By comparison to Mars, yes, it was. Oh, we wouldn't find it comfortable, of course, but our distant ancestors did -- and there's no evidence that it was "extreme" in the sense that we now talk about such environments. Lots of not-too-briny water (much less salt in the oceans then than now, I'm pretty sure) and a dense atmosphere, even if the composition was very different from the modern one; also temperatures roughly in the range we now consider conducive to life. Except for isolated spots, Mars is just a much, much more hostile environment than Earth has ever been in the entire history of life.
Interesting link, thanks! And I really hadn't realized that much stuff made it from here to there.
The question is, out of all that, how likely is it that an extremophile suitable for Martian conditions would be one of the passengers, and would land in a hospitable environment on Mars? The link doesn't address that directly, just noting that the Terrestrial organisms would have a good shot if they landed on Mars in a warmer, wetter age -- the problem there being that we don't know if there ever was such a time in Mars' history, or if so, if it lasted long enough to be significant on evolutionary timescales.
Again: extremophiles and the conditions in which they live, are almost by definition rare here on Earth. And conditions suitable for any Terrestrial life are obviously even rarer on Mars, and quite possibly always have been. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it seems like awfully long odds.
Organisms on Earth which live in extreme environments probably evolved from related species which live in less extreme environments. I have no doubt that there are Terrestrial organisms which could survive in certain environments on Mars, but if they have counterparts on Mars, where did they come from? If they evolved on Mars, there has to have been an environment in which such evolution could have taken place over some kind of condition gradient, from less hostile to more hostile. If they came from Earth, you need a hell of a story about how they got there -- not only are meteor strike ejecta a lot less likely to make it from Earth to Mars than the reverse, you have to envision one piece of rock that just happened to be carrying a viable population of (already rare, even here on Earth) extremophiles that were suited for certain (also very rare) Martian conditions, and landed in just the right place.
If we can ever confirm that Mars had a more life-friendly environment for a significant portion of its history, of course, then these objections can be disregarded. But until we have much more evidence of that than we currently do, I'd be very surprised to find native life on Mars. It's much more likely that if anything is living there, it was carried there by probes from Earth -- and even that seems like a one in a million shot.
please don't ever link to tree hugger to support your claims. everytime you do i'm forced to club a baby seal to balance out the bullshit they spew.
Please don't ever link to Fox News to support your claims. Every time you do, I'm forced to throw a capitalist running dog in the gulag... etc.
You see how stupid that sounds? If you have a problem with the source (which, BTW, links to a Der Spiegel article; perhaps you consider that to be Eurotrash socialist garbage, but in the real world, it's considered one of the most trustworthy mainstream news sources on the planet) then fine -- give a source you consider more credible, and say why.
Better yet, don't argue with the source, argue with the data. If you can.
Now that you've done a nice job of repeating Sarah Palin's talking points (or tweeting points) do you have any original thoughts of your own to contribute?
You, sir, have just written one of the most ignorant posts I've ever read on Slashdot. Congratulations, I guess; it's quite an accomplishment, after a fashion.
A system whereby creators can get paid... just not very well. This doesn't mean it's the only possible system.
Most of the payment currently goes to people who have nothing to do with the creation. This is one of the reasons why it's hard to take the IP lobby's "rights of the artists" cant seriously -- anyone who pays any attention knows that "the artists" are the last people to get paid under the MAFIAA system. I don't know about journalism, but it wouldn't surprise me if it works the same way there; certainly reporting isn't known as a high-pay profession.
Except that most of the time, it isn't an officer, but a corporal or sergeant. That people are so scared of them that they call them all "officer" just so they won't risk offending says a lot about both the police and the policed.
I think you misunderstand what the word "officer" means in this context. When you talk about an "officer" in the military, that's usually shorthand for "commissioned officer" (ensign or above in the Navy, second lieutenant or above in the other services) although warrant officers and non-commissioned officers are technically "officers" as well. But none of this has anything to do with police. "Police officer" is a job description, not a rank, and everyone from the newest guy on the force all the way up to chief is in fact an "officer" by definition. It's not flattery to call them that.
The the equivalent job description in the military is "soldier," "sailor," etc. But this masks a more important problem. Cops are not soldiers, and both they and the rest of us need to remember that. It's easy to confuse them: both groups wear uniforms, carry guns, and use similar rank systems. But the failure to draw a bright line between police work and warfighting is one of the most serious threats to liberty which any nation can ever face, and it's a failure which is disturbingly common in America today.
If the person "selling" whatever it is sincerely believes it, then it can't properly be called a scam.
I don't think that's entirely right. As another poster pointed out, many scams rely on several layers of believers between the scammer and the victim. And for that matter, there are some cases of delusion that most people would call scams, but where everyone involved believes. I didn't set it up this way, but the examples I cited actually illustrate the continuum nicely.
Phishing spam: nobody believes in this except the victims.
Politics: politicians themselves may be cynical and manipulative, and their staffs as well, but the actual "selling" involved in getting a politician elected or re-elected -- the mailings, the fundraisers, the rallies, the get-out-the-vote knocking on doors -- is done by hordes of low-level campaign workers or unpaid volunteers, and these people tend to believe very sincerely in their cause. I know; I used to be one of them, back in my younger and more innocent days.
Fringe medicine: I don't know about "magnetotherapy," but I've known a lot of people involved in homeopathy -- not just using the products, but manufacturing and selling them as well. And let me tell you, these folks believe, with nigh-religious intensity. You can present medical and statistical evidence that it doesn't work, and make sound biochemical arguments about why it can't work, and they'll just blow you off, because to them it's capital-t Truth. And yet I have no trouble labeling the field of homeopathy as a whole as "a scam," and neither does anyone else who's looked at it with a critical eye.
FWIW, I think ID is more like politics than like either of the others. Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski et al. aren't ID believers. They're creationists who see ID as a useful workaround. But many of the people pushing ID at school board meetings and the like really buy into it.
it isn't a scam. Many people sincerely believe in ID
Many people sincerely believe that someone in Nigeria wants to give them a million bucks, too. Many people sincerely believe that wearing magnets will cure everything from foot pain to cancer. Many people sincerely believe that the politicians they vote for will live up to campaign promises. Etc. Belief has nothing to do with whether or not something is a scam.
Sorry if this is trollish, but Macs are IMO a WORSE security risk than Windows when dealing with spearphishing and other forms of targeted attacks.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, even if it has no connection to reality. "Spearphishing" (God that's a stupid term) is an attack on the user, not the machine; it has nothing to do with the OS.
I partially agree with you; I was a medic long I was a biostatistician, and in situations where the alternative to treatment -- any treatment -- is death, it's hard to argue for holding back.
The thing is, what you say about the speed with which Ebola acts is exactly right, and it's a big part of the problem with any treatment for it. Are we supposed to manufacture large stocks of the medication, distribute it to areas where Ebola is prevalent, and take whatever measures are necessary to store it and train medical personnel to administer it... without even knowing if it works or not? Are we supposed to tell people that this is The! Cure! For! Ebola! when it might in fact be nothing but placebo, or even poison? If this were a promising experimental cure for, say, late-stage terminal lung cancer, it would be a lot easier in some ways.
If someone with Ebola wants to volunteer to be a test subject and if the medication can be delivered to them in time, then yeah, I'd say go for it. But the odds of it happening that way are pretty slim. On the other hand, if larger animal trials indicate that this is a good candidate treatment, then the next step will in fact be to distribute some stocks to high-risk areas and offer patients the choice of participating in human trials. We're just not quite there yet.
But - humans, like everything else that walks or swims or flagellates in nature, are just animals. The primitive, tribalist pack mentality is seen at all levels of human interaction, from sports teams to H.O.A.'s to the ethnocentricism of entire corporations, countries, and races.
Tribalism != lack of empathy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Humans are indeed animals -- social animals, and like all such, identification with other members of our group is an inherent part of our nature as a species. We're a lot more like wolves than we are like tigers.
Now, it's true that tribalism tends to discourage identification with members of other tribes, but that's because we tend to define them as not-quite-human. The solution seems to be one we have, in fact, implemented fairly successfully so far, which is to broaden the definition of "our tribe" to include larger and larger numbers of people. People who can't at least identify the people they're closely associated with as being of their tribe are not really functional human beings.
Adaptive optics can deal with atmospheric image distortion, but they can't do anything about absorption. As I understand it, the key advantage of SOFIA (and space telescopes, of course) is that it can pick up wavelengths that are absorbed before reaching ground level.
The p-value is 0.00032 by my off-the-cuff calculation (pbinom(0, 5, 0.8) in R.) So yeah, it's pretty significant. That being said, sample sizes this small still do tend to make people nervous -- the p-value is calculated assuming that the monkeys in question represent a good sample of the population, and doesn't account for lab-specific or family-specific effects. (Where were the monkeys bred? How closely are they related? What sub-population do they belong to? Etc.) So we can certainly accept the finding for what it is, but regulatory bodies will, with good reason, want to see larger animal trials before approving even limited human use.
True enough, but the concept of the "creative class" implies people who have creativity and intelligence and the drive to make something of their talents. Since it's awfully hard to measure traits, especially at the population level, university degrees, particularly advanced degrees, make a reasonable proxy. Sure, there are plenty of smart, creative, hard-working people who never completed any education beyond high school (if that) and there are plenty of people with university degrees who are apparently dumb as rocks. But on the whole, getting a degree indicates a certain amount of intelligence and drive, and getting a research degree indicates a certain amount of creativity as well. It may not be the best measure available, but can you suggest a better one?
If there is one place I've seen worse code than OSS, it would be in academia.
Bizarrely, this is also where I've seen the most brilliant code.
If you look closely, you'll find that the "brilliant code" is most often written by academics who have industry programming experience. Similarly, in industry, you will find that the best code is written by experienced programmers with rigorous academic backgrounds. In contrast, the academics who insist that computer science has nothing to do with programming, and the self-taught hackers who proudly proclaim their lack of all that fancy book-larnin', are two sides of the same worthless coin.
no idea what, for example, the term "object-relational impedance mismatch" might mean
The proper answer to the question "What is object-relational impedance mismatch?" is "It's an old bug in versions of Buzzword prior to 3.6. But they fixed it with a new release of the PHBspeak library back in... oh, 2006 or so."
Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why. No other justification is needed.
One of the commenters on the CNET story on the issue compared it to the Windows practice of hiding file extensions, which is a good analogy. We know how well that worked out (click here on mysterious_attachment.doc{.exe} and see what happens!) Sure, the protocol name may be gabble to most users, but at least the information's there, right out front. And occasionally it even leads them to educate themselves, asking a more technically knowledgeable friend, "What is that http thing, anyway?"
Slashdot Mirror
Is there ever a time when nerds aren't at war?
By comparison to Mars, yes, it was. Oh, we wouldn't find it comfortable, of course, but our distant ancestors did -- and there's no evidence that it was "extreme" in the sense that we now talk about such environments. Lots of not-too-briny water (much less salt in the oceans then than now, I'm pretty sure) and a dense atmosphere, even if the composition was very different from the modern one; also temperatures roughly in the range we now consider conducive to life. Except for isolated spots, Mars is just a much, much more hostile environment than Earth has ever been in the entire history of life.
Interesting link, thanks! And I really hadn't realized that much stuff made it from here to there.
The question is, out of all that, how likely is it that an extremophile suitable for Martian conditions would be one of the passengers, and would land in a hospitable environment on Mars? The link doesn't address that directly, just noting that the Terrestrial organisms would have a good shot if they landed on Mars in a warmer, wetter age -- the problem there being that we don't know if there ever was such a time in Mars' history, or if so, if it lasted long enough to be significant on evolutionary timescales.
Again: extremophiles and the conditions in which they live, are almost by definition rare here on Earth. And conditions suitable for any Terrestrial life are obviously even rarer on Mars, and quite possibly always have been. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it seems like awfully long odds.
Organisms on Earth which live in extreme environments probably evolved from related species which live in less extreme environments. I have no doubt that there are Terrestrial organisms which could survive in certain environments on Mars, but if they have counterparts on Mars, where did they come from? If they evolved on Mars, there has to have been an environment in which such evolution could have taken place over some kind of condition gradient, from less hostile to more hostile. If they came from Earth, you need a hell of a story about how they got there -- not only are meteor strike ejecta a lot less likely to make it from Earth to Mars than the reverse, you have to envision one piece of rock that just happened to be carrying a viable population of (already rare, even here on Earth) extremophiles that were suited for certain (also very rare) Martian conditions, and landed in just the right place.
If we can ever confirm that Mars had a more life-friendly environment for a significant portion of its history, of course, then these objections can be disregarded. But until we have much more evidence of that than we currently do, I'd be very surprised to find native life on Mars. It's much more likely that if anything is living there, it was carried there by probes from Earth -- and even that seems like a one in a million shot.
there has been very little vitriolic attacking on the current President
What planet do you live on?
please don't ever link to tree hugger to support your claims. everytime you do i'm forced to club a baby seal to balance out the bullshit they spew.
Please don't ever link to Fox News to support your claims. Every time you do, I'm forced to throw a capitalist running dog in the gulag ... etc.
You see how stupid that sounds? If you have a problem with the source (which, BTW, links to a Der Spiegel article; perhaps you consider that to be Eurotrash socialist garbage, but in the real world, it's considered one of the most trustworthy mainstream news sources on the planet) then fine -- give a source you consider more credible, and say why.
Better yet, don't argue with the source, argue with the data. If you can.
So if one woman can produce a baby in 9 months, 9 women could make a baby in 1 month? Maybe if you only pay them enough?
9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months, which is a lot more like what we're talking about here.
Now that you've done a nice job of repeating Sarah Palin's talking points (or tweeting points) do you have any original thoughts of your own to contribute?
That's why we need the Shaka Plan for Energy:
1) Replace all coal power plants with nuclear
2) Replace all gasoline imports with coal gassification
3) Replace all the Army's rifles with assegais ... ah, hell, you know the rest.
4) Conquer southern Africa
5) ???
6)
You, sir, have just written one of the most ignorant posts I've ever read on Slashdot. Congratulations, I guess; it's quite an accomplishment, after a fashion.
the system whereby creators can get paid
A system whereby creators can get paid ... just not very well. This doesn't mean it's the only possible system.
Most of the payment currently goes to people who have nothing to do with the creation. This is one of the reasons why it's hard to take the IP lobby's "rights of the artists" cant seriously -- anyone who pays any attention knows that "the artists" are the last people to get paid under the MAFIAA system. I don't know about journalism, but it wouldn't surprise me if it works the same way there; certainly reporting isn't known as a high-pay profession.
Except that most of the time, it isn't an officer, but a corporal or sergeant.
That people are so scared of them that they call them all "officer" just so they won't risk offending says a lot about both the police and the policed.
I think you misunderstand what the word "officer" means in this context. When you talk about an "officer" in the military, that's usually shorthand for "commissioned officer" (ensign or above in the Navy, second lieutenant or above in the other services) although warrant officers and non-commissioned officers are technically "officers" as well. But none of this has anything to do with police. "Police officer" is a job description, not a rank, and everyone from the newest guy on the force all the way up to chief is in fact an "officer" by definition. It's not flattery to call them that.
The the equivalent job description in the military is "soldier," "sailor," etc. But this masks a more important problem. Cops are not soldiers, and both they and the rest of us need to remember that. It's easy to confuse them: both groups wear uniforms, carry guns, and use similar rank systems. But the failure to draw a bright line between police work and warfighting is one of the most serious threats to liberty which any nation can ever face, and it's a failure which is disturbingly common in America today.
If the person "selling" whatever it is sincerely believes it, then it can't properly be called a scam.
I don't think that's entirely right. As another poster pointed out, many scams rely on several layers of believers between the scammer and the victim. And for that matter, there are some cases of delusion that most people would call scams, but where everyone involved believes. I didn't set it up this way, but the examples I cited actually illustrate the continuum nicely.
Phishing spam: nobody believes in this except the victims.
Politics: politicians themselves may be cynical and manipulative, and their staffs as well, but the actual "selling" involved in getting a politician elected or re-elected -- the mailings, the fundraisers, the rallies, the get-out-the-vote knocking on doors -- is done by hordes of low-level campaign workers or unpaid volunteers, and these people tend to believe very sincerely in their cause. I know; I used to be one of them, back in my younger and more innocent days.
Fringe medicine: I don't know about "magnetotherapy," but I've known a lot of people involved in homeopathy -- not just using the products, but manufacturing and selling them as well. And let me tell you, these folks believe, with nigh-religious intensity. You can present medical and statistical evidence that it doesn't work, and make sound biochemical arguments about why it can't work, and they'll just blow you off, because to them it's capital-t Truth. And yet I have no trouble labeling the field of homeopathy as a whole as "a scam," and neither does anyone else who's looked at it with a critical eye.
FWIW, I think ID is more like politics than like either of the others. Philip Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski et al. aren't ID believers. They're creationists who see ID as a useful workaround. But many of the people pushing ID at school board meetings and the like really buy into it.
it isn't a scam. Many people sincerely believe in ID
Many people sincerely believe that someone in Nigeria wants to give them a million bucks, too. Many people sincerely believe that wearing magnets will cure everything from foot pain to cancer. Many people sincerely believe that the politicians they vote for will live up to campaign promises. Etc. Belief has nothing to do with whether or not something is a scam.
Sorry if this is trollish, but Macs are IMO a WORSE security risk than Windows when dealing with spearphishing and other forms of targeted attacks.
Well, you're entitled to your opinion, even if it has no connection to reality. "Spearphishing" (God that's a stupid term) is an attack on the user, not the machine; it has nothing to do with the OS.
I partially agree with you; I was a medic long I was a biostatistician, and in situations where the alternative to treatment -- any treatment -- is death, it's hard to argue for holding back.
The thing is, what you say about the speed with which Ebola acts is exactly right, and it's a big part of the problem with any treatment for it. Are we supposed to manufacture large stocks of the medication, distribute it to areas where Ebola is prevalent, and take whatever measures are necessary to store it and train medical personnel to administer it ... without even knowing if it works or not? Are we supposed to tell people that this is The! Cure! For! Ebola! when it might in fact be nothing but placebo, or even poison? If this were a promising experimental cure for, say, late-stage terminal lung cancer, it would be a lot easier in some ways.
If someone with Ebola wants to volunteer to be a test subject and if the medication can be delivered to them in time, then yeah, I'd say go for it. But the odds of it happening that way are pretty slim. On the other hand, if larger animal trials indicate that this is a good candidate treatment, then the next step will in fact be to distribute some stocks to high-risk areas and offer patients the choice of participating in human trials. We're just not quite there yet.
But - humans, like everything else that walks or swims or flagellates in nature, are just animals. The primitive, tribalist pack mentality is seen at all levels of human interaction, from sports teams to H.O.A.'s to the ethnocentricism of entire corporations, countries, and races.
Tribalism != lack of empathy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Humans are indeed animals -- social animals, and like all such, identification with other members of our group is an inherent part of our nature as a species. We're a lot more like wolves than we are like tigers.
Now, it's true that tribalism tends to discourage identification with members of other tribes, but that's because we tend to define them as not-quite-human. The solution seems to be one we have, in fact, implemented fairly successfully so far, which is to broaden the definition of "our tribe" to include larger and larger numbers of people. People who can't at least identify the people they're closely associated with as being of their tribe are not really functional human beings.
Adaptive optics can deal with atmospheric image distortion, but they can't do anything about absorption. As I understand it, the key advantage of SOFIA (and space telescopes, of course) is that it can pick up wavelengths that are absorbed before reaching ground level.
The p-value is 0.00032 by my off-the-cuff calculation (pbinom(0, 5, 0.8) in R.) So yeah, it's pretty significant. That being said, sample sizes this small still do tend to make people nervous -- the p-value is calculated assuming that the monkeys in question represent a good sample of the population, and doesn't account for lab-specific or family-specific effects. (Where were the monkeys bred? How closely are they related? What sub-population do they belong to? Etc.) So we can certainly accept the finding for what it is, but regulatory bodies will, with good reason, want to see larger animal trials before approving even limited human use.
True enough, but the concept of the "creative class" implies people who have creativity and intelligence and the drive to make something of their talents. Since it's awfully hard to measure traits, especially at the population level, university degrees, particularly advanced degrees, make a reasonable proxy. Sure, there are plenty of smart, creative, hard-working people who never completed any education beyond high school (if that) and there are plenty of people with university degrees who are apparently dumb as rocks. But on the whole, getting a degree indicates a certain amount of intelligence and drive, and getting a research degree indicates a certain amount of creativity as well. It may not be the best measure available, but can you suggest a better one?
The first link, where the actual results are presented, shows that he does exactly what you're calling for.
If there is one place I've seen worse code than OSS, it would be in academia.
Bizarrely, this is also where I've seen the most brilliant code.
If you look closely, you'll find that the "brilliant code" is most often written by academics who have industry programming experience. Similarly, in industry, you will find that the best code is written by experienced programmers with rigorous academic backgrounds. In contrast, the academics who insist that computer science has nothing to do with programming, and the self-taught hackers who proudly proclaim their lack of all that fancy book-larnin', are two sides of the same worthless coin.
Because it's, like, the security researcher's BFF OMG ponies!
no idea what, for example, the term "object-relational impedance mismatch" might mean
The proper answer to the question "What is object-relational impedance mismatch?" is "It's an old bug in versions of Buzzword prior to 3.6. But they fixed it with a new release of the PHBspeak library back in ... oh, 2006 or so."
Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why. No other justification is needed.
One of the commenters on the CNET story on the issue compared it to the Windows practice of hiding file extensions, which is a good analogy. We know how well that worked out (click here on mysterious_attachment.doc{.exe} and see what happens!) Sure, the protocol name may be gabble to most users, but at least the information's there, right out front. And occasionally it even leads them to educate themselves, asking a more technically knowledgeable friend, "What is that http thing, anyway?"