and there really is no way such a harmful mutation would be able to spread. You'd have to have a virus that could infect the cells and mitochondria inside them to change it.

Well, that's not a rule (nor a hypothesis nor a theory nor a law). It's a question, and a meaningless one at that. Not so much meaningless of itself, but rather meaningless in context -- the person asking the question means something different than science does when they say "gravity" and "magnetism" and doesn't explain what their new definitions mean, so no one can make sense of this question. This question really doesn't make much sense to someone who knows what electricity and magnetism are. In any case, that's really not how to ask a scientist a question. More to the point, it makes no predictions whatsoever (not without clarification as to what exactly the question means). What would, if you were to observe such, prove that earth's gravitational pull is not caused by a reaction from an opposite 'magnetic force' in space? Alternately, how could magnetism possibly cause gravity, and what formula gives the relation between the magnetic force and the gravitational force? If you can't answer that sort of question, that is why it is not a hypothesis and we are calling it random gibberish. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedTo put it another way, how do you know that gravity isn't caused by leftover meatballs from the flying spaghetti monster? How do you know that gravity isn't caused by fairies? How do you know that gravity isn't caused by gravitons? How do you know that gravity isn't caused by matter warping the geometry of spacetime? This is all gibberish, and the correct answer to this sort of questions is "How could you tell?"

Well, a fair bit of them were moved to the speculations thread from elsewhere. In any case, we are a science forum and not a misinformation or random gibberish forum. One thing we can't tolerate is people who claim false information is true, as they may mislead less knowledgeable people. So one of the first things we do when people make false claims is point out that they are false. The same goes for unsupported claims. In science, whoever makes a claim must provide evidence that it is "true". This is pretty harsh since it is a difficult thing to do, and all the more so because it must match or exceed existing theories, some of which were developed by famous geniuses like Einstein and tested for centuries by thousands of scientists. That is what their ideas are up against, and most people and most ideas simply aren't up to the task. And just to clarify: by evidence, we don't mean "I like it and it makes sense to me". We mean it gives exact, testable predictions, preferably numerical ones. Oh, and they need to match reality too. It doesn't really matter how neat or clever or sensible etc an idea is, if it can't make real predictions, it's not science. Incidentally, the aspect of making predictions is not "It would only make sense that such and such" it would be "My hypothesis must be false if such and such doesn't happen." It's not like the theories are meaningless gibberish. The whole purpose of them is to make accurate predictions, and if they don't they get discarded. Try passing on this as a chinese whisper: "437 567 * 349 875 = 153 093 754 125". It will be plenty easy to tell if there were some simple mistake passing this on, at least if you have a calculator. And if it were passed on wrong and someone corrected it, then it would still be easy to tell if it was good math. Same with science, it simply needs to make good predictions and the particulars don't really matter. Who says we're correct? We just make good predictions. That's as close to "truth" as science can get. (really really good predictions -- a good seven significant figures is about right for physics predictions).

It's the principle of buoyancy. Try being upside down in water, you shouldn't get a head rush.

Hm, and where do conservatives fit in?

That looks like it could do some damage! Send us pics of the crater when you make one

It's still just stuff, it just means more to you. Which overall I think is a good thing. Of course, some stuff is irreplaceable and some stuff would require significant time investment to get back. But the significance of stuff is not an intrinsic property of it, but rather whatever significance you give it. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Looks like they stole your sense of security too. (A false sense of security, to be honest, but its still rather a necessity.) I'm sure a scrap yard will give you a few bucks for it, assuming it has lots of metal.

However, if you have reason to talk to the police, you would know it before they did. However, I might consider giving only an anonymous tip over a pay phone, unless I wanted to be a witness for something.

Sure. Pressure contribution from fluids is [math]P = \rho g h[/math]. A pump produces a pressure difference via a different method of course, but it doesn't really matter which, just that it creates one. Anyhow, the fluid will flow from an area of higher pressure to an area of lower pressure. The atmospheric pressure of course should not be forgotten. So, you add up all the contributions to pressure and see what it adds up to. First the atmospheric pressure, then add on the pressure contributions of the respective fluids. If the outer fluid is air and the inner fluid is water, then the pressure contribution inside the pipe adds up to a lot more than the pressure contribution from outside the pipe. Given enough height, the difference will eventually equal the the pressure contribution from the pump. At that point, the pump cannot pump. However, if the outside fluid is more dense than air, it would make more of a contribution. Or, if you simply have warmer stuff that is less dense, it will rise. It's basically the same stuff as buoyancy. Yeah, I'm not sure how that would work. If done poorly, the bottom of the pipe could get crushed.