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http://www.zogby.com/search/ReadNews.dbm?ID=259 Gore up 5.4%

http://www.zogby.com/search/ReadNews.dbm?ID=276 Gore now up 7%

http://www.gsm.ucdavis.edu/visitors_center/news/ha gerty_predicts_gore_win.htm UC Davis "statistical analysis" predicts Gore win

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2000/11/6 /184917.shtml Zogby predicts Gore win (Nov. 6, 2000)

http://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/stories/2000/ 11/06/daily19.html Online (yeah, I know) Harris poll predicts Gore win

http://www.apsanet.org/PS/march01/lewisbeck.cfm Gore post-mortem off by almost 7%

It's not that hard to dig this stuff up.

I quoted from the article you referenced, BTW - I didn't think that was too hard to follow.

Perhaps my initial post was overstated (as are yours, BTW, even moreso) - but again, more precisely, all that *I* had heard from the news was (generally speaking) larger margins for Gore, and it turned into a statistical dead heat - and similar errors in the many other issues at hand during previous elections. My links "prove" that you are a liar (or dishonest) by your logic....even with your subsequent artificial constraint about weighting later polls more heavily, and focussing exclusively on the popular vote for the president.

Are you being dishonest now, because I dug up evidence to the contrary? Hmmm....

Obviously, the polls are often off by more than their statistical margin of error. Sometimes significantly so. Perhaps I was factoring in more local, and other national issues - I did not constrain my observation to national polls of the presidential popular vote. Even still, it is easy to dig up plenty of polls that support that.

I have no intent to deceive, and I am also not a Bush supporter.

The H-1b quota was reduced in 2003-but the L-1 visa program has even fewer controls-and is now effectively uncapped.

Well, if she's a union member, that's likely true - an association you join voluntarily would probably have the presumed permission of its members to spend their dues however its leadership sees fit.

However - if your wife resigns from the union and becomes an agency shop member, she would be able to not only demand the "political" percentage of her money back, but also the proportion of her dues spent on organizing other employees into new union shops.

It is illegal (even in a "closed shop" bargaining unit) to force people to join the union or coerce those who choose not to do so. A "happy medium" is what many refer to as the "fair share" employee, who pays for the cost of collective bargaining and grievance representation but not union organization and political campaigns. A quick google search revealed this FAQ that looks pretty succinct but correct.

For more on your rights NOT to join or support a union any more than necessary, check out the National Right to Work Foundation. The National Labor Relations Board also has lots of great material available online.

Also, remember that you don't have to be a unionized employee to gain protection under the Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act. Any employee acting in concert with another (or others - called "concerted activity") for the mutual aid and protection of employees is protected from unlawful interference in their choices to act collectively.

It *is* possible to get 3D sound with just two speakers/headphones. Headphones are of course much preferable. Finally, humans have just two ears, not five or six. Trick is in the processing - the feeling of space is achieved not only by using intensity but also phase of the sound. The algorithms to do that are known, just Google for HRTF (head-related transfer function) - e.g. here.

If you have a good HRTF and a geometrical model of the space, you can recreate very accurate sound reproduction, with just two speakers/headphones.

EAX and DirectSound took a very rough approximation of HRTF and some rough approximation of the space (e.g. concert hall, church, etc.) and give you list of filters. The effects have nothing to do with reality and you will not get better spatial feeling using even twenty speakers. You do not take into account reflections, material on the walls, standing wave effects etc.

For people interested in accoustic, have a look here. I had a short course with prof. Rindel, who is one of the authors of the ODEON software (there is a free demo on the page) and the stuff is really impressive. It beats things like EAX or very expensive 5.1 setups hands down. If modelling of this sort was supported by hardware, that would be the real revolution in computer audio. BTW, this technology was used as a part of CAHRISMA EU project, which we participated in (for the virtual reality part), the stuff is pretty much usable in real time already ( CAHRISMA at DTU, CAHRISMA at our lab, Something on the VR aspects of the project

A rose is a rose is rose, but nothing says geek love like Amorphophallus titanum...

--
Evan "her lab is on campus; she's home today because they ran out of liquid helium for the EPR machine"

This corpse flower at UCDavis is blooming in 2-3 days as well. Amazing timing.

who puffs the magic dragon in this bunch

Readable Description of the ELF standard

Help from SCO on ELF compatability in SCO OpenServer

Summary of a.out, COFF and ELF from a FreeBSD pov

Nice descriptions of various BFFs (binary file format) including ELF

Do you think you guys and the Apache guys could get together and implement pseudoserving? It would help us to greatly cut down on the slashdotting effects. P.S. The article is also available in the ACM Digital Library - get it there if you're a member, and spare my school's server the slashdotting.

I left a comfortable job position to try for a Ph.D. at a major US institution. I was offered a full stipend, and it paid for pretty much everything except car insurance and clothing costs.

Unfortunately, when I got there, I found myself outclassed, and without help. Once my advisor came to realize I was not a specialist in the areas he thought I was, he rarely saw me, while discouraging me to look elsewhere.

Finally, my advisor dumped me two months before my contract with him was due to expire, well after the point all the other Ph.D. advisors had already chosen their underlings for the next year. I later found one of my friends in that research group was originally under my advisor as well, and had been dumped just prior to this advisor taking me in.

But it was too late for me. I lost a large amount of personal funding taking out loans to pay for the next two quarters. The politics in the Engineering department there were much worse than those I ever encountered working for the US government. Eventually I received a very good job offer from a private firm, and dropped out with the Masters degree I already had received at another school. But by that point in time, I estimated I wasted well over $10,000 in my own funds waiting for a new advisor I liked to take me in (it is worth noting he did come up with some funds for me, but I left just after this point).

The paranoid should look at two professors' testimony before the US Congress for some insight. The first is the testimony of Dr. David Goodstein about how the US Ph.D. program attempts to only breed elite members like themselves. The second is the testimony of Dr. Norman Matloff (revised since 1998) on how there really is not a Software labor shortage in the US (one section of this paper discusses why American CS students tend not to go for Ph.D. degrees).

I left a comfortable job position to try for a Ph.D. at a major US institution. I was offered a full stipend, and it paid for pretty much everything except car insurance and clothing costs.

Unfortunately, when I got there, I found myself outclassed, and without help. Once my advisor came to realize I was not a specialist in the areas he thought I was, he rarely saw me, while discouraging me to look elsewhere.

Finally, my advisor dumped me two months before my contract with him was due to expire, well after the point all the other Ph.D. advisors had already chosen their underlings for the next year. I later found one of my friends in that research group was originally under my advisor as well, and had been dumped just prior to this advisor taking me in.

But it was too late for me. I lost a large amount of personal funding taking out loans to pay for the next two quarters. The politics in the Engineering department there were much worse than those I ever encountered working for the US government. Eventually I received a very good job offer from a private firm, and dropped out with the Masters degree I already had received at another school. But by that point in time, I estimated I wasted well over $10,000 in my own funds waiting for a new advisor I liked to take me in (it is worth noting he did come up with some funds for me, but I left just after this point).

The paranoid should look at two professors' testimony before the US Congress for some insight. The first is the testimony of Dr. David Goodstein about how the US Ph.D. program attempts to only breed elite members like themselves. The second is the testimony of Dr. Norman Matloff (revised since 1998) on how there really is not a Software labor shortage in the US (one section of this paper discusses why American CS students tend not to go for Ph.D. degrees).

UCDavis had one bloom last year as well.

Ok, how about these: here, here and here.
All three give different numbers but state that EVs have less overall pollution. Two of the articles state that EVs in California would be particulary helpful because California has cleaner power generation.

Surely you know that every time you "induce" someone into copying a CD or movie, God kills an innocent child. Sorta like masturbating and kittens.

My understanding is that the Patent Office guidelines say that they shouldn't issue a patent if the idea is obvious to one "schooled in the art". (If it's obvious even to a layman, that's even worse.)

http://veghome.ucdavis.edu/classes/winter2004/bit1 71/Intellectual%20property.htm

steveha

This all reminds me of the old saying that at its most advanced, mathmatics is indistinguishable from magic.

All those lovely Escher pictures similarly show the ways in which selective use of mathmatics & physics can create imaginary worlds that, while they could not necessaily occur in reality, "feel" realistic.

Another magical view of the future was the original Futurama Exhibit at the World's Fair .

In setting out to prove that there are an infinite number of arithmetic progressions of prime numbers with four terms, two mathematicians appear to have proved the result for prime progressions of all lengths.

"Get a life ... will ya, people? I mean, for cryin' out loud, it's just a TV show." -- William Shatner

Sure, I wouldn't mind seeing Shatner on Enterprise. If he's reprising his role as Kirk or playing Kirk's (great?) grandfather, then I'm going to be angry.

Looking at the Nielsen ratings and that Enterprise is moving to the "Friday Evening Timeslot of Certain Cancellation," I'd like the last season to be better than a retread of the Berman/Braga bag-o-tricks of propping up hack creativity with a cameo of a favorite character.

Moller's been been taking investors' money for decades, and has exactly squat to show for it.

It's true that he has been taking money from investors for decades, but he's been pouring his own money into it as well. He made about $20 million from real estate investment and millions more from his invention of the SuperTrapp muffler. He invested that in his company. So while it's true that he has been taking money from others, he hasn't been getting rich from it, as the word "scam" implies.

Credible aerospace engineers say that, unless Moller's invented a radically new, ultra-compact engine, there's no way you can move enough air mass to actually lift the thing.

Dr. Moller is a credible aerospace engineer. He is the started the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at UC Davis. And he has invented a new type of engine for the SkyCar.

The spiffy model on the showroom floor is nothing more than a stage prop. It doesn't fly, it never did, and it probably never will.

As someone else pointed out, there have been tethered tests that have shown that the thing can at least hover.

Don't get me wrong. I think that Moller's claims are continually over-optimistic, even to the point that he got in trouble with the SEC for misleading investors. He's been over-promising and under-delivering for decades. But he has made slow, painful progress, and I've seen every indication that he really does believe in what he's doing.

To call it a scam is completely unfair.

If the choice is this or nothing, I'll take nothing. Would you be happy with this if you lived in Spain?

Now if you want to do something constructive, switch to cryptographic tagged aliasing (basically, what Spam Gourmet does). It works, you're in control, and it doesn't break anything. My recent paper shows why this approach is much more suitable than white|black-listing.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

Great! All the lectures make sense now. It's all coming to me... My Cognitive Psychology professor will be delighted to hear what I umm... uhh... Dammit, it escaped me. I knew I should have purged stuff outta my short-term storage before accepting more from my sensory registers.

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely re-arranging their prejudices." -- William James

Common sense can be deceptive. Common sense says that outsourcing will destroy American jobs, but actually, in the long run, outsourcing will help to preserve jobs and Western society.

How? First, please visit the web site that explains "H-1B Myths ". Professor Matloff, who teaches computer science at a top-notch university, has campaigned tirelessly to terminate the H-1B program.

Anyhow, we have only 2 choices.

1. H-1B employment but no outsourcing.

2. Outsourcing but no H-1B employment.

The second choice is best and will result in the long-term gain of jobs for Americans. The United States of America (USA) is a big market, and companies will set up shop in the USA once their share of the market reaches a certain critical size. As well, domestic content laws facilitate this trend. Toyota and Honda are excellent examples; they have built huge manufacturing and design facilities in the USA.

Further, by terminating H-1B employment, you ensure that American jobs stay with Americans.

The second choice also directly deals with the strongest bogus argument by unethical American companies like Intel and possibly Google. Even when Silicon Valley has 8% unemployment, they insist that cannot find American workers for critical jobs and that they must hire H-1Bs. We in the Slashdot community should say, "Fine. Go set up shop overseas. There is plenty of labor there."

You don't know what you're talking about. Unix was ludicrously insecure initially, with design flaws like the mkdir race condition. It took many years to reach the level of security it has today. Even 6 or 7 years ago sendmail was still full of holes.

Rice paddies are usually very large, and they require a LOT of water and sun.

The sun part would do okay in a greenhouse, but the water would be difficult. And, building a structure that is large enough, without any type of support that would impede mechanical planting/harvesting would make this hugely expensive.

Option 1- buy some land, plant rice. Harvest.

Option 2 - but some land, build a huge building that has a crud-load of fresh water in it, maintain the building, and harvest.

Option 1 of course is cheaper.

I drive over rice paddies all the time, and the way they handle it now is pretty simple. They divert a river to flood out a few gazillion acres. They plant the rice, and the only other things I see happen are the occasional crop dusters and the harvesting. This seems to be a fairly low-maintenance crop. And I think that is one of the great benefits of rice- other than the water, it is very cheap to grow.

An even better explanation of the costs of rice farming can be found. But when the 'typical' farm is 700 acres, that would be a lot to cover. The Pentagon only has 34 acres of floor space. The Mall of America is only 92 acres total (stores/entertainment, etc)

700 Acres per farm is a LOT. Constructing a building that large would not be very cost-effective.

Norm Matloff has written about this in the context of H-1B visas. See Problems and Needed Reform for the H-1B and L-1 Work Visas and Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage.

Norm Matloff has written about this in the context of H-1B visas. See Problems and Needed Reform for the H-1B and L-1 Work Visas and Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage.

perhaps, but it was supposed to be as easy as "yum install mplayer" but I gave up after half an hour of header downloads on a T-1 connection. Take a look here for someone else's adventure.

"We've ignored education and Research..."

But, one can't help but see the commoditization of high tech skills that has gone on over the past 2 years all over the world. (even pre-9/11).

Dr. Norman Matloff's 1999 study on immigration and high tech work is finally resonating with the average Joe. But the cheapening of the work force, both foreign and domestic continues. Just check out the March 11, 2004CNN Lou Dobbs transcripts from last night's program on increasing the H1-B quota (again), and later on in the program a chat with a Republican congressman about the rosy future in high tech and the coming job shortages (chuckle). How many more fake high tech developer "shortages" do we need to endure?

As a lot of people have pointed out, it is not true.
It reminded about the program doublespace that came together with DOS 6.0. It would look what files where not or less used and archived them.

The archived files were zipped (or something like it) and put together. It took lesser space and could double the amount of space on your harddrive.

At least that is how I remember it. Memory is kind of fuzzy right now.

More info can be found on the net. Just search google for more info. Even back the M$ was stealing stuff. Who would have known?

A quote from this article:

If you do not purchase Software Assurance within 30 days of purchasing your new Microsoft product, you will need to purchase an entirely new license when you upgrade. Thus, if you do not upgrade your Microsoft products very often, you may not need Software Assurance.

I apologise that this is a secondary reference, but I didn't have time to find this in the MS literature.

In other words "we'll charge you more", not "you can't get it". I'm not saying this is a nice or reasonable thing. However the CIO agreed to it and needs to understand what he's paying for. At best he's arguing the wrong thing. He did not enter into a contract that would give him what he thought he was getting and now he's blaming Microsoft.

They can't silence is copyrighted. 4'33''

As cake recipes go, it's almost as confusing as this paper, described by one observer asentirely equations and symbols, with the word "clearly" here and there

Actually, the visas people need to work in the US require them to not undercut US jobs (ie they can't work for less than an American doing the same job, and they can't have a visa if there are already Americans who can do the job - it's for specialists).

I hope you got a discount when you bought into that. The *Americans first* provision was never enforced, it only applied to less than five percent of the companies that use H-1Bs, and that provision expired several months ago.

Further, the company that hires an H-1B is allowed to determine what the *average* wage is. The government does not check the figure for accuracy. Government and independent studies have shown that H-1Bs are paid twenty to thirty percent less than resident workers on average.

Specialists? The H-1B rules don't even require a degree - experience in the field is enough, and the visa also covers fashion models. Look it up. L-1 holders are only required to have company-specific information. One company is bringing in L-1s because only their (foreign) workers are trained in using their in-house timesheet program.

If you're not just jerking my chain and are interested in the subject, here is a start.

Here at UC Davis and probably most UC's, there seems to be a line of classes that many CS/CE/EE people take from Semiconductor Physics to Software Engineering. At the one end, emphasis is on semiconductors, properties of electrons.. the basis of any piece of hardware.. Other classes then move towards transistors and gates. Another puts them together into hardware design and using hardware modelling languages. Then computer architecture which links assembly and machine code to what's physically going on. Then assembly. Then C, C++. Then classes on Operating Systems and embedded controllers linking more of the previous classes together. This continue to the other end which is the high level software design.

My point is that I'm in CE, and I focus on the left side and middle of that scale. CS focus on the right but trails into the left. EE focuses on the left and trails off the chart. You can't just learn the high-level languages and expect to fully understand much of CS is all about. You can't learn just the low-level stuff and expect to get far without understanding what's built upon it.

Ok fine, you -can- get far just being a code monkey, but how fulfilling is that?

Really it's fairly simple [ ... ] but it would also be horribly prone to errors in the long run

1. constant, unlike the musical notes in my example where regulators need to compensate for the singer's custom pitch and timbre
   
2. a lot easier to calculate on the fly than the nuances of our EXPONENTIAL diatonic music scales.

I know of many US companies who make a living teaching companies in other countries like India about quality control and the way that US Businesses do business. If Indian companies had good quality, these companies would be out of business and not have business booming. I shall cite some examples of the quality of offshoring below.

Thing is, most IT workers, such as me, do not blame the people taking our jobs, but the companies making the move to other countries and cutting us loose. This is a global trend that is not going to stop unless there is some law passed against it, which I doubt will happen.

First it was a Labor Shortage which was a big lie by the Corporations to get rid of US workers and replace them with H1B Visa workers or outsource to India. Now that there is a surplus of IT Workers, they still claim there is an IT shortage and need to move more jobs overseas.

Where is the beef? Where is the quality that Indian companies are supposed to have? Apparently they did not have Quality at Dell when they moved a Help Desk over to India. Where is the quality in programs written? Security issues are a big risk and we are supposed to trust someone we cannot even watch from half a world away that they will not harm source code or be a risk to security?

Of course there is always hidden Malware to consider. Really nice of them to put in a back door or virus or trojan to access the corp system after the Indian programmers are let go when the project is over.

Oh yeah, the myth that it is cheaper. Consider the Hidden costs of Ofshoring nothing like a project going over budget and full of bugs and needing US developers to fit it. Once again, where is the beef? That quality is just not there once again.

It seems that India is America's silent partner. We may not even hear about it during the election year. When a government is more interested in rewriting copyright laws so that the RIAA can sue 13 year-old girls and fair use is out of the picture, I wonder who our politicians really work for? Certainly not the US Citizens, only Corporations. So of course they support the wholesale slaughter of US IT Workers and the export of IT jobs overseas.

Ah but there is a big risk involved in Offshoring. Sort of like taking all the company stock to Las Vegas and betting it all on number 35 on the Roulette Wheel. :) Just ask those who craft the contracts about the risks involved.

Nice to meet the people that are taking the jobs moved to India. Also nice to know they are not concerned that US Workers are losing their jobs to keep the Indian workers employed. I'd think if I was given a job at someone else's expense that I would quote my religious or culutral references instead as well when asked to respond to that. :)

Maybe we should personalize the US IT Workers too. Here is Bob, he worked for a Fortune 500 company for the past 15 years developing award winning programs and his work gained the company many patents. Bob holds a Masters in Information Systems. Management decided that he earns too much, so he was terminated and his job was sent with many others over to an IT sweatshop i

Tell that to my friend who has been unemployed for the last year nearly and has his PhD! The guys isn't stupid at all either, the market simply SUCKS in California.

Additionally I have historically hardly ever seen PhD and Masters degrees in CompSci fields amount to any added benefit in the hiring process OR the salary one gets.

If fact there is a professor at UC Davis who has testified before Congress about H1-B visa issues and the job situation in America before and has shown that the time a person spends on a more advanced degree then their B.S. in Comp Sci actually realizes LESS total financial possibilities due to the time and money spent on the advanced degress verses being in the workforce for that time period.

You also have HR hiring practices to blame for some of this as well where you have HR people asking for job requirements that are impossible or ask for so many specific specialized areas of knowledge that it looks like a company took the job descriptions for three senior level people and combined them into one job at 1/3rd the pay (with probably unrealistic timetables as well once hired).

You can find Professor Norm Matloff's testimony and writings about these issues here:

http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html

Some of the documents on his site arte very long but they are worth your time to read to gain a truer understanding of the national debate about H1-B's and how this and other issues synergize together to create the Pissed-Off Programmer plight now facing our nation.

And certifications are not the answer to this problem by far in my opinion, most certs are worthless with a few exceptions in my book (namely CCIE, CISSP, GIAC for example).

Jope this helps you understand why "going back to school" is really a non-answer to this problem at hand.

I was going to moderate this topic but there is something you guys need to know. A while ago there was a lawsuit by some group that proposes building safety standards and such and lobbies state and local govt to institute them into law. This group claimed it was still copyright after they lobbied to get it enacted to law.

Also currently (it appears) that laws are not copyrightable. Why this is trying to be pused thru is beyond me. To make a quick buck for govt? to prevent unfettered access? To use copyright law to prevent the publication of laws for 'national security'? Gives me the willies.

That line:

You are a weasel, and you are trying to make the world look the way you want it to, rather than the way it _is_.

made me laugh, cause sometimes Linus tries to make the world look the way he wants it to. An example is his Kernel Coding Styles, where he states things like:

Heretic people all over the world have claimed that this inconsistency is ... well ... inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that (a) K&R are right and (b) K&R are right.

i have worked a bit in the field of nano-decorated surfaces. it is impressive that one can make little nano-sizes arrays of magnetic dots on some substrate . this as so small, that one can view them as single particles which switch homogenously. hence you can study the interactions of little magnetic particles in arrays and do experiments which are very close to theoretical models, such as the Ising model. why should you care? because this nano-patterns seem to be interesting for exchange biased systems. and these seem to be interesting for the recording media industry. but why should you care... this is too geeky anyways. this guy (AKA Prof. Kai Liu) at UC Davis does some interesting research with nanostructures... cool pics and some explanations...

What union are they part of? At my school, the TA's and graders are part of the United Auto Worker's Union and were threatening to go on strike. Yup, United Auto Workers. So maybe the students are part of the Electrician's Union or something. =)

"I heard an argument (BBC Radio4, "Moral Maze", ages ago) which claimed that paedophiles are 9 times more likely than a random selection to be homosexual, but I can't find anything else to back that up."

I'm surprised at this level of ignorance still exists today. I'm sorry to inform you that in fact, it's the reverse that's true. The FBI keeps statistics on just these sorts of things, and in fact 95% percent of child molestation cases are committed(bottom of page) by self-described heterosexuals. In fact homosexuals are no more likely(again, scroll to bottom of page) to abuse children than heterosexuals.

I can not help but also point out that your other argument:

"I find this parallel interesting. Homosexuality is arguably natural occurring but atypical (I choose those words carefully) - the same could be said for paedophiles. I would be surprised if they are a historically recent phenomena and they certainly make up a very small percentage of the population, yet their actions and desires are abhorent to the vast majority of us.

The same can be said of homosexuality 100 years ago."

-is also critically flawed.

You see, consensual homosexual acts cause harm to no one, while conversely, child molestation does indeed cause severe mental aguish and trauma to the victim.

2.2 Why can't I just give a URL?
If derivative formats of an article are less useful than the TeX source, a URL is the least useful of all. A list of URLs is like a phone book: easy to compile, temporarily convenient, and soon unreliable. The purpose of the arXiv is to record and distribute the research literature, not merely to announce its location. (On the other hand, you are free to include extra URLs along with the genuine article.)

That goes to show that pretty bright minds are working on Free Software, doesn't it? And suggests what could be a very interesting (though probably quite busy) Slashdot interviewee... I will admit I'm curious to know what drew him to that level of participation in Free Software.

I was pleased to note that dissenting views on whether string theory was science were presented, and even brief discussion of what constitutes science.

(I saw the man once in Park City, Utah -- no, he wouldn't remember me -- busy with a PowerBook, and at the time helping launch another noteworthy open project, the UC Davis Math Archive.)

Slashdot editors?

All the normal excitatory signals that stimulate ejaculation, like touch, sight, sound and smell, can be replaced with the current from the probe," says Trish Berger, professor of animal science at the University of California, Davis. "It's fascinating. Of course, this is a woman talking."

no, not that I saw in those. But this pdf html does have the graph showing how the WW 500M CPUs are currently using the power output of 4 Hover Dams (9000 MW) and a nice exponential graph.

one word: ploticus

i use it here

• No more institution centric home page
• There should only be one portal. (don't want the students using Yahoo! or Excite - we want them to use our portal)
• There must exist -complete- customization available to the user. Otherwise, they will continue to use another portal that allows them to do what they want.
• Replaces your desktop

I may be misinterpreting him, but I believe that the post you responded too was saying that sex is a way to maintain enough genetic variation to prevent parasites (viruses, for example) from destroying a species.

If reproduction was non-sexual, DNA wouldn't be as varied every generation, and easier for a parasite that figures out the right strategy to exploit. Think monocultures of genetic crops. All genetically identical...but if the right blight comes along, they will all perish.

However, there are some species on this planet who get by just fine without sexual reproduction. Some of the walking stick insects (Phasmatodea) can actually reproduce with or without a male! It's true!