Seeker

If you are planning on building from anyone else's code, make sure you get the full source code including any libraries, and check what information it is collecting and transmitting about your users.

The new standard is objective and verifiable. You seem to be deliberately ignoring what I said. "Your stick is good enough for all practical purposes." You don't need an atomic clock to boil an egg, and I am not suggesting you record your mileage in fractions of a light-second. However, when you and a friend both have metre sticks, which each of you think are accurate, but are of slightly different lengths, what then? The normal solution is to have a reference stick which is manufactured to higher tolerances, and it used to calibrate the everyday measures. You then have the same problem again if two of those reference measures disagree, and so on up the chain. The 19th century method which you seem to be advocating is to have a single physical object to which all the high-level references are compared. Unfortunately, physical objects vary with temperature, humidity, corrosion, wear-and-tear, etc. The modern approach is to tie the standards directly to fundamental elements of the Universe. Please note that there is none of your implied drift off into intellectual la-la land here. The comparisons are tricky, sure, but the derivation is measurement-by-measurement, not just inference-by-inference.

Yes. Your stick is good enough for all practical purposes. However for many scientific purposes it is necessary to be ridiculously precise, and so the scientific "stick" is chosen in a way which makes it consistent in as many circumstances as possible. If you raise or lower the temperature for example, your stick will be slightly longer or shorter, whereas a light-second and hence a scientific metre will remain constant. As to changing the speedos, remember I said 0.02 parts per billion? That's the equivalent of measuring the entire width of the continental US and being out by less that the width of a hair. The length of the SI metre been more accurately defined, but lies within the limits of accuracy of previous standards. No adjustment necessary.

But that presupposes that "dog" and "horse" have fixed referents. If everyone called the riding animal a dog and the domestic pet a horse there would be no communication difficulty. Units of measurement need a defined reference or they are meaningless. The metre was originally defined as 1/10,000 of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole measuring along the meridian which passed through Paris. That's a little difficult to use when you are measuring cloth, so a measuring stick was created which was as close as they could make it to the desired length, and then copies were made (to varying degrees of accuracy) and distributed, and copied, and distributed, and used for practical measurements. It doesn't matter whether you call it a metre or a sticklength or a horse, the important thing is the underlying unit. In the case of the speed of light, we have a physical constant (c), measured in units of distance over time. Representatives of the scientific community got together (hence bypassing your linguistic quibble) and decided that rather than defining c in terms of the metre and the second, they would instead define the the metre in terms of c and the second. The relationship between the 3 remains the same in the real world, but it means that the length of the metre is now fixed unless either c or the definition of the second changes. If the real-world value of c were discovered to have changed, then the length of the si metre would by definition change. It's like inflation. If the value of the dollar falls, the value of the cent falls with it. Unlike inflation, though, we're pretty sure that c is a constant.

There is some good info in the measurement section of the Wikipedia speed of light article. The metre is now defined relative to the speed of light, so the speed of light in m/s is now 100% accurate by definition. The value of the second has a separate source, so it is still meaningful to ask how accurate the measurements are. Prior to adopting the current definitions, the accuracy was around 0.02 parts per billion.

So this wag wants to know which tailIban?

Same basic idea, but I thought it was "weakly interacting massive particle". They contrast with MACHOs (massive astrophysical compact halo objects) as rival explanations for dark matter.

In terms of atmospherics the two overlap, so it is not generally possible to definitively tell the two apart from a photo of an unknown location. However... activity during the day (both natural and human) tends to produce a lot of dust, so sunsets are typically redder but more hazy, whereas sunrises are usually clearer and brighter. That means you can often make a good guess as to which is which.

I've never even seen them for sale. Do you know of any which are available online?

Welcome ScorpioMystic.

And here I thought you had misspelled Rabbit and were a follower of Elil-hrair-rah.

That's why I said not all the wants. If you don't have your needs (at least at tier 1) you are dead. That doesn't make you strong.

I think the hierarchy of needs is worth reviewing here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs). A lot of the arguments above seem to stem from category errors when desiderata from different levels of the hierarchy are compared. It seems to me that the Good Life TM involves having all of your needs (but probably not all of your wants) at all levels met.

I find it useless to debate free will in the context of a moral argument. If we do not have free will (ie we cannot make a meaningful choice), then there is no moral action - what we do is inevitable. It may be a point of interest in other contexts, but in a moral debate, free will is a necessary assumption.

Argument, circular: See circular argument. Circular argument: See argument, circular.

Nor do I

Against a clear sky the dancing branches proudly bear One frost-withered bud.

I see that too. As soon as I move elsewhere, it's OK - I am still actually logged in..

A label I sometimes use is "militant agnostic". The key statement would be "I don't know, and you sure as ** don't know either".

One candle burns out Many others lit from it Continue to shine, Goodbye Atwater, blessed be.

Nice poems Joyful, thanks for posting them. The haiku form is quite closely tied to Japanese, so it is hard to draw a clear line in western works, but I would not consider either of those to be haiku.

But the band may not necessarily be able or willing to play it. Ain't analogies fun?

I, too, prefer to just go by my given name. When people insist on calling me Mr X, I then will usually say it should be Rev. X, but I prefer you just to use my name. Organization types seem to freak out a bit at that for some reason.

I quite liked the term "differently abled", but since I'm mundanely abled, I don't think it's any of my business to choose. Again. it's almost certainly well meant, but renaming a group of people to "protect" them seems awfully patronizing to me.