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It look to me that you will benefit reading this paper:

http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf

Slashdotter here, who disbelieves evolution.

As for "evolution is incontrovertible" argument...

  - "Entropy and Evolution" http://dx.doi.org/10.5048/BIO-C.2013.2 (Published)

  - "A Second Look at the Second Law”, http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf (Accepted, but withheld from publication “not because of any errors or
technical problems found by the reviewers or editors, but because the Editor-In-Chief subsequently concluded that the content was more philosophical
than mathematical,” according to the apology later published in the related journal.)

  - Generations past have accepted the sun as been the day's source of light, and the moon the night's. Are their identical sizes (identical as far as our eyes are concerned) a massive coincidence? Or evidence of design.

- If you saw a exponential decay curve (i.e. a long tail curve), with the tail quite apparently truncated at some point, would you assume an event likely caused the truncation?

One such curve is 'number of trees' (Y axis) versus 'tree-rings per tree' (X axis). The truncation is around 4800 tree-rings (X axis) - the number of rings in the oldest trees. If you allow for some trees adding more a ring a year (they do, but very rarely), this roughly coincides with the Biblical date for Noah's flood (4350 years ago), when the then-exant forest of the world would have been destroyed.

Another coincidence?

Few creationists deny natural selection. (After all, Mendel was a creationist).

Few creationists deny genetic mutations occur.

Effectively, what we do deny is that these mechanisms can violate the second law of themodynamics (Best explained here: http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/AML_3497.pdf)

Your argument works on the premise that men and women are of equal ability in this role. I'm not saying that they are not. However, how do you account for the fact that men are over represented within the prison system of every society? If men and women are equal, surely this would mean that men are suffering disadvantages on a massive scale?

Actually there is a lot of evidence that they are.

Since Aggregability is NP-Hard, this should surprise exactly nobody (who reads papers on complexity).

Native: been here a long time.
More native: Been here a longer time than you.

Gotcha, But wouldn't after a period of time, would we be both be beyond a point where it wouldn't/shouldn't matter?

Yeah, it's beyond the point when the living have no memory of discrimination, genocide, or having your land stolen. And there are still living Native American Indians who have memories of these. As late as the 1970s Native American Indian Women were being systematically and forcibly sterilized. Even now the US, er Pres Bush, is seeking to break another treaty in a line of broken treaties, the Treaty of Ruby Valley [1863] which promised to the Western Shoshone Indians Yucca Mountain.

Native: been here a long time.
More native: Been here a longer time than you.

Gotcha, But wouldn't after a period of time, would we be both be beyond a point where it wouldn't/shouldn't matter?

Yeah, it's beyond the point when the living have no memory of discrimination, genocide, or having your land stolen. And there are still living Native American Indians who have memories of these. As late as the 1970s Native American Indian Women were being systematically and forcibly sterilized. Even now the US, er Pres Bush, is seeking to break another treaty in a line of broken treaties, the Treaty of Ruby Valley [1863] which promised to the Western Shoshone Indians Yucca Mountain.

Furthermore, if one looks at just about any flying creature now or in the past, the leading edge of their "wing" has always been protected by bone, feather or both.

That's not true. The leading edge of a bird's wing is called the patagium, and is simply skin that is stretched from the humerus to the carpal joint. The leading edge of a bat wing is similar, but in bats, all the skin of the wing is referred to as the patagium, while the leading edge is called the propatagium. In either case, the leading edge of the wing is very vulnerable to damage; one of my veterinarian friends, who volunteers at a raptor rehabilitation center, sees many cases where the bird's patagium has been torn (bird vs. cat, bird vs. barbed wire fence, etc), and generally in those cases the bird never flies again. It's actually one of the most vulnerable areas on a bird.

Land area of texas 261,914 sq miles
http://www.netstate.com/states/tables/st_size.htm
Population of the earth 6601891967
http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop

math?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&q=26 1%2C914+sq+miles+%2F+6601891967+

102.751476 m2

Yep, you can build a house for everyone in that 10 meters on a side parcel.
Your can have the top L5 section
http://paces.geo.utep.edu/seeley/proterozoic_seque nce8.jpg

enjoy!

Basically because I get tired of seeing in Hispanic Business or other minority based trade magazines a total lack of innovators, they focus on COO's or some VP of finance. I tried to think of oh I dont know good role models for non-white kids to have when it comes to the tech world. My CS department and college graduate the 2nd highest number of hispanics in the US, and its just hard to think of people (due to well just know knowing of any) that I can point out to people and say "see they are a great [developer/innovator/developer] that you can use for a role model". Females have Admiral Hopper and Lady Babbige; who can minorities look to?

It's about time Web "programmers" (too long a title swiped by HTML formatters) realized that URLs are just pointers. To (MIME) typed data, with varied fetch protocols. It's a measure of how badly designed was HTML: *cough*Andreesen*cough*.

His "circular reference oops" was a terrible reason not to use Berners-Lee's advice to use URLs as generic pointers to any embeddable data object. Any good programmer could have cut the recursion, merely by allowing only a (configurable) depth in the renderer, terminating in a hyperlink, rather than a fetch. The disease can be easily detected in the blowjobbing comment by Giza, the "Instructor": because Andreesen got lucky with Mosaic taking off enough for Jim Clark to pick it as "the next big thing", his design travesty was good, even though it was totally broken.

It's 12 years, and millions of hacks, later, and we're finally talking about "AJAX" apps that can get any data, any type, and insert them anywhere in a single document. Calling graphic artists "web designers" gave us a generation of deeper bad designs like half-assed IFRAMEs. How long will it take before we push AJAX JavaScripts back inside the app frame engine, so only a little bit of presentation tag code can lay out a GUI with dynamic data, accessed from and processed by distributed hosts? That was Berners-Lee's design for HTML/URL/CGI, back in 1990. Which is why Berners-Lee got knighted, and Andreesen only got rich.

Flaming Andreesen aside, we've now got "thin" browser clients that are as fat, in their way, as were the dedicated clients to proprietary client/server protocols before the Web. Sure, they do quite a lot, opening up the vast array of content, services and people now more easily connected to the Internet. But we're still trapped in the "browser". Imagine if all Windows apps ran in the context, and GUI, of Windows Explorer. Or all Linux apps in, say, Nautilus. Or every app ran in a panel in the Desktop itself. Using only the simple, static GUI of the enclosing app. Isolated from other apps, other data, any real configurability, integration or further programming by the app "consumer".

"Web services" should be the default for any process on the Web. It needs extra features, like per-call authentication (like htauth/SSL). Their APIs should be versioned and signed for reciprocal authentication of the service by the client. The data should be easily embeddable in any app, a generic remote procedure call. The services should be associated with default logic ojbects for further processing or rendering, keyed either to objects bundled with the local client app, residing in keyed repositories distributed around the Net, or downloadable from the service server. URIs should merely associated with URLs, not merely identical to them, so services/content can be retrieved by name or criteria, rather than by static location (a URI handle, rather than a merely dereferenceable URL pointer).

We've got more "computer science" students and teachers now than ever before. We've got more programmers, designers, architects, IT professionals, infosystem pundits. More depends on this system than ever before, and the stakes of getting more into it, and more people using it, are extremely high. Yet we're spiraling down the same drain that we flushed a generation ago, when we kicked off the fundamental Web architecture (really the ground floor, as per Andreesen's half-blind email to Berners-Lee) with a hack that was never fixed to work beyond its immediate deadline requirement.

Is there any hope that AJAX will become the norm, pushed under an API as simple as HTML 1.0? The Windows apps (and equally mediocre frameworks on all the other platforms) are stuck with their own cultural and legacy requirements baggage. After 15 years of spinning our Web wheels, have we merely moved our architectural tangles onto the Web? Is all of our development, local or networked, doomed to consume 80

How about El Paso?

If low-mainenance Stirlings are in the offing, it's worth taking another look at solar ponds. Pioneered in Israel, and I believe RMIT in Melbourne is still looking at them.

Basically a swimming pool filled with dense brine with two or three different salts, which settle into layers. A greenhouse effect traps heat in the bottom layer, and the Stirling works off the temperature differential between bottom and top.

Drawbacks are corrosion, algae, transparent covering, control of the layers, scalability.

Advantage is storage: heat can be retained through the night, though at the expense of the temperature gradient, I suppose.

India

Israel

Texas

I think anyone who is anyone who knows anything about 16bit MCUs knows about the Motorola HC12 family and it's 8bit predecessor the HC11. The HC11/HC12 is well supported by GCC, binutils and friends (also check out http://www.gnu.org/software/m68hc11/) which is also nicely packaged under Debian/GNU unstable and testing.

HC12/HCS12 devices are extremely easy to debug and develop software for. There is a fantastic Java-based simulator here. If you don't have dev tools that natively understand Motorola's BDM (Background Debugging Module) protocol, you can use a second HC12 configured as a "pod" device interfaced via BDM pins to the target, which will get you a very powerful interactive debugging console via DBug12 (example session here).

I've been doing a lot of work with the 9S12DP256 device. It has 256KiB FLASH, 12KiB SRAM, 4KiB EEPROM, 112QFP, 16 10bit A/D channels, CAN, 2xSCI, 3xSPI, etc etc. and clocks up to 25MHz.

Although HC11s are cheap and easy to come by in 1off quantitites from various retailers, the only HC12s most have available (such as Farnell) are the newer HC9S12 devices such as the one I've just mentioned.

What's the problem with this? Well on paper, nothing. These are extremely powerful devices. I'm going to use the MC9S12A64 in production; these are just $9.80 USD from Arrow.

The problem is that what with the HCS12 core and the family's peripherals being relatively new, Motorola Semiconductor is restructuring (renaming to Freescale Semiconductor), there are a godawful huge number of bugs. The most crippling being so far, SCI interrupts being basically useless (can only rely on having one INTR configured), not to mention PLL config deficiencies, BDM defects, etc.

It isn't too bad if you read the erratta sheet FIRST before chasing your tail and banging your head off the desk.

From the HC11/HC12 GCC port pages, here's a list of tested evaluation boards. Of these I've worked with the Technological Arts Adapt912, which, whilst a fine board, is quite expensive.

For a HCS12-based device (actually uses the same IC I've discussed), check out the Adapt9S12, but again at $159 USD it isn't cheap. The best bargain I've found is the MiniDragon+ which actually has more packed on the PCB than the Adpat9S12 and is $89 USD for students/schools/hobbyists. And at still less than the Adapat9S12 price is the super-deluxe-mercedes decadance model the full Dragon12 evaluation board, with on-board LCD, 2xRS485 sockets, 2xRS232 sockets, 7segment displays, speaker, IR, etc.

I can highly recommend the evbplus.com (aka Wytec) boards, but in doing so I must disclose that I have recieved the MiniDRAGON+/Dragon12 (fr

Some links (click the 1's). Some are for dylexics but still relevent for all since pretty much all of us are capable of visual thought...:

I'd honestly like to see a real cite (not a rant site)...

I don't see how the writings of a former Army Lieutenant Colonel and West Point instructor, on the subject of military history, quite qualifies as a "rant site". You may disagree; he may or may not be correct (I'm a hacker, not a military historian); but he's hardly "ranting".

I've seen several variations of this quote citing different wars and different percentages

Perhaps because there were different percentages in different wars?

Here's an extended quote with some names of references (I did some quick Googling and added links):

In more modern times, the average firing rate was incredibly low in Civil War battles. Paddy Griffith demonstrates that the killing potential of the average Civil War regiment was anywhere from five hundred to a thousand men per minute. The actual killing rate was only one or two men per minute per regiment ( The Battle Tactics of the American Civil War). At the Battle of Gettysburg, of the 27,000 muskets picked up from the dead and dying after the battle, 90 percent were loaded. This is an anomaly, because it took 95 percent of their time to load muskets and only 5 percent to fire. But even more amazing, of the thousands of loaded muskets, over half had multiple loads in the barrel--one with 23 loads in the barrel. In reality, the average man would load his musket and bring it to his shoulder, but he could not bring himself to kill. He would be brave, he would stand shoulder to shoulder, he would do what he was trained to do; but at the moment of truth, he could not bring himself to pull the trigger. So, he lowered the weapon and loaded it again. Of those who did fire, only a tiny percentage fired to hit. The vast majority fired over the enemy's head.

During World War II, US Army Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall had a team of researchers study what soldiers did in battle. For the first time in history, they asked individual soldiers what they did in battle. They discovered that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen could bring themselves to fire at an exposed enemy soldier.

On the other hand it is clear that a finite representation of real numbers has tradeoffs. But only few seem to care about the cumulated errors.

My experience in engineering (simulation of casted turbine blades) was that people know that bad things can occur during complex floating point calculations but the matter was too complicated to be investigated.

Example: if during finite element simulation a timestep did not end up with a valid solution (the iterative/approximative solver of the large linear systems did not converge or even crash) just some control parameters were varied (time step, perhaps material curves) until the calculation seemed to produce some valid looking result. Needless to say, that that only obvious errors can be spotted that way.

The strange thing about all that is, that in the last years the mathematical discipline of interval analyis has been developed. Here every number is represented with its interval of known error bounds. These error intervall are kept and updated during calculations. Thus at the end of a large complex calculation, you know the error. That is a very valuable property.

More, in fact what one does so in many cases is not only a standard calculation but rather machine proof of error bounds.

This offers some unique properties, e.g. for rigorous global searches.

So we have far better technology available. Why is this stuff not used more widely?

As far as I know, only SUN puts interval analysis enabled data types in its FORTRAN and C/C++ compilers. But I have not seen that stuff in gcc, which would have a big impact.

Very strange.

To whom is interested, here is a homepage of the intervals community.

Regards,
Marc

Hardly. With the power management set up (including such things as monitor blanking and hard-drive spin down) and wake-on-LAN enabled, it doesn't really take a lot when not in use.

Yeah and to use Wake-On-LAN you need just another running computer... Very good energy saving indeed...

To quote http://wattwatchers.utep.edu/pages/PowerManagement .htm:
According to EPA Estimates, the average powered workstation costs $37/yr.: a computer with full Power Management configuration can cost only $16.40/yr. 75% of a workstation energy usage comes from the monitor.

Alright, this is more than I thought, but I don't think it justifies letting a computer run over night for 10 hours, just to save one minute boot time! That's you brushing your teeth in between and the computer again almost in screen saver state.

Now you're being foolish. Sharpen up the debating skills a bit - 'examples' like that are too easy to knock down

Well, your opinion seems to be, that if cars had power managment and such, just to say, they don't use so much energy (and money) any more, you wouldn't care.

Maybe you also take a look at:
http://standby.lbl.gov/

Or read http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/energyefficiency/appl iances/standby/

Recent research has revealed that standby power consumption accounts for 11.6% of Australia's household electricity usage, costing Australian households more than $500million and generating more than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. This is equivalent to the greenhouse impact of more than 1 million cars.

And believe me, Australia is nothing in comparison to the US.