Why would you think it would be radioactive? The vast majority of meteorites aren't.
And it's not surprising that her leg wasn't reduced to "smoldering remains." No doubt the meteorite did get quite hot on the upper atmosphere, but by the time it got nearer ground level (and went through England's usual cloud cover;) it had shed quite a bit of both thermal and kinetic energy. And finally -- I've found meteorites that looked very much like the one in the picture, and one of the surprising things about them is how light they are. They're not solid chunks of rock; their outer surfaces are a kind of frozen rock foam, presumably because of what happens to them on their way through the atmosphere. So I have no problem believing that one of these could hit someone on the foot without doing serious damage.
Parent isn't a troll, just doesn't quite have the facts straight.;)
More accurate to say that AIDS is a disease resulting from HIV infection. HIV is itself a virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) which attacks the key cells of the human immune system, leaving it open to all kinds of infection -- viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitical. Drugs which fight these opportunistic infections can (and do) help AIDS patients quite a bit, but it is indeed possible -- and more useful in the long run -- to develop drugs which fight HIV directly. We have plenty such drugs, but none of them work as well or as long as they should. This may be the best of the bunch, if we're lucky.
[rant] I'm consistently amazed at the basic lack of understanding of infectious disease displayed any time a subject like this comes up. People seem to have a quasi-magical conception of pathogens roughly equivalent to believing that stars are holes poked in the roof of the sky, through which the Divine Light shines through. [/rant]
Antiviral medications do exist. None of them are as effective against viruses ([ob] no such word as "viri" [/ob]) as the best antibiotics are against bacteria, but they're out there and getting better. I think that what you're thinking of is vaccines, which do "train" the body to detect and resist infection (viral, bacterial, or other) and can be very effective -- depending on the target. Smallpox and polio, fortunately, turn out to be fairly easy to make vaccines for. HIV, unfortunately, doesn't.
Um... we know perfectly well what they do: make copies of themselves. Now, the circumstances under which they make copies of themselves, and close analogues of themselves in RNA, is in most cases still an open question -- but simulations like this are an important step on the road to figuring that out. Of course it's trial and error; that's how science works.
It's nice that serious scientists are willing to spend time researching things that have very little chance of actually working. Who knows what new insights will come out of this..
Yes, like semiconductors. They have very little chance of actually working. Why aren't those serious scientists spending time on more important things, like vacuum tubes? Oh, well, maybe some theoretical insight will come out of it, but nothing useful. Certainly not in my lifetime.
I believe the system works, despite its flaws, when it is used the way it was designed. In the case of the government, we have a perfectly good design: the Constitution. The problem is that the current government is ignoring that design. The "valid alternative" you're looking for is simple: follow the design (which, BTW, was laid down by people with much more historical knowledge, and in some cases direct personal experience with tyranny, than the vast majority of modern Americans.) Why is this so hard to understand?
When Slashdot moderators have the power to drag you away from your home in the middle of the night and hold you incommunicado in an offshore prison, you can start whining.
You're right, though, in one respect: you weren't trolling. That's why we really need a new moderation category -- "-1, Ignorant."
The only thing that scares me more than the ease with which the government tramples on civil liberties in the name of "the War on ___"...
... is how many people there are like you out there who are willing to let them. You get the government you deserve, indeed... unfortunately, if there are enough of you (apparently, according to the Supreme Court, you don't even have to be a majority) the rest of us get the government you deserve, too.
The United States government is currently holding American citizens indefinitely, without trial, without attorney, without even informing them of the charges against them. If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, then you have no knowledge of history, at all.
I particularly like the part where you accuse others of naivete... [snort]
No, they do make the hypospray-type things, or at least they used to; we used them to administer mass immunizations when I was a medic in the Air Force, because you can inject a lot of people a lot faster with them than you can with a needle. You know why they never caught on for general use? Because one thing Star Trek never showed you is how much the damn things hurt. I mean, a hell of a lot worse than a needle. And they leave nasty welts. And if you twitch, even a bit, while the injection is being given, you'll end up with a deep cut -- again, much worse than what you'd get from a needle. No fun at all.
That's the way it's supposed to be. After carefully observing the behavior of ASP pages on IEWin vs. every other browser/OS combination, I'm not convinced that that's the way it is. I'm not entirely kidding about the idea of client sniffing.
Old-school Perl CGI is relatively slow, yes, though an awful lot of that has to do with the quality of the back-end code. But mod_perl is unbelievably fast -- and I say that as someone who makes his living developing and maintaining a database with a Web interface written in PHP, so it's not like I'm prejudiced in Perl's favor. "Serious webmasters" choose whichever tool gets the job done best, and if they're also good programmers, they write good, clean code that executes fast enough that the client doesn't have to care what's driving the site.
That being said (anti-flamebait!) I'm amazed you mentioned ASP, not because of of its flamebait value, but because, um, it sucks. I swear to God, there must be "if(client != "IEWin"){slow_down(); crash_unpredictably();}" in the source somewhere. Even these days, old-school Perl CGI is often the right tool for the job. Unless you're developing 100% for IEWin, IIS, and MS-SQL, ASP never is.
You know, at this point, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Slashdot coverage actually does register on marketing radar. Sure, the number of Slashdotters is pretty small compared to the total target market of the PS3 (or any other major piece of geekware) but we're early adopters, a big enough crowd to provide a spike in early sales figures; we're also, more importantly, the sorts of people others come to for advice on what geekware to buy.
Are you saying that instead of having one set of rules, we should have several that depend on the size of your organization and the amount of power it wields?
Yes.
If my 85-year-old grandmother walks up to you and punches you in the face, you're going to be annoyed, but you'd have an awfully hard time getting any court to send her to jail for it, or even make her pay a fine. If Mike Tyson walks up to you and punches you in the face, you'll be lucky to survive the experience, and he will almost certainly go (back) to prison (where he belongs.) This is not hard to understand.
without these features I don't call MySQL database
[sigh] Any method of storing data electronically is a database. MySQL is a database, Oracle is a database, PostgreSQL is a database, Access (God help me) is a database, a flat text file is a database, a bunch of random text files scattered all over your hard drive that you have to search with grep constitute a database.
Now, if you want to argue that MySQL isn't a very good database, that's your business. (I disagree; I make my living as a MySQL DBA, and love it. But you have a right to your own opinion.) But saying that it's not a database because it doesn't have feature x is like saying that a car without cruise control isn't a car.
Yawn. The states that seceded did so because they thought (rightly or wrongly) that Lincoln would be an abolitionist President. The purpose of the fighting for the North may have been to preserve the Union, but the cause of the war was Southern secession over the issue of slavery. Generations of Confederate apologists have managed to introduce some doubt on this issue into people's minds, but a reading of the letters and speeches of the time makes it clear that if not for slavery (and abolitionism, to be sure) the secession, and thus the war, would not have happened.
What I meant was... that "in the zone" feeling generally only occurs in medicine when you're overwhelmed with critical patients, and not always even then. So it's a good thing when circumstances are such that you don't feel that way.
It really is a matter of practice. Running -- I've been running three days a week for about ten years now, I know my own physiological and psychological responses to the exercise very well, and that means I can get the "runner's high" very quickly and keep it going throughout the run. On the other hand, the sense of everything flowing just right in the ER was something I experienced maybe once or twice a year, because the kind of shifts required to get that feeling didn't happen very often. Which is a good thing.
Some stimulant drugs (coke, meth) do seem to have a very similar though not identical effect, which is a big part of the reason people take them -- all the fun, no effort.
But yes, I strongly suspect that just about any activity you enjoy, practice a lot, and are good at can put you "in the zone." I've experienced it while running, while coding, while writing, while having sex (okay, lately I haven't been practicing that last as much as I'd like, though things do show signs of turning around soon...;) Hell, I used to sometimes get that same feeling back when I was an ER medic -- a busy night shift in the ER is no one's idea of fun, but there's a definite flow to it, a rhythm, and when you really get into it, when you're triaging mass casualty victims or running a code and everything is going just right, it's a powerful experience.
There were several moon missions. Apollo 11 was the first one to land; all the subseequent ones (the program ended with Apollo 17) also landed on the moon, except for Apollo 13, which suffered a meteor collision enroute and had to return to Earth. Check out this site:
This is a wonderfully humanitarian vision, most likely spoken by someone who has never been near a "battlefield" such as Beirut or Kosovo or Baghdad or anywhere else Big Daddy Warbucks has spent his excess ordinance. Be thankful that the current "battlefield" is not on your doorstep, as it is for so many peoples of the world (but that's why this is much ado about nothing for you, right?)
Actually, I was a medic in Desert Storm, and took care of wounded of all nationalities, including a lot of Iraqis (a lot more Iraqis than anyone else, actually, toward the end of the war.) So I have an up-close and personal view of the effects of modern weaponry that most people don't. And yes, I am thankful that the battlefield isn't on my doorstep.
War is bad. You won't get any argument on that subject from me. But sometimes it's also inevitable (and no, I don't put Desert Storm into that category; that war, like the current one, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Bush Family Marketing, Inc.) If we're going to fight -- and we are, as depressing as it may be; millennia of human history argue that war isn't going away any time soon -- then arguing about whether being blinded by a laser is less humane than being torn apart by shrapnel seems kind of silly, is all.
... as they like to say, meaning, "Stuff that the weapon did other than what it was supposed to do." Like the article says, this isn't a blinding weapon; it's an honest-to-god laser gun (as opposed to the laser targeting systems we've been using for quite some time.) It's designed to blow up or disable vehicles, artillery emplacements, etc. Might people nearby be blinded by reflections? Sure, and people nearby when a bomb hits might be blinded (or worse) by shrapnel. I think this is much ado about nothing, to tell the truth. Battlefields are dangerous places. No amount of tech is going to change that.
"Real chemistry" hasn't just been about "test tubes and stirring rods and funny smells" for a generation. Chemists (especially, but not exclusively, organic chemists) have been relying on automated analysis for years to do serious work. We can analyze complex compunds now in hours which once would have taken months or years, or have been simply impossible to analyze. Computational modeling of the formation and interaction of complex compounds is the next logical step.
Ah, hell with it. You're clearly a chemical Luddite.
Tony Blair is a progressive, you know. Oh, he's a slick politico, of course, but he's managed to reach the top without completely selling his soul, which is an impressive achievement. And now that Jack Straw has been demoted, the UK government in general is a lot less scary and a lot more likeable.
I remember when Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder seemed like the leaders of a real, lasting change in governance of the Western world. Of course, Crown Prince George's handlers managed to derail the process in the US, and it's hard to tell how German politics are going at the moment, but at least the UK is still going strong.
Except that the iMac (CRT and LCD) and eMac (CRT only) are all-in-one machines. Sure, you could buy an LCD iMac and plug in a CRT, or an eMac and plug in an LCD, but why would you want to? If you want a dual-monitor Mac, it seems to me you're much more likely to get a regular Power Mac and plug in two monitors (your choice of manufacturers, styles, and sizes.) Offering people a wide choice of displays _in all-in-one machines_ is what Apple is doing, and IMO that makes a lot of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you think it would be radioactive? The vast majority of meteorites aren't.
;) it had shed quite a bit of both thermal and kinetic energy. And finally -- I've found meteorites that looked very much like the one in the picture, and one of the surprising things about them is how light they are. They're not solid chunks of rock; their outer surfaces are a kind of frozen rock foam, presumably because of what happens to them on their way through the atmosphere. So I have no problem believing that one of these could hit someone on the foot without doing serious damage.
And it's not surprising that her leg wasn't reduced to "smoldering remains." No doubt the meteorite did get quite hot on the upper atmosphere, but by the time it got nearer ground level (and went through England's usual cloud cover
Parent isn't a troll, just doesn't quite have the facts straight. ;)
More accurate to say that AIDS is a disease resulting from HIV infection. HIV is itself a virus (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) which attacks the key cells of the human immune system, leaving it open to all kinds of infection -- viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitical. Drugs which fight these opportunistic infections can (and do) help AIDS patients quite a bit, but it is indeed possible -- and more useful in the long run -- to develop drugs which fight HIV directly. We have plenty such drugs, but none of them work as well or as long as they should. This may be the best of the bunch, if we're lucky.
[rant] I'm consistently amazed at the basic lack of understanding of infectious disease displayed any time a subject like this comes up. People seem to have a quasi-magical conception of pathogens roughly equivalent to believing that stars are holes poked in the roof of the sky, through which the Divine Light shines through. [/rant]
Antiviral medications do exist. None of them are as effective against viruses ([ob] no such word as "viri" [/ob]) as the best antibiotics are against bacteria, but they're out there and getting better. I think that what you're thinking of is vaccines, which do "train" the body to detect and resist infection (viral, bacterial, or other) and can be very effective -- depending on the target. Smallpox and polio, fortunately, turn out to be fairly easy to make vaccines for. HIV, unfortunately, doesn't.
Um ... we know perfectly well what they do: make copies of themselves. Now, the circumstances under which they make copies of themselves, and close analogues of themselves in RNA, is in most cases still an open question -- but simulations like this are an important step on the road to figuring that out. Of course it's trial and error; that's how science works.
I believe the system works, despite its flaws, when it is used the way it was designed. In the case of the government, we have a perfectly good design: the Constitution. The problem is that the current government is ignoring that design. The "valid alternative" you're looking for is simple: follow the design (which, BTW, was laid down by people with much more historical knowledge, and in some cases direct personal experience with tyranny, than the vast majority of modern Americans.) Why is this so hard to understand?
When Slashdot moderators have the power to drag you away from your home in the middle of the night and hold you incommunicado in an offshore prison, you can start whining.
You're right, though, in one respect: you weren't trolling. That's why we really need a new moderation category -- "-1, Ignorant."
The only thing that scares me more than the ease with which the government tramples on civil liberties in the name of "the War on ___" ...
... is how many people there are like you out there who are willing to let them. You get the government you deserve, indeed ... unfortunately, if there are enough of you (apparently, according to the Supreme Court, you don't even have to be a majority) the rest of us get the government you deserve, too.
The United States government is currently holding American citizens indefinitely, without trial, without attorney, without even informing them of the charges against them. If this doesn't scare the hell out of you, then you have no knowledge of history, at all.
I particularly like the part where you accuse others of naivete ... [snort]
No, they do make the hypospray-type things, or at least they used to; we used them to administer mass immunizations when I was a medic in the Air Force, because you can inject a lot of people a lot faster with them than you can with a needle. You know why they never caught on for general use? Because one thing Star Trek never showed you is how much the damn things hurt. I mean, a hell of a lot worse than a needle. And they leave nasty welts. And if you twitch, even a bit, while the injection is being given, you'll end up with a deep cut -- again, much worse than what you'd get from a needle. No fun at all.
That's the way it's supposed to be. After carefully observing the behavior of ASP pages on IEWin vs. every other browser/OS combination, I'm not convinced that that's the way it is. I'm not entirely kidding about the idea of client sniffing.
Old-school Perl CGI is relatively slow, yes, though an awful lot of that has to do with the quality of the back-end code. But mod_perl is unbelievably fast -- and I say that as someone who makes his living developing and maintaining a database with a Web interface written in PHP, so it's not like I'm prejudiced in Perl's favor. "Serious webmasters" choose whichever tool gets the job done best, and if they're also good programmers, they write good, clean code that executes fast enough that the client doesn't have to care what's driving the site.
That being said (anti-flamebait!) I'm amazed you mentioned ASP, not because of of its flamebait value, but because, um, it sucks. I swear to God, there must be "if(client != "IEWin"){slow_down(); crash_unpredictably();}" in the source somewhere. Even these days, old-school Perl CGI is often the right tool for the job. Unless you're developing 100% for IEWin, IIS, and MS-SQL, ASP never is.
You know, at this point, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Slashdot coverage actually does register on marketing radar. Sure, the number of Slashdotters is pretty small compared to the total target market of the PS3 (or any other major piece of geekware) but we're early adopters, a big enough crowd to provide a spike in early sales figures; we're also, more importantly, the sorts of people others come to for advice on what geekware to buy.
If my 85-year-old grandmother walks up to you and punches you in the face, you're going to be annoyed, but you'd have an awfully hard time getting any court to send her to jail for it, or even make her pay a fine. If Mike Tyson walks up to you and punches you in the face, you'll be lucky to survive the experience, and he will almost certainly go (back) to prison (where he belongs.) This is not hard to understand.
Now, if you want to argue that MySQL isn't a very good database, that's your business. (I disagree; I make my living as a MySQL DBA, and love it. But you have a right to your own opinion.) But saying that it's not a database because it doesn't have feature x is like saying that a car without cruise control isn't a car.
Yawn. The states that seceded did so because they thought (rightly or wrongly) that Lincoln would be an abolitionist President. The purpose of the fighting for the North may have been to preserve the Union, but the cause of the war was Southern secession over the issue of slavery. Generations of Confederate apologists have managed to introduce some doubt on this issue into people's minds, but a reading of the letters and speeches of the time makes it clear that if not for slavery (and abolitionism, to be sure) the secession, and thus the war, would not have happened.
What I meant was ... that "in the zone" feeling generally only occurs in medicine when you're overwhelmed with critical patients, and not always even then. So it's a good thing when circumstances are such that you don't feel that way.
:)
It really is a matter of practice. Running -- I've been running three days a week for about ten years now, I know my own physiological and psychological responses to the exercise very well, and that means I can get the "runner's high" very quickly and keep it going throughout the run. On the other hand, the sense of everything flowing just right in the ER was something I experienced maybe once or twice a year, because the kind of shifts required to get that feeling didn't happen very often. Which is a good thing.
Some stimulant drugs (coke, meth) do seem to have a very similar though not identical effect, which is a big part of the reason people take them -- all the fun, no effort.
... ;) Hell, I used to sometimes get that same feeling back when I was an ER medic -- a busy night shift in the ER is no one's idea of fun, but there's a definite flow to it, a rhythm, and when you really get into it, when you're triaging mass casualty victims or running a code and everything is going just right, it's a powerful experience.
But yes, I strongly suspect that just about any activity you enjoy, practice a lot, and are good at can put you "in the zone." I've experienced it while running, while coding, while writing, while having sex (okay, lately I haven't been practicing that last as much as I'd like, though things do show signs of turning around soon
Okay, I misremembered. Hey, it was a long time ago.
This may be feeding the trolls, but ...
...
There were several moon missions. Apollo 11 was the first one to land; all the subseequent ones (the program ended with Apollo 17) also landed on the moon, except for Apollo 13, which suffered a meteor collision enroute and had to return to Earth. Check out this site:
Project Apollo Program Overview
Like I said, I may be feeding the trolls, but it sounds to me like you genuinely didn't know this, so
War is bad. You won't get any argument on that subject from me. But sometimes it's also inevitable (and no, I don't put Desert Storm into that category; that war, like the current one, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Bush Family Marketing, Inc.) If we're going to fight -- and we are, as depressing as it may be; millennia of human history argue that war isn't going away any time soon -- then arguing about whether being blinded by a laser is less humane than being torn apart by shrapnel seems kind of silly, is all.
... as they like to say, meaning, "Stuff that the weapon did other than what it was supposed to do." Like the article says, this isn't a blinding weapon; it's an honest-to-god laser gun (as opposed to the laser targeting systems we've been using for quite some time.) It's designed to blow up or disable vehicles, artillery emplacements, etc. Might people nearby be blinded by reflections? Sure, and people nearby when a bomb hits might be blinded (or worse) by shrapnel. I think this is much ado about nothing, to tell the truth. Battlefields are dangerous places. No amount of tech is going to change that.
"Real chemistry" hasn't just been about "test tubes and stirring rods and funny smells" for a generation. Chemists (especially, but not exclusively, organic chemists) have been relying on automated analysis for years to do serious work. We can analyze complex compunds now in hours which once would have taken months or years, or have been simply impossible to analyze. Computational modeling of the formation and interaction of complex compounds is the next logical step.
Ah, hell with it. You're clearly a chemical Luddite.
Tony Blair is a progressive, you know. Oh, he's a slick politico, of course, but he's managed to reach the top without completely selling his soul, which is an impressive achievement. And now that Jack Straw has been demoted, the UK government in general is a lot less scary and a lot more likeable.
I remember when Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder seemed like the leaders of a real, lasting change in governance of the Western world. Of course, Crown Prince George's handlers managed to derail the process in the US, and it's hard to tell how German politics are going at the moment, but at least the UK is still going strong.
Except that the iMac (CRT and LCD) and eMac (CRT only) are all-in-one machines. Sure, you could buy an LCD iMac and plug in a CRT, or an eMac and plug in an LCD, but why would you want to? If you want a dual-monitor Mac, it seems to me you're much more likely to get a regular Power Mac and plug in two monitors (your choice of manufacturers, styles, and sizes.) Offering people a wide choice of displays _in all-in-one machines_ is what Apple is doing, and IMO that makes a lot of sense.