Am I the only one confused by the fact that the Gamecube supported HD, but the "next-gen" console does not? That seems like a strange move for Nintendo, IMO.
What are you talking about? The GameCube does not support HD. It, at best, supports 480P -- standard television resolution, but a full 60 frames per second. In order to get this resolution, you must be using component video cables, playing one of the relatively few games that support progressive scan, and hold B at startup (once) to tell the system that you want to switch to progressive scan.
The component video cables are generally only available from Nintendo's web site, and Nintendo eventually stopped putting the component video port on the back of the system -- if you go buy a new GameCube, you will most likely find that it is missing the digital video output port that you would need to access progressive scan in the first place. New GameCubes are limited to 480I.
So, the GameCube most certainly does not support HD. The Revolution won't either, but it will at least require all of its games to provide 480P output. That makes me hopeful that the stupidity of the difficult-to-achieve-and-ultimately-discontinued 480P support present in the GameCube won't be repeated.
If you notice most are "find the best picture" for $0.03. Of course the site rules really slow right now so its not worth your time, but if it ran faster it would be something to do if you could crank through a hundred an hour.
So, you've just busted your ass to crank through one image every 36 seconds for a solid hour, and you have three dollars to show for it. There are definitely parts of the world where that would be a fantastic income, but my home country isn't one of them.
I accept that we could, in theory, mitigate the cellular damage that leads to aging, and humans could live much longer than they do now. There are, however, two BIG problems, in addition to the overcrowding that everyone else has mentioned.
First is cancer. Cancer is caused by DNA damage which causes cells to begin dividing uncontrollably. Humans, over our mere 100 year lifespan, face a very high risk of dying from cancer. Over a thousand years, it becomes a virtual certainty that at least a handful of your cells would have a very harmful mutation. Unless we also have the technology to periodically "refresh" all the DNA in your body (hint: unlikely), the simple fact is that after a thousand years you would have developed every kind of cancer known to man. I don't believe any medical technology could keep one of us alive that long -- if and when humans manage to extend our lifespans to the thousand year range, we won't be doing it in our current bodies.
Second is psychology. The human mind did not evolve to last a thousand years, and asking it to operate so far outside of its design parameters is bound to have some surprising (and likely unpleasant) effects. In fact, I am very skeptical that anyone could even hold on to sanity for that length of time. We just aren't built for that kind of time scale. We obviously don't know the effects of a truly long life on the human mind, but I just can't imagine an ordinary human lasting for a thousand years without becoming seriously disturbed.
Don't. Or at least, not as resume fodder or in an attempt to make a living. Coders are a dime a dozen these days.
Sure. My team is trying to hire a couple of Java programmers right now. We're talking about a very well-known company (hint: there's a Slashdot category for us), a Silicon Valley office, and a six-figure income.
And we're desperate. We finally (after much searching) managed to find a really great candidate for one of the positions, but the other one remains unfilled. I'd rather leave the position empty than lower my standards enough to pick some of the people we've talked to.
So, I suppose I agree that coders are a dime a dozen if you're looking for an idiot that doesn't even understand the difference between "a == b" and "a.equals(b)", but if you're looking for competent programmers, they're tough to find at any price.
I saw that episode and remember being pissed that they did the experiment wrong and called it busted.
They did not angle each individual mirror at the same spot. They just had a big surface with all the mirrors attached to it on the same plane (which was as worthless as a single small mirror).
Then you weren't paying attention. They made a very big deal of how they were focusing the mirrors on the same point by adjusting each of them individually, and even described it (correctly) as a Fresnel arrangement.
Because this goes against the law of Biogenesis -- the observable fact that all life comes from other life -- abiogenesis is an un-natural force (at least, until the law of Biogenesis is proven wrong).
That is a deeply flawed philosophy.
First, it is an observable fact that abiogenesis happened. Whether you believe that God did it or that unknown natural processes caused it to happen, every rational person will agree that at one point in the past life did not exist and now it does. So your "observable fact" that all life comes from other life is ipso facto false -- we already know that (no matter what your worldview, religious beliefs, or other beliefs may be) that life somehow managed to get created from a previously non-living environment.
The question about abiogenesis is not whether it happened, but how it happened. It's certainly possible that God snapped his fingers and planted some primitive bacteria in the oceans. It's also possible that it happened without the intervention of a deity -- that is, that life arises from non-life quite naturally on its own.
I appeal to Occam's Razor here. It requires less handwaving to say that "an unknown sequence of chemical processes gave rise to life on Earth" than it does to say "there is an invisible, undetectable, super-intelligent, all-powerful being capable of violating the laws of physics that everything else we see is subject to, and this being, for its own inscrutable reasons, created life".
Similarly, we don't know how gravity works. We have absolutely no idea. But I maintain that is easier to believe that "the force of gravity is governed by strict physical laws similar to the laws governing other areas of physics, despite the fact that we have not yet determined those laws" than "invisible fairies enjoy pushing objects together, giving rise to the force we know as gravity".
The only part I don't understand is why the invisible fairy argument sounds stupid to everyone but the invisible man in the sky argument doesn't.
The Christian point of view is that sex is great when you do it the way God designed you to: at the very least, monogamously. Doing it otherwise is like trying to eat vegetables with only your two upper front teeth. It's just not the way you were designed to eat.
Nonsense. Eating vegetables with only your two upper front teeth might be silly, but no Christian is going to claim that doing so will get you sent to hell. But both the Bible and common Christian belief tell us in quite definitive terms that people engaing in, say, gay sex (among other "unnatural" sexual acts) are most definitely going to hell. You can believe that or not, as you choose. But I find the way you're trying to pass it off as quite disingenuous.
Virtually everything humans do is unnatural -- we don't naturally wear clothes, write, fly in airplanes, or live in houses. All of these things are learned and quite definitely unnatural. So, the fact that an act is "unnatural" is meaningless. The Christian opposition to non-monogamous, non-heterosexual, non-vaginal, or non-missionary-position sex has little to do with how natural these acts are. And in fact, missionary position itself is unnatural -- humans naturally have sex the way almost all other mammals do, in doggy style position. If it were natural to have sex in missionary position, the missionaries wouldn't have to preach about it in the first place, because everybody would have been doing it that way already.
On top of that, you appear to blithely agree with the viewpoint that we were "designed" to have sex monogamously (and, presumably, you also mean only heterosexually), which is a point I take exception to. Humans are not by nature monogamous -- our monogamy (or, more often, attempted monogamy) is a societal convention. Throughout human history the arrangement of one man and many wives has been far more common than the modern monogamous relationship. None of the other great apes, nor most mammals in general, are monogamous. Homosexuality is also well-documented in many other animal species and is perfectly natural.
I'd have to say that if God "designed" us to only have monogamous sex between a man and a woman, he did a pretty piss-poor job of it. I find it much easier to believe that we weren't designed at all -- we are animals with more brainpower than any other animal on the planet, and have been able to surpass them as a result. Honestly, what reason is there to believe anything else?
Tone down the frothing-at-the-mouth paranoia a bit, please. I doubt the GP poster was suggesting that the drivers run at ring 0 -- he certainly never suggested such.
Instead he was just pointing out the pure stupidity of the fact that X Windows itself must handle drivers for video, sound, mouse, and so forth, rather than relying on services exposed by an underlying layer of the OS (which does not have to be running in ring 0). If the OS handled these devices, AS IT SHOULD, any program could make use of them without having to go through X.
Where do you get the notion that the X server takes care of all the input devices? The kernel already provides access to them through/dev anyway.
Raw access to a/dev device hardly equates to proper support via a driver API. I'm beginning to get the impression that most Linux developers really don't see why this was a bad idea from day 1, and that's very unfortunate.
At 30GB, you have enough for over three hours of HDTV, which means most movies, even with special features, won't need any more than that. Why use a more expensive format when you'll hardly ever need the extra space?
I agree, and that's why not all blu-ray disks will be 50GB. A 25GB single-layer blu-ray disk holds almost as much as a 30GB dual-layer HD-DVD disk. Fitting the entire movie on a single layer both eliminates layer transition pauses and reduces the cost of the disk. Even a 50GB dual-layer disk will generally only use one layer for the movie itself (the rest for extras) and so not require a mid-movie layer transition.
On top of that, it's not clear that a single-layer blu-ray disk will be more expensive to manufacture than a dual-layer HD-DVD disk. The HD-DVD group conveniently ignores the fact that their opposition doesn't have to use two layers to store a full-length movie.
The bricks and 2x4s were stolen from a nearby house that was under construction. He knows this because he watched the guy do it. Just because a partially-completed house has a pile of bricks and lumber in front of it doesn't mean "Hey guys, free building materials!"
The brick mailbox is a poorly-constructed eyesore. Did you take a look at the pictures? Things like that really do affect property values in otherwise decent neighborhoods. And the fact that much of the stuff is in the back yard doesn't necessarily mean much -- my house's back yard is visible from the street.
While I don't consider myself religious by any means, I don't see any reason to disbelieve that Jesus, Achilles, or Buddha were real people. While there's not enough evidence to give me overwhelming reason to believe in their existence, as there is with, for example, Napoleon, there's not enough evidence to disbelieve them either.
I consider your viewpoint quite a bit more odd. You seem to suggest that I need evidence to disbelieve something, which is not so. If you tell me that a leprechaun lives in your back yard, I don't need to go hunt for evidence in order to not believe you. You are the one making the extraordinary claim, and you are the one with the burden of evidence. Likewise, when someone claims that Jesus actually existed, I want to see some evidence.
We have writings of all sorts of fantastic people -- Jesus, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter just to name a few. There are far more primary writings about Harry Potter than there are Jesus, but nobody believes that Harry Potter really exists. So why the special treatment for Jesus? Why do you believe in him just because there are a few millenia-old parchments that mention him?
There is essentially no evidence in favor of the historical existence of Jesus. The gospels were written long after his death, by unknown authors (certainly not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and the writing style is that of fiction. They reveal events that take place when Jesus was alone, or detail his thoughts, in exactly the same way that modern fiction writers do. No contemporary historians (of which there were many) record Jesus' existence, and they would have had his fame been as great as described in the Gospels. Pontius Pilate's writings do not mention him. There are no Roman records of Jesus being executed. Of all of the miraculous events that supposedly occurred during Jesus' life, some of which would have been visible the world over, not a single contempory account exists.
So let me ask you this: why should I believe in Jesus? Why should I believe in him, or Achilles, or Hercules, any more than I do in Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, or unicorns, or leprechauns?
In fact, it's interesting that you actually believe in Achilles, since he's the most obviously fictional of the characters I first mentioned. The description of Achilles occurs in an ancient work of fiction -- why do you believe he exists, when (I presume) you don't believe that characters described in modern-day fiction exist?
He's not talking about changing the odds, he's talking about changing the outcome.
Use your coinflip example. There's a 50% chance you get heads on every flip. That means there is some probability (you're perfectly capable of doing this math yourself) that after a given number of flips you'll have had 75% heads. You can just keep flipping until that's the case, and then stop.
Probability is apparently very difficult for some people to understand, and that's why Las Vegas continues to rake in the cash. Your math is faulty. The actual result is as follows:
On the first birth, 50% of the population (500) have a girl and stop. The other 500 have a boy and keep going. We now have 500 girls and 500 boys, and only 500 families are still having children.
On the second birth, 50% of the remaining 500 couples have a girl and stop. The other 50% have a boy and keep going. We now have 750 boys and 750 girls, and only 250 families are still trying.
On the third birth, 50% of the remaining 250 families have a girl and stop. The other 50% have a boy and keep going. We now have 875 boys and 875 girls, and 125 families are still trying.
You could keep going as long as you like, and you'd always end up with an expected equal number of boys and girls. If it were otherwise, not only could you easily win any game in Vegas, but the entire science of statistics would be shot to hell.
Of course the inherent randomness allows for odd results -- it's certainly possible for every single couple to have a girl on the first try. But such results would be very very very unlikely, and so we can safely assume that over a large number of trials, the expected results and actual results will match very closely. If you flipped a coin half a million times and got 70% heads, it's time to assume that the coin isn't fair.
It is easy to see how this would lead to more BOYS or GIRLS in each respective case (on average).
Not so. Assuming you have a 50-50 chance of it being a boy or a girl, you will end up with 50% boys and 50% girls no matter what contortions you go through to try to influence the outcome.
Look at it another way: pretend these are coin flips rather than childbirths. Your suggestion (that you can alter the odds by when you choose to stop trying) is equivalent to saying that you can bias to heads or tails by deciding when you stop flipping the coin. And, of course, that isn't true -- no matter how many trials you perform or in what order, a fair coin will (on average) deliver 50% heads and 50% tails. One more 50-50 flip won't in any way alter the expected outcome.
It's exactly the same way with childbirth. The first child (we would expect) would be 50% likely to be a boy. The second would be 50% likely to be a boy. The third would be 50% likely to be a boy, and so on ad infinitum. Adding another trial (childbirth) onto the end of the sequence does not change the odds, and on average you would end up with 50% boys and 50% girls.
Of course, this research shows that that naive assumption isn't true, and apparently something is altering the odds. We just don't yet know what.
(And, amusingly enough, I'm to find out my baby's gender in two days. Evidently it's more likely to be a boy...)
So your opinion is that psychics and two-thousand-year-old mythological characters better understand the nature of consciousness than modern neuroscientists?
Pray tell, what great scientific achievements did Edgar Cayce contribute to the world? I'll even let all of his missed and failed predictions, such as his belief that we would discover the death-ray used in Atlantis back in 1958, slide. I just want to know how he contributed to our understanding of consciousness.
As for Jesus, he was a fictional character. There is no more reason to believe that Jesus really existed than that Zeus, Achilles, or Hercules really existed. On top of that, none of the sayings attributed to him in any way contribute to our understanding of consciousness.
Psychics and fictional characters didn't invent the light bulb or the rocket ship. They aren't going to decipher the mysteries of the conscious mind either. We got to where we are today because of science, not religion.
The specific legal test in the case of trademark suits is "consumer confusion". In other words, if the mark is used in such a way that ordinary consumers could be confused into thinking that Tiger OS and TigerDirect were somehow associated, it would be ruled as an infringement.
To give a specific example, there is nothing wrong with a guy named Bob McDonald naming his company "McDonald's Auto Repair". But if he uses yellow text in a style similar to McDonald's restaurant, he's potentially infringing. If he adds a symbol that looks like the Golden Arches, he's definitely infringing, as upon seeing his shop you would very likely find yourself thinking "Huh? When did McDonald's (the restaurant) get into the auto repair business?". Depending on usage, a trademark can be infringing in completely different markets (auto repair vs. restaurant), or non-infringing even in very similar markets (operating system vs. computer store).
So, in this case the question is whether a consumer would erroneously assume that there was some association between Tiger the OS and TigerDirect the store.
In my opinion, not a frickin' chance. It's an attempt at extortion, as others have already pointed out, and will very probably be defeated in court. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Apple finds itself in a trademark battle -- they were sued by Apple Records, and (obviously) won.
Good point. I am not a cryptologist, but as an amateur I figured that it would be simple enough to keep all software that could be easily cracked on the server side, safe from attacks. Thats just me, though, I'm sure the people who design these systems know better.
You're mostly correct. There is absolutely no reason for ordinary users to be able to read the/etc/passwd file or other such hashed password files, so on properly-configured machines you can't apply that particular attack.
The public key problem, though, is unsolvable. By their very nature they require giving you the public key, and the public key + massive amounts of computational power == private key. They rely on the fact that massive amounts of computational power aren't readily available, but quantum computers will take care of that little wrinkle.
I can't wait to be able to start signing software using, say, Microsoft's private key;-).
I don't see how it could crack into a computer any faster than a modern computer, since the number of times you are allowed to try and crack a machine is based on the speed of the machine being cracked, isn't it?
Not always. For instance if you have access to the/etc/passwd file, all you have to do is find a password which hashes to the same value as the entry in the passwd file, and you can do that on an entirely different machine.
Public key algorithms are also vulnerable, as the private key can be likewise be found without talking to the target computer at all. I'm sure many other such systems are vulnerable.
Furthermore, shadows (absence of light, or the process of 'shutting off' of a light source) absolutely follow the rules of light travel and are not known to ever, even trivially, have traveled faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum).
I don't think you understood the parent poster's point, as this is incorrect. Shadows can and do travel faster than the speed of light.
The salient point here is that matter and energy are constrained by the speed of light. But a purely logical entity, such as a spot of light on the ground, is not constrained by such limits.
Suppose I shine a powerful laser beam on a distant body (the moon, say). I can see the spot on the moon where the light is shining due to the reflection. I then sweep the laser beam across the moon as fast as my machinery can do it. The moon has a diameter of 2,159 miles, which is 0.01 light-seconds. So if I sweep the laser across the moon in less than a hundredth of a second, the spot is travelling faster than the speed of light!
Now, of course, nothing is "really" moving faster than the speed of light. The spot of light on the moon is neither matter nor energy -- it's simply a logical entity that we humans talk about for convenience. The light is really travelling from my laser to the moon and back (at the speed of light, of course), not sweeping across the face of the moon.
The exact same principle applies to a shadow. If instead of sweeping a laser across the moon, I sweep an occluding object in front of a light source, the shadow would also move faster than the speed of light. Again, that's possible simply because the term "shadow" is a logical construct, and nothing is really moving faster than the speed of light.
These folks are not being held for "capital crimes", which is a technical definition. In fact, the letter of the law says that we don't have to charge them with anything. The fifth amendment does not come into play. So while your post is well-intentioned, it is not rigorously correct.
It specifically states that no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law.
So by saying the fifth amendmed does not come into play, you are asserting that A) they aren't people, B) they haven't been deprived of liberty, or C) there has been due process of law.
Even if they could keep it clean during construction, how would they keep it from getting contaminated with lighter-than-mercury space dust over time?
The moon's atmosphere is basically hard vacuum. Sure, there are a few air molecules here and there, but certainly nothing that could lift and transport dust particles.
So, short of nearby meteorite impacts kicking up dust and micrometeorites falling to the surface, there really isn't any way for dust to get on the mirror in the first place. And keep in mind that even such dust as would be sent up by the occasional meteorite wouldn't hang around in the air the way it would on Earth, because there isn't any air. It would just trace a parabolic arc and fall straight back down (well, it wouldn't be quite that simple due to the the gases released by the meteorite's own impact, but you get the point).
I very much doubt that the minute quantities of dust that would find their way onto the mirror would present a significant problem.
If you're running the cables long distances (e.g. front projection often needs this), or splitting the signal, etc, then you'll see a difference. Three foot runs directly behind your TV you most likely won't.
Not with a good component video cable. I have an Infocus 7205 projecting onto a 160" screen, with a 30' run between the receiver and projector. A high-end projector, a very large screen, and a long run pretty much make this the worst-case scenario.
I have two DVD players hooked up to this projector, one via component and one via DVI. There is no difference between the two. Absolutely none, at least not that human eyes can distinguish. And I'm married to a professional photographer, so we have very trained (and picky) eyes.
I think most DVDs are only encoded in 480p at best. So component or HDMI are not going to make any difference if the input (the DVD) isn't superb to start with.
The format encoded on DVD is 480i, period. We can derive a 480p signal from most DVDs for the sole reason that most of them are 24 fps film transfers, and there is a particular pattern of fields used to convert 24 progressive frames into 60 interlaced fields. Progressive scan DVD players or TVs detect this (with varying degrees of success) and undo it, ending up with the original 24 progressive frames.
Now, that said, component video or DVI/HDMI still gives a much clearer picture than s-video or composite. I have several high-end displays, including an Infocus 7205 projector with a 160" screen, and I can very easily tell the difference on any of them. S-video just isn't a particularly good standard (and composite is pure unadulterated crap).
I can tell absolutely no difference between component and DVI on my projector (and if I can't tell on a high-end projector with a 160" screen, that pretty much means there is no difference). I had a crappy component video cable hooked up for a while though during an equipment shuffle, and I could tell then. Of course my run is 30 feet long, so the need for good cables is not surprising.
is that three weeks our time or three weeks hurling-through-space time?
The probe isn't moving fast enough for relativity to have a significant impact. The scientists still take it into account, because they are making very sensitive measurements, but to us normal people there is no difference.
Huygens separated from Cassini 22 days ago, I believe.
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Am I the only one confused by the fact that the Gamecube supported HD, but the "next-gen" console does not? That seems like a strange move for Nintendo, IMO.
What are you talking about? The GameCube does not support HD. It, at best, supports 480P -- standard television resolution, but a full 60 frames per second. In order to get this resolution, you must be using component video cables, playing one of the relatively few games that support progressive scan, and hold B at startup (once) to tell the system that you want to switch to progressive scan.
The component video cables are generally only available from Nintendo's web site, and Nintendo eventually stopped putting the component video port on the back of the system -- if you go buy a new GameCube, you will most likely find that it is missing the digital video output port that you would need to access progressive scan in the first place. New GameCubes are limited to 480I.
So, the GameCube most certainly does not support HD. The Revolution won't either, but it will at least require all of its games to provide 480P output. That makes me hopeful that the stupidity of the difficult-to-achieve-and-ultimately-discontinued 480P support present in the GameCube won't be repeated.
If you notice most are "find the best picture" for $0.03. Of course the site rules really slow right now so its not worth your time, but if it ran faster it would be something to do if you could crank through a hundred an hour.
100 images / hour * $0.03 / image == $3.00 / hour.
So, you've just busted your ass to crank through one image every 36 seconds for a solid hour, and you have three dollars to show for it. There are definitely parts of the world where that would be a fantastic income, but my home country isn't one of them.
I accept that we could, in theory, mitigate the cellular damage that leads to aging, and humans could live much longer than they do now. There are, however, two BIG problems, in addition to the overcrowding that everyone else has mentioned.
First is cancer. Cancer is caused by DNA damage which causes cells to begin dividing uncontrollably. Humans, over our mere 100 year lifespan, face a very high risk of dying from cancer. Over a thousand years, it becomes a virtual certainty that at least a handful of your cells would have a very harmful mutation. Unless we also have the technology to periodically "refresh" all the DNA in your body (hint: unlikely), the simple fact is that after a thousand years you would have developed every kind of cancer known to man. I don't believe any medical technology could keep one of us alive that long -- if and when humans manage to extend our lifespans to the thousand year range, we won't be doing it in our current bodies.
Second is psychology. The human mind did not evolve to last a thousand years, and asking it to operate so far outside of its design parameters is bound to have some surprising (and likely unpleasant) effects. In fact, I am very skeptical that anyone could even hold on to sanity for that length of time. We just aren't built for that kind of time scale. We obviously don't know the effects of a truly long life on the human mind, but I just can't imagine an ordinary human lasting for a thousand years without becoming seriously disturbed.
Don't. Or at least, not as resume fodder or in an attempt to make a living. Coders are a dime a dozen these days.
Sure. My team is trying to hire a couple of Java programmers right now. We're talking about a very well-known company (hint: there's a Slashdot category for us), a Silicon Valley office, and a six-figure income.
And we're desperate. We finally (after much searching) managed to find a really great candidate for one of the positions, but the other one remains unfilled. I'd rather leave the position empty than lower my standards enough to pick some of the people we've talked to.
So, I suppose I agree that coders are a dime a dozen if you're looking for an idiot that doesn't even understand the difference between "a == b" and "a.equals(b)", but if you're looking for competent programmers, they're tough to find at any price.
I saw that episode and remember being pissed that they did the experiment wrong and called it busted.
They did not angle each individual mirror at the same spot. They just had a big surface with all the mirrors attached to it on the same plane (which was as worthless as a single small mirror).
Then you weren't paying attention. They made a very big deal of how they were focusing the mirrors on the same point by adjusting each of them individually, and even described it (correctly) as a Fresnel arrangement.
Because this goes against the law of Biogenesis -- the observable fact that all life comes from other life -- abiogenesis is an un-natural force (at least, until the law of Biogenesis is proven wrong).
That is a deeply flawed philosophy.
First, it is an observable fact that abiogenesis happened. Whether you believe that God did it or that unknown natural processes caused it to happen, every rational person will agree that at one point in the past life did not exist and now it does. So your "observable fact" that all life comes from other life is ipso facto false -- we already know that (no matter what your worldview, religious beliefs, or other beliefs may be) that life somehow managed to get created from a previously non-living environment.
The question about abiogenesis is not whether it happened, but how it happened. It's certainly possible that God snapped his fingers and planted some primitive bacteria in the oceans. It's also possible that it happened without the intervention of a deity -- that is, that life arises from non-life quite naturally on its own.
I appeal to Occam's Razor here. It requires less handwaving to say that "an unknown sequence of chemical processes gave rise to life on Earth" than it does to say "there is an invisible, undetectable, super-intelligent, all-powerful being capable of violating the laws of physics that everything else we see is subject to, and this being, for its own inscrutable reasons, created life".
Similarly, we don't know how gravity works. We have absolutely no idea. But I maintain that is easier to believe that "the force of gravity is governed by strict physical laws similar to the laws governing other areas of physics, despite the fact that we have not yet determined those laws" than "invisible fairies enjoy pushing objects together, giving rise to the force we know as gravity".
The only part I don't understand is why the invisible fairy argument sounds stupid to everyone but the invisible man in the sky argument doesn't.
The Christian point of view is that sex is great when you do it the way God designed you to: at the very least, monogamously. Doing it otherwise is like trying to eat vegetables with only your two upper front teeth. It's just not the way you were designed to eat.
Nonsense. Eating vegetables with only your two upper front teeth might be silly, but no Christian is going to claim that doing so will get you sent to hell. But both the Bible and common Christian belief tell us in quite definitive terms that people engaing in, say, gay sex (among other "unnatural" sexual acts) are most definitely going to hell. You can believe that or not, as you choose. But I find the way you're trying to pass it off as quite disingenuous.
Virtually everything humans do is unnatural -- we don't naturally wear clothes, write, fly in airplanes, or live in houses. All of these things are learned and quite definitely unnatural. So, the fact that an act is "unnatural" is meaningless. The Christian opposition to non-monogamous, non-heterosexual, non-vaginal, or non-missionary-position sex has little to do with how natural these acts are. And in fact, missionary position itself is unnatural -- humans naturally have sex the way almost all other mammals do, in doggy style position. If it were natural to have sex in missionary position, the missionaries wouldn't have to preach about it in the first place, because everybody would have been doing it that way already.
On top of that, you appear to blithely agree with the viewpoint that we were "designed" to have sex monogamously (and, presumably, you also mean only heterosexually), which is a point I take exception to. Humans are not by nature monogamous -- our monogamy (or, more often, attempted monogamy) is a societal convention. Throughout human history the arrangement of one man and many wives has been far more common than the modern monogamous relationship. None of the other great apes, nor most mammals in general, are monogamous. Homosexuality is also well-documented in many other animal species and is perfectly natural.
I'd have to say that if God "designed" us to only have monogamous sex between a man and a woman, he did a pretty piss-poor job of it. I find it much easier to believe that we weren't designed at all -- we are animals with more brainpower than any other animal on the planet, and have been able to surpass them as a result. Honestly, what reason is there to believe anything else?
Tone down the frothing-at-the-mouth paranoia a bit, please. I doubt the GP poster was suggesting that the drivers run at ring 0 -- he certainly never suggested such.
/dev anyway.
/dev device hardly equates to proper support via a driver API. I'm beginning to get the impression that most Linux developers really don't see why this was a bad idea from day 1, and that's very unfortunate.
Instead he was just pointing out the pure stupidity of the fact that X Windows itself must handle drivers for video, sound, mouse, and so forth, rather than relying on services exposed by an underlying layer of the OS (which does not have to be running in ring 0). If the OS handled these devices, AS IT SHOULD, any program could make use of them without having to go through X.
Where do you get the notion that the X server takes care of all the input devices? The kernel already provides access to them through
Raw access to a
It's a matter of what's good enough.
At 30GB, you have enough for over three hours of HDTV, which means most movies, even with special features, won't need any more than that. Why use a more expensive format when you'll hardly ever need the extra space?
I agree, and that's why not all blu-ray disks will be 50GB. A 25GB single-layer blu-ray disk holds almost as much as a 30GB dual-layer HD-DVD disk. Fitting the entire movie on a single layer both eliminates layer transition pauses and reduces the cost of the disk. Even a 50GB dual-layer disk will generally only use one layer for the movie itself (the rest for extras) and so not require a mid-movie layer transition.
On top of that, it's not clear that a single-layer blu-ray disk will be more expensive to manufacture than a dual-layer HD-DVD disk. The HD-DVD group conveniently ignores the fact that their opposition doesn't have to use two layers to store a full-length movie.
The bricks and 2x4s were stolen from a nearby house that was under construction. He knows this because he watched the guy do it. Just because a partially-completed house has a pile of bricks and lumber in front of it doesn't mean "Hey guys, free building materials!"
The brick mailbox is a poorly-constructed eyesore. Did you take a look at the pictures? Things like that really do affect property values in otherwise decent neighborhoods. And the fact that much of the stuff is in the back yard doesn't necessarily mean much -- my house's back yard is visible from the street.
This is a rather odd viewpoint you have.
While I don't consider myself religious by any means, I don't see any reason to disbelieve that Jesus, Achilles, or Buddha were real people. While there's not enough evidence to give me overwhelming reason to believe in their existence, as there is with, for example, Napoleon, there's not enough evidence to disbelieve them either.
I consider your viewpoint quite a bit more odd. You seem to suggest that I need evidence to disbelieve something, which is not so. If you tell me that a leprechaun lives in your back yard, I don't need to go hunt for evidence in order to not believe you. You are the one making the extraordinary claim, and you are the one with the burden of evidence. Likewise, when someone claims that Jesus actually existed, I want to see some evidence.
We have writings of all sorts of fantastic people -- Jesus, Sherlock Holmes, and Harry Potter just to name a few. There are far more primary writings about Harry Potter than there are Jesus, but nobody believes that Harry Potter really exists. So why the special treatment for Jesus? Why do you believe in him just because there are a few millenia-old parchments that mention him?
There is essentially no evidence in favor of the historical existence of Jesus. The gospels were written long after his death, by unknown authors (certainly not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and the writing style is that of fiction. They reveal events that take place when Jesus was alone, or detail his thoughts, in exactly the same way that modern fiction writers do. No contemporary historians (of which there were many) record Jesus' existence, and they would have had his fame been as great as described in the Gospels. Pontius Pilate's writings do not mention him. There are no Roman records of Jesus being executed. Of all of the miraculous events that supposedly occurred during Jesus' life, some of which would have been visible the world over, not a single contempory account exists.
So let me ask you this: why should I believe in Jesus? Why should I believe in him, or Achilles, or Hercules, any more than I do in Harry Potter or Sherlock Holmes, or unicorns, or leprechauns?
In fact, it's interesting that you actually believe in Achilles, since he's the most obviously fictional of the characters I first mentioned. The description of Achilles occurs in an ancient work of fiction -- why do you believe he exists, when (I presume) you don't believe that characters described in modern-day fiction exist?
He's not talking about changing the odds, he's talking about changing the outcome.
Use your coinflip example. There's a 50% chance you get heads on every flip. That means there is some probability (you're perfectly capable of doing this math yourself) that after a given number of flips you'll have had 75% heads. You can just keep flipping until that's the case, and then stop.
Probability is apparently very difficult for some people to understand, and that's why Las Vegas continues to rake in the cash. Your math is faulty. The actual result is as follows:
On the first birth, 50% of the population (500) have a girl and stop. The other 500 have a boy and keep going. We now have 500 girls and 500 boys, and only 500 families are still having children.
On the second birth, 50% of the remaining 500 couples have a girl and stop. The other 50% have a boy and keep going. We now have 750 boys and 750 girls, and only 250 families are still trying.
On the third birth, 50% of the remaining 250 families have a girl and stop. The other 50% have a boy and keep going. We now have 875 boys and 875 girls, and 125 families are still trying.
You could keep going as long as you like, and you'd always end up with an expected equal number of boys and girls. If it were otherwise, not only could you easily win any game in Vegas, but the entire science of statistics would be shot to hell.
Of course the inherent randomness allows for odd results -- it's certainly possible for every single couple to have a girl on the first try. But such results would be very very very unlikely, and so we can safely assume that over a large number of trials, the expected results and actual results will match very closely. If you flipped a coin half a million times and got 70% heads, it's time to assume that the coin isn't fair.
It is easy to see how this would lead to more BOYS or GIRLS in each respective case (on average).
Not so. Assuming you have a 50-50 chance of it being a boy or a girl, you will end up with 50% boys and 50% girls no matter what contortions you go through to try to influence the outcome.
Look at it another way: pretend these are coin flips rather than childbirths. Your suggestion (that you can alter the odds by when you choose to stop trying) is equivalent to saying that you can bias to heads or tails by deciding when you stop flipping the coin. And, of course, that isn't true -- no matter how many trials you perform or in what order, a fair coin will (on average) deliver 50% heads and 50% tails. One more 50-50 flip won't in any way alter the expected outcome.
It's exactly the same way with childbirth. The first child (we would expect) would be 50% likely to be a boy. The second would be 50% likely to be a boy. The third would be 50% likely to be a boy, and so on ad infinitum. Adding another trial (childbirth) onto the end of the sequence does not change the odds, and on average you would end up with 50% boys and 50% girls.
Of course, this research shows that that naive assumption isn't true, and apparently something is altering the odds. We just don't yet know what.
(And, amusingly enough, I'm to find out my baby's gender in two days. Evidently it's more likely to be a boy...)
So your opinion is that psychics and two-thousand-year-old mythological characters better understand the nature of consciousness than modern neuroscientists?
Pray tell, what great scientific achievements did Edgar Cayce contribute to the world? I'll even let all of his missed and failed predictions, such as his belief that we would discover the death-ray used in Atlantis back in 1958, slide. I just want to know how he contributed to our understanding of consciousness.
As for Jesus, he was a fictional character. There is no more reason to believe that Jesus really existed than that Zeus, Achilles, or Hercules really existed. On top of that, none of the sayings attributed to him in any way contribute to our understanding of consciousness.
Psychics and fictional characters didn't invent the light bulb or the rocket ship. They aren't going to decipher the mysteries of the conscious mind either. We got to where we are today because of science, not religion.
I stand corrected. You are absolutely right.
The specific legal test in the case of trademark suits is "consumer confusion". In other words, if the mark is used in such a way that ordinary consumers could be confused into thinking that Tiger OS and TigerDirect were somehow associated, it would be ruled as an infringement.
To give a specific example, there is nothing wrong with a guy named Bob McDonald naming his company "McDonald's Auto Repair". But if he uses yellow text in a style similar to McDonald's restaurant, he's potentially infringing. If he adds a symbol that looks like the Golden Arches, he's definitely infringing, as upon seeing his shop you would very likely find yourself thinking "Huh? When did McDonald's (the restaurant) get into the auto repair business?". Depending on usage, a trademark can be infringing in completely different markets (auto repair vs. restaurant), or non-infringing even in very similar markets (operating system vs. computer store).
So, in this case the question is whether a consumer would erroneously assume that there was some association between Tiger the OS and TigerDirect the store.
In my opinion, not a frickin' chance. It's an attempt at extortion, as others have already pointed out, and will very probably be defeated in court. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Apple finds itself in a trademark battle -- they were sued by Apple Records, and (obviously) won.
Good point. I am not a cryptologist, but as an amateur I figured that it would be simple enough to keep all software that could be easily cracked on the server side, safe from attacks. Thats just me, though, I'm sure the people who design these systems know better.
/etc/passwd file or other such hashed password files, so on properly-configured machines you can't apply that particular attack.
;-).
You're mostly correct. There is absolutely no reason for ordinary users to be able to read the
The public key problem, though, is unsolvable. By their very nature they require giving you the public key, and the public key + massive amounts of computational power == private key. They rely on the fact that massive amounts of computational power aren't readily available, but quantum computers will take care of that little wrinkle.
I can't wait to be able to start signing software using, say, Microsoft's private key
I don't see how it could crack into a computer any faster than a modern computer, since the number of times you are allowed to try and crack a machine is based on the speed of the machine being cracked, isn't it?
/etc/passwd file, all you have to do is find a password which hashes to the same value as the entry in the passwd file, and you can do that on an entirely different machine.
Not always. For instance if you have access to the
Public key algorithms are also vulnerable, as the private key can be likewise be found without talking to the target computer at all. I'm sure many other such systems are vulnerable.
Furthermore, shadows (absence of light, or the process of 'shutting off' of a light source) absolutely follow the rules of light travel and are not known to ever, even trivially, have traveled faster than the speed of light (in a vacuum).
I don't think you understood the parent poster's point, as this is incorrect. Shadows can and do travel faster than the speed of light.
The salient point here is that matter and energy are constrained by the speed of light. But a purely logical entity, such as a spot of light on the ground, is not constrained by such limits.
Suppose I shine a powerful laser beam on a distant body (the moon, say). I can see the spot on the moon where the light is shining due to the reflection. I then sweep the laser beam across the moon as fast as my machinery can do it. The moon has a diameter of 2,159 miles, which is 0.01 light-seconds. So if I sweep the laser across the moon in less than a hundredth of a second, the spot is travelling faster than the speed of light!
Now, of course, nothing is "really" moving faster than the speed of light. The spot of light on the moon is neither matter nor energy -- it's simply a logical entity that we humans talk about for convenience. The light is really travelling from my laser to the moon and back (at the speed of light, of course), not sweeping across the face of the moon.
The exact same principle applies to a shadow. If instead of sweeping a laser across the moon, I sweep an occluding object in front of a light source, the shadow would also move faster than the speed of light. Again, that's possible simply because the term "shadow" is a logical construct, and nothing is really moving faster than the speed of light.
These folks are not being held for "capital crimes", which is a technical definition. In fact, the letter of the law says that we don't have to charge them with anything. The fifth amendment does not come into play. So while your post is well-intentioned, it is not rigorously correct.
It specifically states that no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law.
So by saying the fifth amendmed does not come into play, you are asserting that A) they aren't people, B) they haven't been deprived of liberty, or C) there has been due process of law.
So, which is it?
Even if they could keep it clean during construction, how would they keep it from getting contaminated with lighter-than-mercury space dust over time?
The moon's atmosphere is basically hard vacuum. Sure, there are a few air molecules here and there, but certainly nothing that could lift and transport dust particles.
So, short of nearby meteorite impacts kicking up dust and micrometeorites falling to the surface, there really isn't any way for dust to get on the mirror in the first place. And keep in mind that even such dust as would be sent up by the occasional meteorite wouldn't hang around in the air the way it would on Earth, because there isn't any air. It would just trace a parabolic arc and fall straight back down (well, it wouldn't be quite that simple due to the the gases released by the meteorite's own impact, but you get the point).
I very much doubt that the minute quantities of dust that would find their way onto the mirror would present a significant problem.
If you're running the cables long distances (e.g. front projection often needs this), or splitting the signal, etc, then you'll see a difference. Three foot runs directly behind your TV you most likely won't.
Not with a good component video cable. I have an Infocus 7205 projecting onto a 160" screen, with a 30' run between the receiver and projector. A high-end projector, a very large screen, and a long run pretty much make this the worst-case scenario.
I have two DVD players hooked up to this projector, one via component and one via DVI. There is no difference between the two. Absolutely none, at least not that human eyes can distinguish. And I'm married to a professional photographer, so we have very trained (and picky) eyes.
I think most DVDs are only encoded in 480p at best. So component or HDMI are not going to make any difference if the input (the DVD) isn't superb to start with.
The format encoded on DVD is 480i, period. We can derive a 480p signal from most DVDs for the sole reason that most of them are 24 fps film transfers, and there is a particular pattern of fields used to convert 24 progressive frames into 60 interlaced fields. Progressive scan DVD players or TVs detect this (with varying degrees of success) and undo it, ending up with the original 24 progressive frames.
Now, that said, component video or DVI/HDMI still gives a much clearer picture than s-video or composite. I have several high-end displays, including an Infocus 7205 projector with a 160" screen, and I can very easily tell the difference on any of them. S-video just isn't a particularly good standard (and composite is pure unadulterated crap).
I can tell absolutely no difference between component and DVI on my projector (and if I can't tell on a high-end projector with a 160" screen, that pretty much means there is no difference). I had a crappy component video cable hooked up for a while though during an equipment shuffle, and I could tell then. Of course my run is 30 feet long, so the need for good cables is not surprising.
Quote from Nasa's Huygens site (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/subsystems- huygens.cfm):
Much of the battery power will be used to power the timer for the 22 days of "coasting" to Titan.
So, while I agree with you that a timer should essentially be "free", apparently there's more to it than that.
is that three weeks our time or three weeks hurling-through-space time?
The probe isn't moving fast enough for relativity to have a significant impact. The scientists still take it into account, because they are making very sensitive measurements, but to us normal people there is no difference.
Huygens separated from Cassini 22 days ago, I believe.