Oh come come, the only shopkeepers using imperial were bolshie greengrocers from hartlepool or [insert you favourite armpit of the uk here] who made a big thing of selling bananas in pounds to over 60's UKIP/BNP supporters. No-one with a life has used imperial when shopping for years, if not decades.
Hardly. There's the occassional rogue greengrocer in hartlepool or who insists on selling bananas by the pound to over 60's UKIP supporters, but everyone else moved years if not decades ago.
"British people are metric in name only: underneath, the sickening heart of ugly imperial units beats away."
Not really anymore. It's true we do use imperial for some things - distances in miles, beer in pints - but on the whole nearly all other measurements are in metric. All food and drink in shops is sold in metric, all building work is done in metric etc etc. And of course our coinage went metric well over 30 years ago.
I think all you're getting hot under the collar about is that in a typical British way we decided to be pragmatic and consensual about the move rather than doing a dictatorial "everyone will use metric exclusively from next tuesday" (or whenever). We've now been changing to metric for two generations (being in my mid 40's mine was the first to be taught only metric in school). The government (society?) has been prompoting metric steadily now for 40-odd years, and we're probably about 75% converted with people younger than me using metric pretty much exclusively and people in the 50s probably dropping into imperial for quite a bit of everyday use.
And if it takes a century to convert where's the harm in that? Actually if we never completely convert for a few traditional things like beer then what's the problem with that either?
Presumaby you intall XP, then install the anti-virus software from disk. Then you log onto symantec and download the update file using another machine, copy the update onto the install machine and apply.
Another solution with a spare machine would be to download a free firewall and appy that first.
The '4th' generation was then used to mean something that tried to be more English like - what we'd now call a scripting language - typically for use against a database/development environment. The one I did a lot of coding with was NATURAL, which ran against ADABAS (an early semi-relational database)
Basically when it came down to it '4th generation' was really marketing-speak. Made the suits think they were really clever as they we going to get these new found computer thingies cracked by a pseudo-english command language.
Why oh why can't someone produce a decent PAD like they used for passing reports around on Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise?
I had a Jordana for several years and recently replaced it with a iPAQ 4150 (the smallest iPAQ with built in wireless lan). I know this will cause a sharp intake of breath, but as I use Windows the integration with Outlook is superb. I love the way I can copy important information on notes in Outlook and I know it will sync automatically onto the PDA. Over and above the usual contact and diary info too of course.
Other functions are less useful, but nice to have. I have written short articles in Word on a PDA - slow, but beats humping the laptop - used the browser (+ mobile phone) to find train timetable information on the move, and used it to keep up with email while on holiday.
But, it could be improved. True portability at PDA size is nice, but I'd sacrifice a little of that for a larger screen. Which brings me back to the Star Trek PADs. The ones they carry around on Enterprise are about twice the size of a PDA, which seems to me to be ideal. A PDA with a 640 x 480 screen at around twice current PDA width would be great. Small enough to be easily portable but big enough not to feel cramped. Ideally it would fold in hald for transport too
So what happened to Cold Fusion? I've scripted in Perl, PHP, Python, Javascript, VB and many others and I'd still say Cold Fusion is the simplest/quickest to build a small to medium sized system in.
Sure it lacks the geek factor because it's not open source, and it's not as widely available as perl/php, but it's certainly a lot more common on ISP servers than ruby.
Exactly. Unfortunatly I can't find the reference for this, but it came up when discussing a similar issue recently along the lines of 'how long would you like to live?'. My understanding is that actuarial statistics indicate that if we were granted genetic immortality free from disease practical immortality would be limited to around 300 - 500 years as in our current state of society you'd most probably be involved in a fatal accident before you reached this age.
I find this interesting as most people assume when discussing increasing lifespans that all that is involved is a matter of medicine and genetics. Of course it could be assumed that in such a society fewer accidents are fatal, but personally I rather doubt it. Seems to me that if you could live a long time in a reasonable state of health by the time you reached 150 with the body of a 30 year old you'd be looking for all sort of novel experiences, and inevitably novel experiences involve risk. And that's in addition to the normal risks of living - I've been driving for 25 years and during that time I've had a couple of very close near misses. I'm sure if I'd been driving for 250 years (or the equivalent) the probability of one of the expected 20-odd near misses being fatal must be very high indeed.
5000 years is won't happen without some major restructuring of society. As we currently have things set up you have a 50% chance of being involved in a fatal accident by the time you are 300.
You're missing the point. She wants to do something 'clever' with her computer but she's never going to be a hardcore 'C' geek, so you need something that is fun, gives fast results and looks good.
If she's got any hint of design skills at all go for Flash. Hell you might even get something 'commercial' out of it - get here to design a flash game that hooks in 'moms' and you have a seriously sellable product!
Indeed, for instance the xian neocons are currently trying to run a country on the basis of a book put together by a set of barbaric nomads wandering around desert over 3000 years ago. In the process they've gotten themselves embroiled in a meaningless war with another bunch of idiots who want to run their societies on the basis of a book put together by a delusional merchant in a desert over 1300 years ago.
They went through a very rough patch for the week or two after they were slashdotted, but I've been using them again now consistently for several weeks and their service is back to normal or better.
Given the impact that a slashdotting would have on a site of this nature, and the presumably permenant increase in traffic I don't think they've done too badly at all
"I brought that up because evolutionists always trot it out to say "See??? They developed resistance! That proves evolution because they evolved!" You can't have both arguments."
Well, yes you can actually. Your assuming 'evolution' is some monolithic process. It's not, there can be lots of different mechanisms whereby variations occur, propegate, and are selected for. And bacterial evolution is even more complex than the the multicellular variety because of lateral gene transfer and other such exotica. With antibiotics what you probably have is the relatively slow co-evolution of antibiotics & antibiotic resistance couple with the relatively fast lateral transmission of resistance via plasmid transfer when the evolutionary pressures (i.e. human use of antibiotics) promote it.
"Now, about that whole "species" argument: Paleontologists will take any minor variation and declare it a new species. "
That's an interesting point, but almost in the reverse sense to what you imply. It's a favourite Creationist falicy to misunderstand what a species is and how we define it, but generally Creationism is so scientifically screwed up that it never gets as far as asking interesting questions.
Bottom line of course is that our definition of a species is decidedly fuzzy around the edges. The usual definition - a group of organisms of similar characteristics that can interbreed - is one of those definitions whereby you recognise it when you see it but otherwise would be hard put to deliniate a priori.
We are very good at defining species among present day mammals and birds. There's lots of visible characteristics to look at, we can examine breeding populations, and generally gather a lot of data. We get much less good at it the further 'down' the evolutionary tree we go. In recent years analysis of genetic variation between and within species has nicely illustrated this. For example the amount of genetic variation within a typical amphibian or fish species is roughly similar to that we'd see in a whole genus, or even family, of mammals. The implication is that there are actually far more species of 'lower' organisms around than we recognise - in other words because of our bias towards studying mammals and birds in depth we tend to artificially put the sieve for sorting into different species at a much finer setting among these than we do in, for example, fish.
With paleontologists it's pretty certain we are dramatically underestimating the number of species. For example there are three distinct species of zebra but it's doubtful if we'd pick up more than one from fossil evidence. Paleontologists by definition cannot view the breeding population of the animals/plants they study, nor see non-skeletal characteristics or behaviours. Another example - no palentologist would ever be able to tell a willow tit and marsh tit apart from fossil evidence - no matter how well preserved (http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/marshtit.htm)
"There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations"
I'd have though an examination of the structure of the Photosynthetic Reaction Centre and Light Harvesting proteins over bacterial and plant species was an excellent and convincing illustration of evolution.
But for real hard core data I'd refer you to the work of Woese on the evolution of the 16s RNA.
You know, you got as far as the second line of your first paragraph before making a monumental blunder of such proportions that it shows you really have f*** all idea about what you are arguing about. You are therefore to be congratulated - most creationists manage to screw up in the first line.
Let's look at your blooper again...
"Since the first antibiotics were developed in the 1940's, "
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The first antibiotics were *discovered* in the 1940's. Antibiotics are a naturally occuring chemical warfare mechanism evolved by microbial organisms themselves to compete within their evolutionary and ecological niches.
They've probably been around since the primeval slime and there's been a continual competition since then between antibiotic resistance and antibiotics. Penicillin and Penicillinases are a classic example of this. Indeed you can use the protein structure of Penicillinases to demonstrate evolution in bacteria with some considerable success. One of my previous co-workers even wrote his Ph.D. thesis on precisely that subject.
It's true of course that we've chemically modified some antibiotics ourselves to tune for various properties, but to assume that we hav'nt done something that nature hasn't herself already done in the 3 billion years she's been working on the subject is arrogance in the extreme. Of course there's antibiotic resistance out their for modern antibiotics. This is simply *not* a problem for evolutionary theory, in fact it's quite a nice confirmation of it.
Also note that antibiotic resistance can of course spread quite widely quite quickly - if evolutionary pressures exist to make it do so. Most antibiotic genes are on plasmids not the genomic DNA and moving plasmids around between bacteria is exceptionally easy. The little buggers actually have a form of sex to do it.
The rest of your post is full of similar elementary mistakes, but this one gets me
"Nevertheless, the number of microbial species are relatively few"
WHAT THE F****????? How on earth did you get that impression? There are countless millions of bacterial species if species is used in an analogous genetic classification sense to multicellular organisms. What you are probably getting confused with is the fact that bacterial classification has up until recently been characteristic based - and as there's not that many characteristics you can distinguish in a unicellular organism the number of 'species' recognised has been artificially limited.
We know quite a lot actually, it's just that microbiology keeps throwing up these holes because until 10 or 20 years ago we were severely limited by what could be cultured in the lab. Microbiology is now only just catching up with the breadth of the real world and not a self-selected subset.
I've been out of the subject for quite some time, but when I was active in the area in the mid 80's it was just dawning on microbiologists that out of a typical soil sample they could culture a few percent of the different bacterial species in there (as determined by DNA footprint evidence).
Up until then if you couldn't culture an organism it simply didn't exist as far as microbiologist were aware.
No idea, but as generating the large spatial distortions required for the drive to work needs controlled manipulation of large amounts of exotic matter/energy I think it's not an unreasonable assumption that by the time Alcubierre drive becomes *just* and engineering problem then sorting out a way to handle collsions will be a relatively trivial aspect of this.
The speed of light is only a restriction upon the velocity of matter/energy within space-time. There is no such restriction upon the expansion or movement of space-time itself. If you think about it in the usual 'rubber sheet' model then this is equivalent to saying that particles on the surface of the sheet can only travel up to c, but that the sheet itself can change without such restrictions.
This is effectively how the Alcubierre warp drive works.
Support can be passive as well as active. I simply fail to see why it isn't possible to build into the freenet software/protocols some sort of mechanism to prevent CP being distributed.
The position you outline above basically seems to say you don't approve of CP, but you do believe paedophiles have a right distribute CP.
Didn't search. If you use any of the site list pages I looked at then CP links are prominently displayed. True not all links are to CP, but more than enough to give a very stong impression that one of, if not the, main use for Freenet is as a CP distribution network.
This argument that if you want uncencored freedom of information then you have to accept CP is completely spurious. CP is a record of a crime being committed against a child, and a vile crime at that. There is no valid argument that says that you have to support the greater political good by supporting crimes against children.
In other words Freenet needs to walk away from Omelas.
I too did exactly that. While in theory I support their attempts to provide a completely uncencored service, in practice any political etc. content is swamped to the point of non-existance by the paedophiles.
It seems to me it doesn't have to be that way. The blurb for freenet goes on and on about it being complete freedom of information or nothing. That's rubbish, it'd be hard true, but if filters to prevent paedophile images etc were built into the system at core then it would gain a lot more acceptance than it has. At the present it's too easy for freenet to be painted as purely as a distribution network for kiddie pr0n - which is unfortunatly true - and the uncencored political benefits are lost as collateral damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come come, the only shopkeepers using imperial were bolshie greengrocers from hartlepool or [insert you favourite armpit of the uk here] who made a big thing of selling bananas in pounds to over 60's UKIP/BNP supporters. No-one with a life has used imperial when shopping for years, if not decades.
Hardly. There's the occassional rogue greengrocer in hartlepool or who insists on selling bananas by the pound to over 60's UKIP supporters, but everyone else moved years if not decades ago.
"British people are metric in name only: underneath, the sickening heart of ugly imperial units beats away."
Not really anymore. It's true we do use imperial for some things - distances in miles, beer in pints - but on the whole nearly all other measurements are in metric. All food and drink in shops is sold in metric, all building work is done in metric etc etc. And of course our coinage went metric well over 30 years ago.
I think all you're getting hot under the collar about is that in a typical British way we decided to be pragmatic and consensual about the move rather than doing a dictatorial "everyone will use metric exclusively from next tuesday" (or whenever). We've now been changing to metric for two generations (being in my mid 40's mine was the first to be taught only metric in school). The government (society?) has been prompoting metric steadily now for 40-odd years, and we're probably about 75% converted with people younger than me using metric pretty much exclusively and people in the 50s probably dropping into imperial for quite a bit of everyday use.
And if it takes a century to convert where's the harm in that? Actually if we never completely convert for a few traditional things like beer then what's the problem with that either?
Presumaby you intall XP, then install the anti-virus software from disk. Then you log onto symantec and download the update file using another machine, copy the update onto the install machine and apply.
Another solution with a spare machine would be to download a free firewall and appy that first.
I first started coding professionaly in the mid-80s at which point '"4th generation" language was the new buzz word. The schema then was
1st - Machine Code
2nd - Assembler
3rd - High level - COBOL, FORTRAN
The '4th' generation was then used to mean something that tried to be more English like - what we'd now call a scripting language - typically for use against a database/development environment. The one I did a lot of coding with was NATURAL, which ran against ADABAS (an early semi-relational database)
Basically when it came down to it '4th generation' was really marketing-speak. Made the suits think they were really clever as they we going to get these new found computer thingies cracked by a pseudo-english command language.
Aye, that'd be the in the Delta of Venus?
Why oh why can't someone produce a decent PAD like they used for passing reports around on Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise?
I had a Jordana for several years and recently replaced it with a iPAQ 4150 (the smallest iPAQ with built in wireless lan). I know this will cause a sharp intake of breath, but as I use Windows the integration with Outlook is superb. I love the way I can copy important information on notes in Outlook and I know it will sync automatically onto the PDA. Over and above the usual contact and diary info too of course.
Other functions are less useful, but nice to have. I have written short articles in Word on a PDA - slow, but beats humping the laptop - used the browser (+ mobile phone) to find train timetable information on the move, and used it to keep up with email while on holiday.
But, it could be improved. True portability at PDA size is nice, but I'd sacrifice a little of that for a larger screen. Which brings me back to the Star Trek PADs. The ones they carry around on Enterprise are about twice the size of a PDA, which seems to me to be ideal. A PDA with a 640 x 480 screen at around twice current PDA width would be great. Small enough to be easily portable but big enough not to feel cramped. Ideally it would fold in hald for transport too
So what happened to Cold Fusion? I've scripted in Perl, PHP, Python, Javascript, VB and many others and I'd still say Cold Fusion is the simplest/quickest to build a small to medium sized system in.
Sure it lacks the geek factor because it's not open source, and it's not as widely available as perl/php, but it's certainly a lot more common on ISP servers than ruby.
Exactly. Unfortunatly I can't find the reference for this, but it came up when discussing a similar issue recently along the lines of 'how long would you like to live?'. My understanding is that actuarial statistics indicate that if we were granted genetic immortality free from disease practical immortality would be limited to around 300 - 500 years as in our current state of society you'd most probably be involved in a fatal accident before you reached this age.
I find this interesting as most people assume when discussing increasing lifespans that all that is involved is a matter of medicine and genetics. Of course it could be assumed that in such a society fewer accidents are fatal, but personally I rather doubt it. Seems to me that if you could live a long time in a reasonable state of health by the time you reached 150 with the body of a 30 year old you'd be looking for all sort of novel experiences, and inevitably novel experiences involve risk. And that's in addition to the normal risks of living - I've been driving for 25 years and during that time I've had a couple of very close near misses. I'm sure if I'd been driving for 250 years (or the equivalent) the probability of one of the expected 20-odd near misses being fatal must be very high indeed.
5000 years is won't happen without some major restructuring of society. As we currently have things set up you have a 50% chance of being involved in a fatal accident by the time you are 300.
You're missing the point. She wants to do something 'clever' with her computer but she's never going to be a hardcore 'C' geek, so you need something that is fun, gives fast results and looks good.
If she's got any hint of design skills at all go for Flash. Hell you might even get something 'commercial' out of it - get here to design a flash game that hooks in 'moms' and you have a seriously sellable product!
Indeed, for instance the xian neocons are currently trying to run a country on the basis of a book put together by a set of barbaric nomads wandering around desert over 3000 years ago. In the process they've gotten themselves embroiled in a meaningless war with another bunch of idiots who want to run their societies on the basis of a book put together by a delusional merchant in a desert over 1300 years ago.
As opposed to the unprovable 'god/gods/goddess' theories espoused by the xians/muslims/various other nutters?
They went through a very rough patch for the week or two after they were slashdotted, but I've been using them again now consistently for several weeks and their service is back to normal or better.
Given the impact that a slashdotting would have on a site of this nature, and the presumably permenant increase in traffic I don't think they've done too badly at all
"I brought that up because evolutionists always trot it out to say "See??? They developed resistance! That proves evolution because they evolved!" You can't have both arguments."
Well, yes you can actually. Your assuming 'evolution' is some monolithic process. It's not, there can be lots of different mechanisms whereby variations occur, propegate, and are selected for. And bacterial evolution is even more complex than the the multicellular variety because of lateral gene transfer and other such exotica. With antibiotics what you probably have is the relatively slow co-evolution of antibiotics & antibiotic resistance couple with the relatively fast lateral transmission of resistance via plasmid transfer when the evolutionary pressures (i.e. human use of antibiotics) promote it.
"Now, about that whole "species" argument: Paleontologists will take any minor variation and declare it a new species. "
That's an interesting point, but almost in the reverse sense to what you imply. It's a favourite Creationist falicy to misunderstand what a species is and how we define it, but generally Creationism is so scientifically screwed up that it never gets as far as asking interesting questions.
Bottom line of course is that our definition of a species is decidedly fuzzy around the edges. The usual definition - a group of organisms of similar characteristics that can interbreed - is one of those definitions whereby you recognise it when you see it but otherwise would be hard put to deliniate a priori.
We are very good at defining species among present day mammals and birds. There's lots of visible characteristics to look at, we can examine breeding populations, and generally gather a lot of data. We get much less good at it the further 'down' the evolutionary tree we go. In recent years analysis of genetic variation between and within species has nicely illustrated this. For example the amount of genetic variation within a typical amphibian or fish species is roughly similar to that we'd see in a whole genus, or even family, of mammals. The implication is that there are actually far more species of 'lower' organisms around than we recognise - in other words because of our bias towards studying mammals and birds in depth we tend to artificially put the sieve for sorting into different species at a much finer setting among these than we do in, for example, fish.
With paleontologists it's pretty certain we are dramatically underestimating the number of species. For example there are three distinct species of zebra but it's doubtful if we'd pick up more than one from fossil evidence. Paleontologists by definition cannot view the breeding population of the animals/plants they study, nor see non-skeletal characteristics or behaviours. Another example - no palentologist would ever be able to tell a willow tit and marsh tit apart from fossil evidence - no matter how well preserved (http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/marshtit.htm)
"There are assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by pertinent experiments or calculations"
I'd have though an examination of the structure of the Photosynthetic Reaction Centre and Light Harvesting proteins over bacterial and plant species was an excellent and convincing illustration of evolution.
But for real hard core data I'd refer you to the work of Woese on the evolution of the 16s RNA.
You know, you got as far as the second line of your first paragraph before making a monumental blunder of such proportions that it shows you really have f*** all idea about what you are arguing about. You are therefore to be congratulated - most creationists manage to screw up in the first line.
Let's look at your blooper again...
"Since the first antibiotics were developed in the 1940's, "
Wrong, wrong, wrong. The first antibiotics were *discovered* in the 1940's. Antibiotics are a naturally occuring chemical warfare mechanism evolved by microbial organisms themselves to compete within their evolutionary and ecological niches.
They've probably been around since the primeval slime and there's been a continual competition since then between antibiotic resistance and antibiotics. Penicillin and Penicillinases are a classic example of this. Indeed you can use the protein structure of Penicillinases to demonstrate evolution in bacteria with some considerable success. One of my previous co-workers even wrote his Ph.D. thesis on precisely that subject.
It's true of course that we've chemically modified some antibiotics ourselves to tune for various properties, but to assume that we hav'nt done something that nature hasn't herself already done in the 3 billion years she's been working on the subject is arrogance in the extreme. Of course there's antibiotic resistance out their for modern antibiotics. This is simply *not* a problem for evolutionary theory, in fact it's quite a nice confirmation of it.
Also note that antibiotic resistance can of course spread quite widely quite quickly - if evolutionary pressures exist to make it do so. Most antibiotic genes are on plasmids not the genomic DNA and moving plasmids around between bacteria is exceptionally easy. The little buggers actually have a form of sex to do it.
The rest of your post is full of similar elementary mistakes, but this one gets me
"Nevertheless, the number of microbial species are relatively few"
WHAT THE F****????? How on earth did you get that impression? There are countless millions of bacterial species if species is used in an analogous genetic classification sense to multicellular organisms. What you are probably getting confused with is the fact that bacterial classification has up until recently been characteristic based - and as there's not that many characteristics you can distinguish in a unicellular organism the number of 'species' recognised has been artificially limited.
We know quite a lot actually, it's just that microbiology keeps throwing up these holes because until 10 or 20 years ago we were severely limited by what could be cultured in the lab. Microbiology is now only just catching up with the breadth of the real world and not a self-selected subset.
I've been out of the subject for quite some time, but when I was active in the area in the mid 80's it was just dawning on microbiologists that out of a typical soil sample they could culture a few percent of the different bacterial species in there (as determined by DNA footprint evidence).
Up until then if you couldn't culture an organism it simply didn't exist as far as microbiologist were aware.
No idea, but as generating the large spatial distortions required for the drive to work needs controlled manipulation of large amounts of exotic matter/energy I think it's not an unreasonable assumption that by the time Alcubierre drive becomes *just* and engineering problem then sorting out a way to handle collsions will be a relatively trivial aspect of this.
The speed of light is only a restriction upon the velocity of matter/energy within space-time. There is no such restriction upon the expansion or movement of space-time itself. If you think about it in the usual 'rubber sheet' model then this is equivalent to saying that particles on the surface of the sheet can only travel up to c, but that the sheet itself can change without such restrictions.
This is effectively how the Alcubierre warp drive works.
Support can be passive as well as active. I simply fail to see why it isn't possible to build into the freenet software/protocols some sort of mechanism to prevent CP being distributed.
The position you outline above basically seems to say you don't approve of CP, but you do believe paedophiles have a right distribute CP.
Didn't search. If you use any of the site list pages I looked at then CP links are prominently displayed. True not all links are to CP, but more than enough to give a very stong impression that one of, if not the, main use for Freenet is as a CP distribution network.
This argument that if you want uncencored freedom of information then you have to accept CP is completely spurious. CP is a record of a crime being committed against a child, and a vile crime at that. There is no valid argument that says that you have to support the greater political good by supporting crimes against children.
In other words Freenet needs to walk away from Omelas.
I too did exactly that. While in theory I support their attempts to provide a completely uncencored service, in practice any political etc. content is swamped to the point of non-existance by the paedophiles.
It seems to me it doesn't have to be that way. The blurb for freenet goes on and on about it being complete freedom of information or nothing. That's rubbish, it'd be hard true, but if filters to prevent paedophile images etc were built into the system at core then it would gain a lot more acceptance than it has. At the present it's too easy for freenet to be painted as purely as a distribution network for kiddie pr0n - which is unfortunatly true - and the uncencored political benefits are lost as collateral damage.
I thought everyone knew that the Holy Grail is buried in the Apprentice Pillar at Rosslyn Chapel?
http://www.rosslynchapel.org.uk/
Allah tell you all this personally?