I know about the Toba Hypothesis, but the last time that I read something related to the population crunch, the crunch and the eruption were supposedly not close enough together for cause and effect. If Toba is back under indictment, good, that makes things make sense; OTOH, things making too much sense is often a sign that you are missing something important, because reality tends towards messiness.
Yes, but Walter was a huge fanboi, as he would have admitted if he had ever seen the term. I always thought that ABC had the better scientific info, but watching Cronkite just plain gush was more fun. Adding in Schirra after his Apollo flight made CBS the better choice, all around.
Well, yes, if you convert it from one big rock to a big bunch of pebbles too small to survive passing through the atmosphere, it WILL help a lot. Still years without summers, but not a total extinction event. They never show the effects of all that particulate matter on the sunsets, never mind the next winter lasting two years or more (at least in New England), but then rom-cons never show the couple getting bored with each other after a few years, either.
BTW, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" was a non-fiction essay, not a story, and it deliberately left off the obvious solution, a simulated red sun environment (a real red sun worked for Kal-El and every other Kryptonian, why not a simulated one for Junior-El?).
He is probably assuming omni-directional radio versus lasers. OTOH, at light year distances, even the best focused laser spreads like a flashlight beam does, so rubycodez is still wrong.
For the past century, we have been radiating radio waves like a small radio star, and are obvious above background for almost 100 light years. Unfortunately, in Habitable Planets For Man (which "solved" the Drake equation with values now known to be wildly optimistic) the estimate was that communication-capable civilizations were about 1000 light years apart, so even the entire world isn't good enough to show above some possible someone-else's background.
Neanderthals make up about 3% of non-African human DNA, and not all the same 3% (supposedly we can ID about 20% of their genome from various groups), so you cannot really call them a separate species. Subspecies, maybe, but not their own species.
Intelligence is a bit of an advantage - there is a reason that predators are always more intelligent than their preferred prey - but it only gets one so far. A super-intelligent panda or koala, bound to one food source in one biome, would be an extinction waiting to happen. To support a really intelligent species you need adaptability on the same order as the Norway black rat. Ocean-based might be different, given that cuttlefish seem to be really quite intelligent even though they only live a few years and so have little chance of actually using their smarts for anything.
Then who/what was capable of reducing the population of Europe by 1/3 (to take the monkish chronicles) to 50% (based on the number of abandoned English boroughs) to 2/3 (last estimate that I read, based on abandoned boroughs not enough to maintain the pre-Death populations of the still-occupied ones)?
The only close competitor would be whatever almost extincted humanity about 80,000 years ago, reducing the African portion of the species to the equivalent of about 1000 unrelated individuals (I have no idea if it affected the Neanderthal, Denisovian, or the Indonesian "hobbit" groups, or any other non-African groups that we have not yet identified, by as much), and I would question whether hunter-gatherers ever class as "in large groups"
As far as them being "lazy and incompetent" goes, the people designing the Internet of Things are doing nothing different than the people who designed the Internet of networks. Back then, they assumed that the main danger would be unexpected network partitioning, not some man-in-the-middle attacker sending lies to major routers or DNS sites (hell, back then DNS was a file maintained by Jon Postell out of the goodness of his heart, sent out every so often to replace the previous/etc/hosts file for all hosts), or worse.
Leaving off security to make something useful fast is an easy tradeoff. That it is too dangerous is hard for people in high trust societies (like invented the Internet or picked it over their own ISO network) to wrap their heads around. Maybe DARPA should have outsourced the design or development to the USSR or Afghanistan, where rampant paranoia just meant that someone was paying attention, but it didn't.
All that this lack indicates is that Linux has too small a market share among probable targets to be worth setting up a cookie-cutter process to hack it. Neither Al Quaida (sp? and whose?) nor the German Chancellor's office are likely to have dedicated SAs determined to keep out others by security through obscurity, regardless of it preventing easy usability of popular software that their principals demand.
Use any distribution out of the box, without doing something that makes things interesting (like Sun used to have the/bin directory tree in a separate partition which was mounted as read-only) and you are just as vulnerable to script kiddies (even if law enforcement agents) as anyone, although the variability between different distributions might help a bit.
Who compensates the cat owner -- the driver or the car manufacturer?
Everyone within half a mile with a non-trivial bank account or liquid assets. Just ask any personal injury lawyer when he is being honest (usually only when a guest lecturer in Law School, or drunk).
So basically, what you are saying is that in the classic scenario of the runaway traincar, guaranteed to kill 5 people if you do nothing, but only kill 1 person if you choose to change rails, if I choose to not choose, I should then be on the hook for murdering 5 people.
To quote Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
OTOH, expecting one unique and universally acceptable moral or ethical decision in almost anything is the sign of someone who hasn't studied Ethics. Or Tort Law.
OTThirdH, expecting that the on-board computer has the _time_ to make these decisions is a sign of someone who hasn't tried embedded programming.
Yes, well I will not pay attention to you unless you can state your argument in proper Latin, as you would when degrees really meant something, in the early 19th Century. Seriously, you write of standards dropping to accommodate job seekers, in English?
exit SARC mode
Anyway, when people were still studying the trivium and the quad-whatever-it-was. they were still doing it to get a job, when not going just to make contacts like the nobility and upper commoners' sons (like the son of the Franklin from the Canterbury Tales).
thares no poynt to lurn proppr spellng and gramars
William Shakespeare would probably agree. Once, he spelled his name three different ways on the same sheet of paper. Likewise, so would The Honorable David S. Crockett. So, for that matter, would a German co-worker of mine who moved to the US at about 12 years old, and never really learned the spelling rules although he had not a trace of accent when I knew him (Stanford Math department didn't care much, either, since they gave him a PhD after he left the company).
I assumed that the Kemal Attaturk reforms were *designed* to make Ottoman and Seljuk literature unreadable, so that the new Turkish nation could modernize without the dead weight of history, just as the "first" Chinese Emperor tried to have all the works written before him, especially Confucius, destroyed for that purpose.
and no one makes an effort to read the Latin-script books that have survived today (athough most were pulped, as paper was scarce at the time of the switch)
And knowing Stalin, the readers of the Latin-alphabet books were equally pulped.
First, I doubt that Finnish spelling is as complex as English.
Second, I was exposed to letters in kindergarten, then started reading words in the middle of 1st grade, just like everyone else in my 1st grade class (the ones who could not were held back [OK, the one person flunked]). Before that (reading from "Tip", our school's equivalent of the more famous "Dick and Jane" books), the closest that we got to reading in the Fall half of 1st grade was the teacher trying to tell me that a bucket started with the letter "p" and was pronounced "pail" even though there was no champagne bottle in it (she didn't like it when I used that very point, for some reason).
(For the non-US, kindergarten was a half-day grade zero that exposed children to letters, digits, minimal socialization, and most importantly naps when we were not sleepy. Nowadays, most children have a grade -1 called "pre-school" as well, ignoring the question of whether they have had day care from infancy because their complete set of parental units had to work)
Third, why are we discussing methods of teaching English in the US when the article is whether Germany is raising a generation of illiterates? Is there a slashdot.org.de to which this should have been limited? Or should we also discuss here whether Chairman Mao's decision to drastically simplify Chinese orthography from historical Chinese is designed to produce a nation of illiterates, or is it just NewSpeak (from 1984), since modern PRC Chinese will be unable to read anything from before the change or anything written by Chinese writers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the Chinese Diaspora?
Computer scientists would still be useful, just not in the same ways. Algorithms are carried out by people, too, not just computers.
Correction: Algorithms will be carried out by computers, but the computers will be groups of women with adding machines, as they were up to the middle of WWII.
CompSci will be useful to the extent that it relates to handling large numbers, or if they can build robots using what is left. Losing Heathkit may well have doomed us to be recreated after the last living computer person has died.
The Apollo CSM never pulled along side another space based object and latched on because it didn't need to on any of the missions except 13, and that mission wouldn't have needed to do so if the service module hadn't had a one-in-a-program explosion. The DID do that during at least two Gemini missions that I watched growing up.
The original design version of the shuttle would have been far more useful, but it was Proxmired away.
Which Earth2, though? There have been several, and ALL had at least one hot chick and one guy who looks like Major West from Lost In Space (either of them).
Yes, really they should have started the study at the year 1364, to get more years into the mix. That 1364 is about the start of the Little Ice Age, rather than starting in the middle of it as they do, is entirely beside the point, and should not affect the results at all. Six hundred and fifty years containing most of a period of excessive cold is a far better case of "Cherry-picking" than a mere five hundred.
Thirty years ago there probably wasn't a cop anywhere who would have given a hairy rodent's rear whether a motorist warned others about his presence, let alone actually go to the trouble of writing a ticket.
BS, as this was discussed in Social Studies when I was still in high school (yes, over 30 years ago). It wasn't a Federal case, but the precedent was widely followed.
I'd like to see the effects of a national law saying money collected from traffic tickets like this don't go to the city or the police department. Have it go towards paying down the national debt instead.
Speed limits are not a Federal law, but a state one (hence Montana dropping them for "reasonable speed" every few years), so the tickets go to reducing the local town's debt, instead.
Also, number of tickets issued isn't a metric by which police officer performance can be judged
It isn't, officially, just as there are no quotas, officially, and NFL defenses never had bounties for opposing players, officially. And Brutus is an honorable man.
Slashdot Mirror
I know about the Toba Hypothesis, but the last time that I read something related to the population crunch, the crunch and the eruption were supposedly not close enough together for cause and effect. If Toba is back under indictment, good, that makes things make sense; OTOH, things making too much sense is often a sign that you are missing something important, because reality tends towards messiness.
Yes, but Walter was a huge fanboi, as he would have admitted if he had ever seen the term. I always thought that ABC had the better scientific info, but watching Cronkite just plain gush was more fun. Adding in Schirra after his Apollo flight made CBS the better choice, all around.
Well, yes, if you convert it from one big rock to a big bunch of pebbles too small to survive passing through the atmosphere, it WILL help a lot. Still years without summers, but not a total extinction event. They never show the effects of all that particulate matter on the sunsets, never mind the next winter lasting two years or more (at least in New England), but then rom-cons never show the couple getting bored with each other after a few years, either.
BTW, "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" was a non-fiction essay, not a story, and it deliberately left off the obvious solution, a simulated red sun environment (a real red sun worked for Kal-El and every other Kryptonian, why not a simulated one for Junior-El?).
as I was hoping to meet a nice Vulcan equivalent hottie one day.
And only mate with her once every seven years.
He is probably assuming omni-directional radio versus lasers. OTOH, at light year distances, even the best focused laser spreads like a flashlight beam does, so rubycodez is still wrong.
For the past century, we have been radiating radio waves like a small radio star, and are obvious above background for almost 100 light years. Unfortunately, in Habitable Planets For Man (which "solved" the Drake equation with values now known to be wildly optimistic) the estimate was that communication-capable civilizations were about 1000 light years apart, so even the entire world isn't good enough to show above some possible someone-else's background.
Neanderthals make up about 3% of non-African human DNA, and not all the same 3% (supposedly we can ID about 20% of their genome from various groups), so you cannot really call them a separate species. Subspecies, maybe, but not their own species.
Intelligence is a bit of an advantage - there is a reason that predators are always more intelligent than their preferred prey - but it only gets one so far. A super-intelligent panda or koala, bound to one food source in one biome, would be an extinction waiting to happen. To support a really intelligent species you need adaptability on the same order as the Norway black rat. Ocean-based might be different, given that cuttlefish seem to be really quite intelligent even though they only live a few years and so have little chance of actually using their smarts for anything.
Then who/what was capable of reducing the population of Europe by 1/3 (to take the monkish chronicles) to 50% (based on the number of abandoned English boroughs) to 2/3 (last estimate that I read, based on abandoned boroughs not enough to maintain the pre-Death populations of the still-occupied ones)?
The only close competitor would be whatever almost extincted humanity about 80,000 years ago, reducing the African portion of the species to the equivalent of about 1000 unrelated individuals (I have no idea if it affected the Neanderthal, Denisovian, or the Indonesian "hobbit" groups, or any other non-African groups that we have not yet identified, by as much), and I would question whether hunter-gatherers ever class as "in large groups"
A piece of cold, wet, spaghetti. Gluten-free spaghetti, at that.
As far as them being "lazy and incompetent" goes, the people designing the Internet of Things are doing nothing different than the people who designed the Internet of networks. Back then, they assumed that the main danger would be unexpected network partitioning, not some man-in-the-middle attacker sending lies to major routers or DNS sites (hell, back then DNS was a file maintained by Jon Postell out of the goodness of his heart, sent out every so often to replace the previous /etc/hosts file for all hosts), or worse.
Leaving off security to make something useful fast is an easy tradeoff. That it is too dangerous is hard for people in high trust societies (like invented the Internet or picked it over their own ISO network) to wrap their heads around. Maybe DARPA should have outsourced the design or development to the USSR or Afghanistan, where rampant paranoia just meant that someone was paying attention, but it didn't.
All that this lack indicates is that Linux has too small a market share among probable targets to be worth setting up a cookie-cutter process to hack it. Neither Al Quaida (sp? and whose?) nor the German Chancellor's office are likely to have dedicated SAs determined to keep out others by security through obscurity, regardless of it preventing easy usability of popular software that their principals demand.
Use any distribution out of the box, without doing something that makes things interesting (like Sun used to have the /bin directory tree in a separate partition which was mounted as read-only) and you are just as vulnerable to script kiddies (even if law enforcement agents) as anyone, although the variability between different distributions might help a bit.
Mod Parent Insightful
The child can be running away from the car, thus the speed of approach would be lower.
Who compensates the cat owner -- the driver or the car manufacturer?
Everyone within half a mile with a non-trivial bank account or liquid assets. Just ask any personal injury lawyer when he is being honest (usually only when a guest lecturer in Law School, or drunk).
So basically, what you are saying is that in the classic scenario of the runaway traincar, guaranteed to kill 5 people if you do nothing, but only kill 1 person if you choose to change rails, if I choose to not choose, I should then be on the hook for murdering 5 people.
To quote Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
OTOH, expecting one unique and universally acceptable moral or ethical decision in almost anything is the sign of someone who hasn't studied Ethics. Or Tort Law.
OTThirdH, expecting that the on-board computer has the _time_ to make these decisions is a sign of someone who hasn't tried embedded programming.
Yes, well I will not pay attention to you unless you can state your argument in proper Latin, as you would when degrees really meant something, in the early 19th Century. Seriously, you write of standards dropping to accommodate job seekers, in English?
exit SARC mode
Anyway, when people were still studying the trivium and the quad-whatever-it-was. they were still doing it to get a job, when not going just to make contacts like the nobility and upper commoners' sons (like the son of the Franklin from the Canterbury Tales).
thares no poynt to lurn proppr spellng and gramars
William Shakespeare would probably agree. Once, he spelled his name three different ways on the same sheet of paper. Likewise, so would The Honorable David S. Crockett. So, for that matter, would a German co-worker of mine who moved to the US at about 12 years old, and never really learned the spelling rules although he had not a trace of accent when I knew him (Stanford Math department didn't care much, either, since they gave him a PhD after he left the company).
will the decrease in paper demanded raise a generation of enough trees in forests that can fall without making sounds?
No, but the trees saved will surely reverse Global Climate Change.
I assumed that the Kemal Attaturk reforms were *designed* to make Ottoman and Seljuk literature unreadable, so that the new Turkish nation could modernize without the dead weight of history, just as the "first" Chinese Emperor tried to have all the works written before him, especially Confucius, destroyed for that purpose.
and no one makes an effort to read the Latin-script books that have survived today (athough most were pulped, as paper was scarce at the time of the switch)
And knowing Stalin, the readers of the Latin-alphabet books were equally pulped.
First, I doubt that Finnish spelling is as complex as English.
Second, I was exposed to letters in kindergarten, then started reading words in the middle of 1st grade, just like everyone else in my 1st grade class (the ones who could not were held back [OK, the one person flunked]). Before that (reading from "Tip", our school's equivalent of the more famous "Dick and Jane" books), the closest that we got to reading in the Fall half of 1st grade was the teacher trying to tell me that a bucket started with the letter "p" and was pronounced "pail" even though there was no champagne bottle in it (she didn't like it when I used that very point, for some reason).
(For the non-US, kindergarten was a half-day grade zero that exposed children to letters, digits, minimal socialization, and most importantly naps when we were not sleepy. Nowadays, most children have a grade -1 called "pre-school" as well, ignoring the question of whether they have had day care from infancy because their complete set of parental units had to work)
Third, why are we discussing methods of teaching English in the US when the article is whether Germany is raising a generation of illiterates? Is there a slashdot.org.de to which this should have been limited? Or should we also discuss here whether Chairman Mao's decision to drastically simplify Chinese orthography from historical Chinese is designed to produce a nation of illiterates, or is it just NewSpeak (from 1984), since modern PRC Chinese will be unable to read anything from before the change or anything written by Chinese writers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the Chinese Diaspora?
Computer scientists would still be useful, just not in the same ways. Algorithms are carried out by people, too, not just computers.
Correction: Algorithms will be carried out by computers, but the computers will be groups of women with adding machines, as they were up to the middle of WWII.
CompSci will be useful to the extent that it relates to handling large numbers, or if they can build robots using what is left. Losing Heathkit may well have doomed us to be recreated after the last living computer person has died.
The Apollo CSM never pulled along side another space based object and latched on because it didn't need to on any of the missions except 13, and that mission wouldn't have needed to do so if the service module hadn't had a one-in-a-program explosion. The DID do that during at least two Gemini missions that I watched growing up.
The original design version of the shuttle would have been far more useful, but it was Proxmired away.
Which Earth2, though? There have been several, and ALL had at least one hot chick and one guy who looks like Major West from Lost In Space (either of them).
Yes, really they should have started the study at the year 1364, to get more years into the mix. That 1364 is about the start of the Little Ice Age, rather than starting in the middle of it as they do, is entirely beside the point, and should not affect the results at all. Six hundred and fifty years containing most of a period of excessive cold is a far better case of "Cherry-picking" than a mere five hundred.
Exit SARC mode
Thirty years ago there probably wasn't a cop anywhere who would have given a hairy rodent's rear whether a motorist warned others about his presence, let alone actually go to the trouble of writing a ticket.
BS, as this was discussed in Social Studies when I was still in high school (yes, over 30 years ago). It wasn't a Federal case, but the precedent was widely followed.
I'd like to see the effects of a national law saying money collected from traffic tickets like this don't go to the city or the police department. Have it go towards paying down the national debt instead.
Speed limits are not a Federal law, but a state one (hence Montana dropping them for "reasonable speed" every few years), so the tickets go to reducing the local town's debt, instead.
Also, number of tickets issued isn't a metric by which police officer performance can be judged
It isn't, officially, just as there are no quotas, officially, and NFL defenses never had bounties for opposing players, officially. And Brutus is an honorable man.