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i think you've done too many drugs. the word "ignorant" is clearly in the post i responded to

the most destructive force in the entire history of human existence is not war, disease, authoritarian government... it is substance abuse

as for my opinion of certain drugs, it is based on a distinct understanding of inebriation and addiction: highly addictive, not inebriating: ok (nicotine). highly inebriating, not addictive: ok (lsd). middling addictiveness and inebriation: ok (alcohol, marijuana). highly addictive and highly inebriating: not ok (heroin, cocaine, meth). why? because that is the combination that renders you unable to hold a job and a relationship. meaning you cost society. meaning i have an economic interest in preventing the creation of more of you. by limiting the substance that renders you useless

like this son:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_(mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence).svg

wake up

On 16 November 2006, it was announced that BT were making an offer for all shares in Plusnet. The BT deal (worth approximately £67m) was declared unconditional on 24 January 2007 (after OFT approval was granted).

Let's look at a better popularity metric - what percent of which OS hit the servers of Wikipedia in October 2011.

Ubuntu was 0.41% of all Wikipedia traffic with roughly 16.9 million hits in October. Mint was 0.01% of Wikipedia traffic, with roughly half a million hits in October. Ubuntu traffic dwarfs Mint traffic by many multiples.

In terms of the popularity of Linux distros hitting Wikipedia: Android was #1. Ubuntu was #2. Fedora was #3, just barely surpassing SuSE which is #4. Debian was #5. Mandriva was #6. Then comes along Mint at #7. In fact, Mint is barely even beating Kubuntu. Hits to Wikipedia is not a perfect metric, but if anyone knows of a better one I'd like to hear it.

Things can change, and Mint may be gaining popularity, but we have to be realistic about things. I like a lot of things about Debian and Trisquel, but I'm also aware of the fact that for every Debian desktop hitting Wikipedia, there are 20 Ubuntu desktops hitting Wikipedia, including my own. That number goes to 1:30 for Mint to Ubuntu. So no, Mint will not be surpassing Ubuntu any time soon.

that when Physicist can't explain anything these days, they just invent a particle for it?

I rather suspect that when an AC can't understand something in physics or some other scientific field, and the arguments and evidence on the matter are incomprehensible to him, he tries to project his ignorance onto those who do understand the issue. Yet another manifestation of the Kruger-Dunning effect.

Choking != freezing. Browser != Mozilla (with IE pre-9.0 still taking almost half of market, btw, good luck with SVG there). Me != GGP, so I can't provide you those, but it's easy to find SVGs in 1.5Mb size range, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Anime_Girl.svg for example.

After testing on that image, I see why you mentioned FF - it takes about 8-10 seconds to render in FF8 here, with Opera and Chrome and Opera Mobile on Android netbook doing it in 2-3 seconds, with loading time excluded. What's worse it hogs the CPU on each redraw of that tab - WTF, is caching not invented in Mozilla world?

You are missing the point of the comic. It explicitly measures the entropy of the two password selection schemes. The selection scheme itself is not secret; the point is that if there are about 2048 (2^11) "common" words, then there are 2^44 passwords made out of 4 common words, which is a lot more than the estimated ~2^28 possibilities for the more common password scheme.

What the comic doesn't take into account is methods of discovering the password other than brute force. If the password is known to be 4 common words, and you somehow discover a few letters of the password (eg looking over someone's shoulder) and have a rough idea of the placement of those letters within the password, it suddenly becomes a whole lot easier to guess what the remaining letters are, as opposed to a random password where knowing a few letters in the password doesn't help in determining what the other letters are. Using something like the acoustic keystroke logger posted on Slashdot the other day becomes a whole lot easier too as the search space is diminished because the words are common dictionary words.

You are missing the point of the comic. It explicitly measures the entropy of the two password selection schemes. The selection scheme itself is not secret; the point is that if there are about 2048 (2^11) "common" words, then there are 2^44 passwords made out of 4 common words, which is a lot more than the estimated ~2^28 possibilities for the more common password scheme.

This would explain the massive proliferation of governments whose sole purpose is murdering innocent civilians, right? Governments are made up of people - often the same people they govern, and who live right alongside citizens of that government.

Here's the major difference between what I said about corporations, and the s/corporation/government/g twist: governments, by their very nature, are established with the sole legal right, authority, and sanction to do violence on behalf of its citizenry.

Oh, you poor, naive young thing.

Did it never occur to you to wonder why the government's monopoly on punishment came about? It's because that power used to rest in the hands of the companies, and countless people suffered as a result.

Of the two (granting government more power, or granting corporations more power), neither is a "good" thing, but I've at least got a chance with the unarmed con man... not so much with the guy pointing a pistol at my head.

The private sector is just as capable of holding a gun to your head as the government. Moreso, even, if you hamstring the government and give all the power back to the corporations.

This would explain the massive proliferation of governments whose sole purpose is murdering innocent civilians, right? Governments are made up of people - often the same people they govern, and who live right alongside citizens of that government.

Here's the major difference between what I said about corporations, and the s/corporation/government/g twist: governments, by their very nature, are established with the sole legal right, authority, and sanction to do violence on behalf of its citizenry.

Oh, you poor, naive young thing.

Did it never occur to you to wonder why the government's monopoly on punishment came about? It's because that power used to rest in the hands of the companies, and countless people suffered as a result.

Of the two (granting government more power, or granting corporations more power), neither is a "good" thing, but I've at least got a chance with the unarmed con man... not so much with the guy pointing a pistol at my head.

The private sector is just as capable of holding a gun to your head as the government. Moreso, even, if you hamstring the government and give all the power back to the corporations.

There are several asymmetric protocols with very nice security properties, even against adversaries with quantum computers. My personal favorite is based on the Learning With Errors problem, which is in turn based on some lattice results. Wikipedia has a decent summary, and the original paper is here. The old McEliece cryptosystem might be secure against quantum attack. NTRU is commercialized but its security bounds make me very nervous. There also systems based on elliptic curve isogenies, but a new quantum algorithm comes somewhat close to breaking them. The main problem with these cryptosystems is that the resulting ciphertexts and signatures tend to be fairly long. RSA produces ciphertexts that are about the same length as the original messages and DSA produces nice, short signatures. ECC protocols are even better, but Shor's algorithm breaks them just as easily as RSA and DSA. The fancy post-quantum protocols, on the other hand, tend to produce large messages that are slow to work with.

Bullshit. You should always look at a period long enough to get rid of the noise. If you do that with ocean levels, you'll see that the long term trend is undeniably up.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/Recent_Sea_Level_Rise.png

You can also see that the short time data is very noisy.

Here's a start:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_weather_records

Notice how many heat records have been recorded since 2000, and how most cold records are much older.

And here's a paper describing the statistical relationship between climate and extreme weather:

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Nature/rahmstorf_coumou_2011.pdf

Do you realize that it's possible for what you say to be true (and I agree with the general point) AND for it to also be true that humans are capable of altering the environment? Given that, it's also possible that the natural changes wouldn't be so bad, but the human caused changes might end up being very bad for us. So shouldn't we do something to stop the changes we can stop?

The answer to your questions lies not in the direct answer, but the indirect one. To give the answer I have to give a little background.

The Earth's climate has always been changing and it always will. The treehugger notion we could or should stop the climate from changing is great irony - because that would be a bigger imposition on the Earth's ecology than doing nothing. It would introduce a static climate never before seen on Earth - if it were possible - with inevitable and unforeseen consequences. But there are temperature zones the Earth appears not to like, and it transitions through them swiftly - and then stays on one side or another of this zone for a longer time. There are other zones that global average temperature can vary in for a considerable period of time - until it enters this unsavory zone and then rapidly crosses over it again. I'll leave the "why" of this to some philosopher or trained scientist, but it's a useful observed fact without understanding why.

Giving the average global temperature of the 21st century as 0, we reached the peak of the current temperate zone about 5,000 years ago at a level called the Holocene Climatic Optimum at about +1C. This is about 4-8C below the maximum temperature for the last 450K years or so, and there appear to be feedback effects which prevent the temperature from going any higher than that maximum because it hasn't deviated from this pattern for 2.5 million years - longer than humans have been around. There is a climate danger zone at -0.6C and if we enter it the temperature drops quickly to a new range of -5 to -8C for a very long time. Glaciers march and scrape our cities into the sea, owning the land for a hundred thousand years.

Unfortunately for our teeming billions, up until about 300 years ago the temperature had declined from the Holocene Optimum of +1C to -0.6C and was trending down. -0.6C appears to be the upper bound of one of those unsavory zones, and the next stop is -5C which is quite a drastic change. We were on the cusp of transition into the ice, and in fact that period is called the "little ice age". Each time in the last half-million years the average temperature passed below -0.7C it skipped directly over the intervening temperatures and went directly to the lower level - resulting in the die-off of terrestrial animals including humans, glaciation, and other unpleasant effects. The duration of this cold period averages 100,000 years which is likely longer than we could bear it. If it had not been for the warming currently attributed by some to the burning of fossil fuels and its concomitant CO2 discharge, we would likely already be suffering the cold dipping to -5C or more.

Perhaps 6 billion of us would be dead already, or never born - not from the cold, but from the inevitable famine and struggling for resources that it would bring. But that's not the end. 300 years from now there would be only a few million of our seven billions left, if the resulting wars didn't leave the planet uninhabitable entirely. Our entire industrial revolution, sciences and arts these last 200 years? Lost, perhaps forever.

No matter what we do the Earth will not stay habitable to this many humans forever. In the last half-million years we've had only four such periods lasting an average 12,000 years or so. This warm period we now enjoy is not the Earth's normal temperature. And when it's over, it really and truly does appear to be over for a very long time. It will be cold sooner or later. For me and mine, I

Actually, most scientists agree it's much warmer now than during the MWP.

Here are the modern temperature reconstructions for the last 1000 years.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

If you have solid evidence that the WMP was globally warmer than today, I'd love to see it.

What you're stating is the broken window fallacy.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

All those things are bad for the economy, which is the reason that the governments haven't actually done anything so far.

For years I've thought that WASTE was a great solution looking for a problem.

There is definitely research going into educational games. Refaction is a game designed to teach fractions. That group seems mostly interested in studying how tweaking the game affects learning/fun (i.e. if the game is not fun and players give up, then they aren't learning anymore) than in developing new games.

There are a number of programming games which are played by writing code which controls your agent in the game. I am not sure how much they really teach advanced programming concepts, but I can certainly see them teaching basic skills.

For anyone interested in the recent shenanigans of investment banks, I highly recommend the movie Margin Call (2011). It dramatizes this "cash in or bankrupt" behavior extremely well.

The movie's greatest strength is its portrayal of the enormous pressure many of those guys are under to outperform their colleagues. It is easy to see how serious risks can become commonplace in such a viciously competitive environment.

The problem with those averages is that it divided on a completely arbitrary line (every year ending in a 0). Either single very large spikes in either direction, or events occurring on 7 or 14 year cycles, could pull the "average" numbers used for each 10 year span. A quick analysis appears to show some sort of ~30 year period cycles occurring (1880-1919 cluster around a small range, as do 1930-1979), and both longer or shorter cycles are practically guaranteed. What I do not see adequately discussed is the prospect of very long, multi-century cycles longer than our temperature records: a cycle of (say) volcanic activity which extends for 800-1000 years could easily fit the "small" deviations in the Holocene paleoclimate records, and would coincide with the current warming period. (Even closer historically, the "little ice age" - the last big dip in the thick black line on that chart - occurs right at the start of our temperature records. Even cycles of a small as 300 years would be completely occluded by the brevity of our direct records.)

Ryanair's boss Michael O'Leary is known for this kind of brainfarts. He knows the press will talk about it for days, so it is all free publicity. He gives a rats ass about the image of the company, since its image is that they are cheap. More of his brilliant ideas: paying for toilets, flying without co-pilot and having a flight attended land it in case of trouble and airplanes with standing room only. They run some provoking advertisements too, like giving the finger to their competitors, or giving holiday suggestions for Berlusconi (he finally resigned a few hours ago!).

WHAT connector, and what charging volt/amp/etc

TFA mentions that competitors are already using a standard connector:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SAE_J1772

Don't say religion when you only mean Christianity. For example, Jews and Muslims don't believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, neither do Hindus or Buddhists.

That's why the Jewish calendar is currently year 5772?

Nothing special, just an implementation of HRTF.

global temperatures are NOT increasing by huge amounts in an extremely short time, DESPITE CO2 levels increasing in an extremely short time

Global temperatures are increasing by fairly big amounts in a short time.

perhaps what we are seeing now are CO2 levels increasing due to what temperatures were doing 800 years ago - a period, if I'm not very much mistaken, which we call the Medieval Warm period

No, apparently you have never looked closely at CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Here is a picture of the last half million years:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

Note how the recent increase is much higher than before, and also goes almost vertical. Increases due to glacial cycles were much slower.

Also, even if there was an 800 year lag, it doesn't work that way. You cannot warm up the earth, cool it down again, and then see nothing happen until exactly 800 years later. And, of course, the MWP was nothing spectacular anyway. Compared to the glacial cycles, the MWP temperature swings were tiny, so the CO2 response should be tiny too.

And "normal" is just the long term average. Say between 200-300 ppm. You can see from the graph that's about the range that the earth has moved between in the last half million years. Based on the sharp increase in the graph, it is obvious were dealing with something unique here.

Fun fact: Agent Orange was, at worst, 99.8% dioxin-free.

Actually, most reports of Agent Orange dioxin contamination peg it no worse than 30 ppm TCDD dioxin concentration, which, of course, means the Agent Orange could still be 99.997% pure!

So, next time you see something that claims to be "99% organic" or "99 44/100% pure", just remember that it could potentially be several orders of magnitude worse than the contaminated Agent Orange used in Vietnam.

Why not ask Rebecca Mercuri? She is a voting expert, and if indications are correct, the last couple of voting exercises were not exactly as clean as they were supposed to have been.

You can ask politicians whatever you want, I would suggest you become more interested in assuring that your vote actually goes where it is supposed to go.

Godwin's law!! https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Godwin's_law

The percentage bachelors degrees granted in engineering doubled from 1975-1985 and it's dropped back down to the 1975 value again. I can't find the source but I read the other day that the number of bachelors degrees has roughly doubled since the 1970s. If so, we're graduating as many engineers as we were in 1975 but "production" of engineers has not not kept up with the increase of over 25% in population.

In fact I'm surprised no one has blamed this quake on it yet.

Because the real culprit is right in front of our tentacles.

Wriggle in fear, miserable humanoids!

And global warming is caused by a reduction in the pirate population: Average global temperature vs. Number of pirates

Making up correlations is fun!

The world was a different place in the early days of NT 4

Arguably true... but only for the monolithic win 9x series releases, which aren't relevant to this topic since the NT kernel was developed independently within Microsoft by Dave Cutler from DEC. It was Microsoft's first truly modern operating system. As many comm enters above me have mentioned NT originally did have functions such as font rendering in userspace due to its heavy hardware abstraction. As the pending issues with 9x loomed however MS could read the writing, on the wall; porting 9x to Unicode (it was ANSI throughout, a separate "Layer for Unicode" had to be used to run Unicode programs on 9x machines) as well as supporting newer hardware (AHCI, USB, true Plug and Play) was going to be nearly impossible (the attempt was called Windows ME). So Microsoft began with NT4 to prep for the mass migration from 9x. Since the average consumer at the time didn't want to drop $3k for a workstation that would be able to run the NT model correctly, Microsoft made some compromises to the OS for the sake of speed.

No, it wasn't. NT4 was released in 1996. By that time, many people here on /. had been exploiting bugs like that for 10 or 20 years already. Granted, mostly for fun or to cheat in (single-player) games, but still...

NT4 already had a security architecture. There was a different place available (basically anywhere outside ring0) and it should have been put there, and it definitely should have been obvious to anyone with three grams of brains that stuff like this doesn't belong into ring0.

You however are making the assumption that everybody in Microsoft talks to each other. A most incorrect assumption. The reality is most likely that WinDiv (The division responsible for the OS) made the assumption that fonts would not be loaded from insecure sources, e.g. Word documents. The Office division however faced the problem of what do you do when some user uses a font that is not on another users system? So they made the decision to allow the embedding of fonts into the file format, along with a bunch of other really bad decisions in hindsight (remember the Melissa virus?) that would have been caught if they had had the same security reviews as WinDiv did. To compound the problem, Office used unpublished and most likely unhardened APIs (it probably still does in parts) that allowed it the capabilities to do things like on the fly font loading something that wasn't exposed to the rest of us until Windows 2000 (NT 5.0). My point being that at the time it WAS a safe decision as far as WinDiv was concerned. Should they have been a little more careful with those unpublished APIs... yes they should have, it would have prevented a lot of anti-trust issues, but they weren't. So here we are with yet another security bug.

The world was a different place in the early days of NT 4

Arguably true... but only for the monolithic win 9x series releases, which aren't relevant to this topic since the NT kernel was developed independently within Microsoft by Dave Cutler from DEC. It was Microsoft's first truly modern operating system. As many comm enters above me have mentioned NT originally did have functions such as font rendering in userspace due to its heavy hardware abstraction. As the pending issues with 9x loomed however MS could read the writing, on the wall; porting 9x to Unicode (it was ANSI throughout, a separate "Layer for Unicode" had to be used to run Unicode programs on 9x machines) as well as supporting newer hardware (AHCI, USB, true Plug and Play) was going to be nearly impossible (the attempt was called Windows ME). So Microsoft began with NT4 to prep for the mass migration from 9x. Since the average consumer at the time didn't want to drop $3k for a workstation that would be able to run the NT model correctly, Microsoft made some compromises to the OS for the sake of speed.

No, it wasn't. NT4 was released in 1996. By that time, many people here on /. had been exploiting bugs like that for 10 or 20 years already. Granted, mostly for fun or to cheat in (single-player) games, but still...

NT4 already had a security architecture. There was a different place available (basically anywhere outside ring0) and it should have been put there, and it definitely should have been obvious to anyone with three grams of brains that stuff like this doesn't belong into ring0.

You however are making the assumption that everybody in Microsoft talks to each other. A most incorrect assumption. The reality is most likely that WinDiv (The division responsible for the OS) made the assumption that fonts would not be loaded from insecure sources, e.g. Word documents. The Office division however faced the problem of what do you do when some user uses a font that is not on another users system? So they made the decision to allow the embedding of fonts into the file format, along with a bunch of other really bad decisions in hindsight (remember the Melissa virus?) that would have been caught if they had had the same security reviews as WinDiv did. To compound the problem, Office used unpublished and most likely unhardened APIs (it probably still does in parts) that allowed it the capabilities to do things like on the fly font loading something that wasn't exposed to the rest of us until Windows 2000 (NT 5.0). My point being that at the time it WAS a safe decision as far as WinDiv was concerned. Should they have been a little more careful with those unpublished APIs... yes they should have, it would have prevented a lot of anti-trust issues, but they weren't. So here we are with yet another security bug.

If initrd is sufficient to mount /usr and /, what would it change if the file system recovery tools are in / rather than /usr ?

Well, for one thing, it would require changing all of the initramfs scripts that are used to build an initrd image from, and for building a generic kernel it would require including in all of the possible recovery programs, which includes recovery programs for filesystems your system isn't using. However -- the more I think about this, the more it seems like this would be fine on modern desktop or laptop hardware (just not on embedded).

And if we need file system recovery tools to mount /, they need to be in initrd.

Yes, on this I agree with you, and I've had this problem myself and had wished that the recovery utilities were in the initrd. These days I've been using XFS on top of encrypted LUKS; this is a bit of a crazy thing to do, because XFS generally gets some minor corruption if the kernel panics or the system is otherwise hard-powered-off without a proper shutdown and without using the Magic SysRq emergency shutdown sequence. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key Recovering / then becomes a multi-step process of booting a Linux LiveCD that has both cryptsetup and xfs_repair available on it, mounting the encrypted partition via cryptsetup, then running xfs_repair. (Typically I use a newer CD version of Knoppix to do this.) The initrd image already has to have cryptsetup in it (AFAIK) to mount the encrypted partitions, so it's not that much of an extension to add the recovery programs, and if they were there it would be more convenient, as I wouldn't have to boot a recovery LIveCD to recover /.

The point is simplification, instead of having initrd to mount / that is used to mount /usr, just have initrd to do the job o / and /usr, with regards to boot.

I'm still skeptical that bundling together all of the executables on the system into one directory is going to end up being a simplification. That sounds more like a mess you'd expect on Windows in the /system or /system32 directories than something you'd expect on a modern *nix system. However; long ago some Unix systems used to have startup binaries in /etc which I thought was ugly; at least HP-UX did that at one time.

IT seems you can not read what Lumpy seems to have posted, here's some basic education for you. a 9.0 Earthquake is really really really REALLY big, the type that can snap off parts of a island or land mass. IT shakes really hard and breaks things more than you have any comprehension of, think World going to end level of shaking.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale to educate yourself as you seem to not even understand what an earthquake is.

Right after an earthquake that would crumble most buildings to the ground, the plant was hit by a tsunami.. You seem to think that that means, "a small child with a squirt gun" but in reality it's a whole lot larger than that. Where you live, what happened to the nuclear plant, would have killed everyone in your city PLUS destroyed every building there. No US military base would have withstood what happened to this plant. NYC would have been smashed to the ground in a Fallout 3 state of destruction if what happened there hit NYC.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tsunami so you know what a tsunami is... they happen in oceans not bathtubs.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant to educate you because it seems you know nothing at all about the event that happened. I am sorry you get your news from Fox News, but they do not report truth or educate, it's a Entertainment channel not a news channel.

Here is what happened....

On 11 March 2011 an earthquake categorized as 9.0 MW on the moment magnitude scale occurred at 14:46 Japan Standard Time (JST) off the northeast coast of Japan. Units 4, 5 and 6 had been shut down prior to the earthquake for planned maintenance.[42][43] The remaining reactors were shut down automatically after the earthquake, and the remaining decay heat of the fuel was being cooled with power from emergency generators. The subsequent destructive tsunami with waves of up to 14 meters (the reactors were designed to handle up to 6 meters) disabled emergency generators required to cool the reactors. Over the following three weeks there was evidence of partial nuclear meltdowns in units 1, 2 and 3: visible explosions, suspected to be caused by hydrogen gas, in units 1 and 3; a suspected explosion in unit 2, that may have damaged the primary containment vessel; and a possible uncovering of the units 1, 3 and 4 spent fuel pools.[44] Radiation releases caused large evacuations, concern about food and water supplies, and treatment of nuclear workers.[45][46][47] --- This is from the wikipedia link above.

So it appears that not only is lumpy 100% correct in his statement, but you seem to be drastically lacking in your education and comprehension of world events. I must assume you are a 12-14 year old kid because any adult with such a large hole in their education and comprehension capabilities can not be a functioning member of society.

IT seems you can not read what Lumpy seems to have posted, here's some basic education for you. a 9.0 Earthquake is really really really REALLY big, the type that can snap off parts of a island or land mass. IT shakes really hard and breaks things more than you have any comprehension of, think World going to end level of shaking.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale to educate yourself as you seem to not even understand what an earthquake is.

Right after an earthquake that would crumble most buildings to the ground, the plant was hit by a tsunami.. You seem to think that that means, "a small child with a squirt gun" but in reality it's a whole lot larger than that. Where you live, what happened to the nuclear plant, would have killed everyone in your city PLUS destroyed every building there. No US military base would have withstood what happened to this plant. NYC would have been smashed to the ground in a Fallout 3 state of destruction if what happened there hit NYC.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tsunami so you know what a tsunami is... they happen in oceans not bathtubs.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant to educate you because it seems you know nothing at all about the event that happened. I am sorry you get your news from Fox News, but they do not report truth or educate, it's a Entertainment channel not a news channel.

Here is what happened....

On 11 March 2011 an earthquake categorized as 9.0 MW on the moment magnitude scale occurred at 14:46 Japan Standard Time (JST) off the northeast coast of Japan. Units 4, 5 and 6 had been shut down prior to the earthquake for planned maintenance.[42][43] The remaining reactors were shut down automatically after the earthquake, and the remaining decay heat of the fuel was being cooled with power from emergency generators. The subsequent destructive tsunami with waves of up to 14 meters (the reactors were designed to handle up to 6 meters) disabled emergency generators required to cool the reactors. Over the following three weeks there was evidence of partial nuclear meltdowns in units 1, 2 and 3: visible explosions, suspected to be caused by hydrogen gas, in units 1 and 3; a suspected explosion in unit 2, that may have damaged the primary containment vessel; and a possible uncovering of the units 1, 3 and 4 spent fuel pools.[44] Radiation releases caused large evacuations, concern about food and water supplies, and treatment of nuclear workers.[45][46][47] --- This is from the wikipedia link above.

So it appears that not only is lumpy 100% correct in his statement, but you seem to be drastically lacking in your education and comprehension of world events. I must assume you are a 12-14 year old kid because any adult with such a large hole in their education and comprehension capabilities can not be a functioning member of society.

IT seems you can not read what Lumpy seems to have posted, here's some basic education for you. a 9.0 Earthquake is really really really REALLY big, the type that can snap off parts of a island or land mass. IT shakes really hard and breaks things more than you have any comprehension of, think World going to end level of shaking.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Richter_magnitude_scale to educate yourself as you seem to not even understand what an earthquake is.

Right after an earthquake that would crumble most buildings to the ground, the plant was hit by a tsunami.. You seem to think that that means, "a small child with a squirt gun" but in reality it's a whole lot larger than that. Where you live, what happened to the nuclear plant, would have killed everyone in your city PLUS destroyed every building there. No US military base would have withstood what happened to this plant. NYC would have been smashed to the ground in a Fallout 3 state of destruction if what happened there hit NYC.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tsunami so you know what a tsunami is... they happen in oceans not bathtubs.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Power_Plant to educate you because it seems you know nothing at all about the event that happened. I am sorry you get your news from Fox News, but they do not report truth or educate, it's a Entertainment channel not a news channel.

Here is what happened....

On 11 March 2011 an earthquake categorized as 9.0 MW on the moment magnitude scale occurred at 14:46 Japan Standard Time (JST) off the northeast coast of Japan. Units 4, 5 and 6 had been shut down prior to the earthquake for planned maintenance.[42][43] The remaining reactors were shut down automatically after the earthquake, and the remaining decay heat of the fuel was being cooled with power from emergency generators. The subsequent destructive tsunami with waves of up to 14 meters (the reactors were designed to handle up to 6 meters) disabled emergency generators required to cool the reactors. Over the following three weeks there was evidence of partial nuclear meltdowns in units 1, 2 and 3: visible explosions, suspected to be caused by hydrogen gas, in units 1 and 3; a suspected explosion in unit 2, that may have damaged the primary containment vessel; and a possible uncovering of the units 1, 3 and 4 spent fuel pools.[44] Radiation releases caused large evacuations, concern about food and water supplies, and treatment of nuclear workers.[45][46][47] --- This is from the wikipedia link above.

So it appears that not only is lumpy 100% correct in his statement, but you seem to be drastically lacking in your education and comprehension of world events. I must assume you are a 12-14 year old kid because any adult with such a large hole in their education and comprehension capabilities can not be a functioning member of society.

You either haven't understood the Towers of Hanoi, or this puzzle.
Here's a link for you to read what Towers of Hanoi exactly are. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi

Towers of Hanoi aims at moving a set of discs in the same order from one peg to another, and this one's just talking about sorting.

someone accidentally caused a nuclear fission without taking proper precautions at a lab

That happened, at least twice. See the WIkipedia entries for Harry Daghlian, Jr and Louis Slotin.

someone accidentally caused a nuclear fission without taking proper precautions at a lab

That happened, at least twice. See the WIkipedia entries for Harry Daghlian, Jr and Louis Slotin.

So where's the lawsuit against Applebee's since that apple looks a lot more like Apple (Inc.)'s logo than AppleADay's logo?

This. I was fastforwarding through commercials on my DVR the other day, and I thought I saw an add containing a burning Apple logo.

It was the Applebee's logo.

So, where's the lawsuit against Applebee's, Apple? If you just glance at them, they really do look identical.

Third, as is pointed out every time an incident like this occurs, trademark owners have to take no chances and must enforce perceived violations or risk losing their right to it.

So where's the lawsuit against Applebee's since that apple looks a lot more like Apple (Inc.)'s logo than AppleADay's logo?

Every time I go into a library I thank God they're around and think about what it would be like to try to create them now if they didn't already exist.

Hi, Congress and the **AA. We want to make a big place--several of them, actually, in your typical metropolitan area--where any local resident can walk in empty-handed and walk out with both arms full of books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs, for free. Oh, and the government will pay for it all. Ideally, they'll look like this.

Just imagine trying to get that done today. Go out and patronize your local library, before it's too late!

Bible actually teaches that God and Jesus are two totally separate entities and that it is blasphemy to call Jesus a God.

Citation on this?

I don't own a Bible so I cannot provide you with any direct quote, sorry. I had one that I had gotten from elementary school years and years ago, but I lost it in a fire. Not that I miss it anyways.

Anyways, if Jesus and God were one and the same, then why would Jesus on many occasions call out to himself, including when he is in horrible pain due to just having been crucifixed? You know, the "Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?" - part ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sayings_of_Jesus_on_the_cross ) He even teaches about his "father in Heaven" and so on, ie. in a third person.

And we all know that the ten commandments tell you to only have the one and only God and no other Gods. So, if you're calling Jesus a God you are indeed having multiple ones and breaking the commandment.

While I'm in favor of piling onto Haught, he isn't a creationist.

Lets not forget about Darwaza while we're at it! Can't let coal have all the fun!

And so did Austria https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plant

My objection, from the beginning, was and stems from your statement that you apparently know that design will not be a conclusion in the unknown future of science. I continue to maintain that you cannot, and am not claiming that I can "prove God did it".

My objection is that it still needs more evidence to make it even vaguely plausible.

There are other options you don't seem to be discussing for some reason. Like "It just happened despite the improbability", "there's a yet unknown mechanism that made it happen", "it got copied as-is from another source", and so on.

Yet you oddly concentrate specifically on design, despite design requiring a designer we have not the slightest shred of evidence of, despite having looked for other civilizations with SETI, and constantly looking at space with telescopes, for instance.

I'm not sure if I'm being unclear, or if my point is just so rock-simple on its basic level that you can't believe my point was actually what it was--but it is. I showed you a picture of fluorescent cats that were demonstrably designed, by virtue of being designed by genetic engineers.

Don't be silly. The argument is and always has been about the historic "origin of species", which covers a huge timeline that we are a tiny part of.

Sure, let's ignore say, the last 1000 years, it doesn't make a difference for the sake of argument.

I disagree with this notion, that it is merely a question of perception, or subjective evaluation, but I'm not really prepared at this point to offer an exhaustive counterargument. I believe such is quantifiable, by, for example, specifying the minimum Finite State Machine that could fully "emulate" the entity in question, and determining the number of State-Event transitions such a model requires. There are probably objections to this that could be made, though, so I'll leave it at that counterproposal without further analysis.

Don't you think you should figure that out first? How can you argue about complexity before even figuring out what it is?

And for that matter, I don't think the FSM is going to solve your problem. Say, how do you reduce fractal to a FSM? Do you have some algorihtm that can take any piece of data and somehow figure out the most efficient algorithm possible to generate it? Or do you judge by your best attempt to make a FSM to generate the image without using the formula for the Mandelbrot set, despite that the algorithm and initial data needed to make it is tiny in comparison?

What about other things, like say, pi? Is it complex because it never ends? Is then 1/3 complex? Or is it simple because it's the result of a division? Does the algorithm to calculate arbitrary digits of it change its complexity?

Finally, how are you going to apply this to genetics?

Seems plausible, but I still think we lack the development of genetics at this point to make a quantifiable analysis of which transitions are the best candidates for strong argument for specific design.

Then on what basis do you suggest ID?

Again, I am not fundamentally opposed to the notion of design occurring only at a "higher-order" of design of the process of evolution to ultimately produce specific results, or design of the properties of physics from which evolution emerges--but this is more of a philosophical stance than a specific scientific question, and it is the specific science level that I am concerned about being damaged by dismissing some viable possibilities a-priori.

I dismiss it on the basis that you've yet to provide a good reason to even propose ID as a possibility. Nothing in the record that conflicts with evolution, no coherent definition of what is this complexity you keep talking about, and now you even admit that you can't figure out what kind of characteristic would be a strong candidate for ID.

You're talking out of your ass, basically.

According to Wikipedia it's only 17 per cent.

That's probably higher on a windy day (heck, even here in Spain we can hit 40% on a windy day) but the leap from 17% to 100% is massive. A vast chasm. Maybe even impossible to achieve in practice.

At some point you're going to have to burn fuel. If you stop using those cold war bomb manufacturing plants as energy sources then Nuclear is the best option.

I'm sure it's not literally at random, there's some method to their madness, but their track record looks pretty random to any outsider.

And there are many more innocent people who have been tortured due to cases of mistaken identity and misplaced suspicion. You'd think they'd check those things before they start the torture, but you'd be wrong.

I'm sure it's not literally at random, there's some method to their madness, but their track record looks pretty random to any outsider.

And there are many more innocent people who have been tortured due to cases of mistaken identity and misplaced suspicion. You'd think they'd check those things before they start the torture, but you'd be wrong.