You can go back to really old space operas like E.E.Smith's Lensman stories. Smith proposes several life forms that exist only partially in this 3-D existence of ours. Then, A.E.Merritt's dweller in the Moon Pool (1919) was both artificial and not bound by 3-space and neither were its makers. Many Scifi authors do seem to shrink from going to far into the unknown.
I kind of doubt that Linux will overtake MS anytime soon on the desktop. That said, if apps developers are bailing out of Windows, to develope server stuff on Linux, perhaps the near future may see a MS vs. everyone else world. Rather like Apple used to be.
it could be read as underlining the importance of controlling the output of greenhouse gases by technical civilization. The greenhouse gases are not just capturing more of the available solar radiation, they may be capturing more of the INCREASING solar radiation. Consequently, this would indicate that it is more important than ever to control greenhouse output. Facts are not apologist crap. Interpretations however may be.
Certainly looks like some sources disagree. Of course it also highlights the confused nature of some of these issues. As far as Jefferson's views about revolution are concerned, remember who he was. As the author of the Bill of Rights, you can get a very clear idea that he did not really trust government much, if at all.
Also, I rather suspect that if you really though that it is legitimate to compare Hoover and Jefferson, then perhaps you also trust Bush, Ashcroft, Rice and Rumsfeld to know what they are doing. You may also believe that US media give you fair and unbiased reportage.
The Barbary "pirates" were generally commanded by admirals (Reis) or lesser naval officers. What I have read indicates that the "pirates" were simply the respective navies of the various small states along the north coast enforcing the tribute requirements of the local governments. They were not independent operators and their vessels were not privately owned. Infact, while we treated with the individual city-states and regional governments, they were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, which included Algiers and Tunisia by the end of the 17th century. The Ottomans were pretty lax in the region though. Tunisia and Algiers declared war on the US, and the reason we "brought war to them," to steal your phrase, is because Jefferson and his successors did not wish to pay tribute to the states of the Barbary Coast. The use of the term "pirates" is in part an attempt to lower the standing of the little states involved in the view of the populace and politicians of the US. Remember that even Jefferson's government was trying to negotiate the terms of a tribute sytem with Tunisia and Algiers, while TJ himself was rabidly opposed to the very idea ('course the present situation would piss him no end. He advocated the right to keep and bear arms as a soveriegn cure for politicians, and preyed that the US would never go 20 years without a revolution). No, the Barbary war really was a war with real states. They were penny-ante states, who could not really militarily threaten much more than merchant shipping. They were in no sense a parallel to the al Qaeda, though you could make a case for them resembling the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which was a pretty chicken-manure outfit.
This man lost his rights as a US citizen when he traveled overseas and conspired with a foreign government to harm the United States.
Which foreign government would that be? If he was conspiring with a foreign government, this was treason. If he was conspiring with terrorists, he is a criminal.
Jeeze, logging in to/. part way through composing a comment can be a mistake.
To conclude the forgoing, the author to whom I was commenting should probably dig a little deeper and be more careful with his choice of examples. The Barbary pirates were acting legally within the view of the governments that they served. They were not private, civilian criminals. The barbary pirates operated from military ships belonging to the navies of the respective Barbary states. The pirates WERE part of the respective navies. The states themselves were actually the "pirates." So aside from being Muslim, there is no parallel between the Barbary Pirates and the al Qaeda.
Barbary Pirates... were acting within the view point of the governments of the small states along the coast of North Africa (Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, etc.). These governments regarded the "pirates" as a legitimate and important source of revenue from tribute, plunder, ransom and slaves. They were essentially privateers "legally" operating against shipping that traversed waters claimed by their governments. Most Eurpopean states who shipped in the Mediterranean basin paid tribute to the Barbary governments. These are not the same as real pirates operating in the Carribean and elsewhere, who were acknowledge outlaws. The US lost a frigate in the Barbary conflict and it was not lost to "pirates." The Bary war WAS waged with established governments. The fact they were feudal and unlike the contemporary European governments doesn't change that.
War actually was declared by Tripoli against the US. That is WHY the "shores of Tripoli" are mentioned in the Marine Corps anthem. The piracy was ended when treaties were signed between the US and presentatives of the Barbary states including Algiers. SO, perhaps
Or perhaps it just shows their willingness to admit that some of their past actions (i.e. supporting Linux) led in large part to their current slow death.
Their current slow death is due to their deeply ingrained lack of focus. They had one of the best installers applied to one of the worst distros of Linux. Did they improve their distro? Not hardly. Caldera has also grabbed up a DOS orphan, as well as SCO and the rights to one branch of the unix tree. They never have been able to settle down and do one thing right for very long. Changing their minds could have been a good idea. The old ones never were up to snuff. Unfortunately they apparently traded down.
of the ONLY great game ever turned out for OS/2. StarDock was originally supplied apps for OS/2. One - not a game - provided multiple desktops and otherwise took great advantage of the object oriented nature of the os. GC was multithreaded and had a vicious AI. GC also earned a Game of the Year Award at one point. Great news.
Exactly so. I noticed that the former Commander-in-chief was also quoted this week as being concerned that a move in Iraq by the US would move us into the colonial business for the first time. He does not think this is a good idea. Of course he is also considering running against Bush.
are not a new problem at the US Patent Office. Just one example is that there were many patents issued for nearly non-existent modifications to the basic ceramic tube insulator that was used in structural wiring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, they were issued for the addition of trivial details like tiny, paired projections that "locked" the tube in place. More than one patent was issued for very slightly different variations on this idea.
really tends to be a hegemonic power rather than a colonial one. You can say we colonized the portion of North America we occupy and the Hawaiian Islands and very little else. Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the Ottoman Turks, were all big colonial powers at one time or another. Following the Spanish-American war we took over the administration of the Phillipines and some Caribbean islands such as Puerto Rico, but we did not colonize them in any logical sense. Nor has the US ever "colonized" any part of Africa. The nearest to that would have been the establishment of the nation of Liberia.
As far as eastern Europe is concerned, it was a mess before there WAS a US. The idea that the US could "help" there is wishful thinking. The Ottmans created that problem, just as Britain, France and Germany finished off the job for the Ottomans in the Middle East, creating the present hodge podge of borders. Even so, you can't track back through the region's (or the world's) history and point to some time when things were right. The idea is wishful thinking.
Specs from Moller's pages indicate that the vehicle is equipped with two parachutes that should be able to bring the entire vehicle down safely. The idea of providing entire aircraft with parachutes was originally explored I believe in a Scientific American article that argued that it was quite feasible to equip most aircraft with sets of parachutes that could bring a disabled craft down safely.
I wasn't actually thinking that you were indicating your ox was being gored. My impression was that your sources might be seriously misleading you. Fossils, as I said, come in a lot of different conditions. If they did not occasionally occur in very high quality, we wouldn't have a clue that the Archaeopteryx, for example, was feathered. I can't off hand recall the deposits in Europe where the earliest "bird" was discovered, but it is the Jura Mountains district in Germany(?) I think. Some of the material recovered there is amazing. Provided that the animal was quickly buried, the matrix is fine grained (clay to fine grained silt), and tectonics have mangled the landscape, even large animal fossils can offer amazing preservation. The Ichthyosaur Park includes an example of an adult female that died giving birth. Thus we know that they gave live birth. High quality preservation may be unusual, but not inordinately so. The worst preserved examples are usually the really large animals that have undergone serious taphonomic changes before they stabilzed. So, if the scream of fraud was your scepticism, my apologies. Scepticism is good and little salt are good. However, you may be worrying pointlessly.
Fossils come in all kinds of states. The condition depends pretty much on the geological history of the region in which the deposit was located, the nature of the burial environment and post-burial events (insects and scavenging animals working the corpse). Having an NPR talking-head make an asinine statment like "fossils are very difficult to put together" screams "media meister with foot-in-mouth disease" to me. Besides which, anyone can look at the images on the Nature site and see that the fossil in question IS in several pieces.
The difficulty in assembling a fossil is USUALLY associated with the obstacles that size and disarticulation place on the "interpretation" of the skeleton. You have all, or at least a lot of the bones of a monstrous therapod, but there are two-hundred odd not counting fragments, all laid out on the museum's curation room floor. How do you relate them? Do you have sufficient skeletal material to make informed reconstructions of missing parts? Do you even know what you are doing?
One famous incidence of this problem was a nineteenth century reconstruction of a Brontosaurid. The lead scientist worked from living reptiles and decided the posture would look like a monstrous crocodilian or monitor lizard (hey it was a reptile after all) with the legs out to the sides and the belly on or near the ground. He was congratualated by a colleague for successfully showing why dinosaurs became extinct - they died from the pain of those disarticulated joints. I think this little contrempts may be described in *The Hotblooded Dinosaurs* if you want to read about it.
If you compare this with the Chinese find, the animal is much smaller, only a meter long. Consequently, the find can be removed in a few small pieces, rather than excavating indvidual bones and bring round the pickup. The skeleton is articulated so well that all the bones are in situ. Scarcely any assembly is required.
If you compare the quality and detail of the skeleton, it is quite similar to finds made in parts Europe, and about which there was an article in National Geographic a few years back. The archaeopteryx was in similar condition and quality when it was discovered at a European site. The European and presumably the Chinese sites are in very fine grained shale or mudstone that has under gone minimal deformation. The bodies were buried quickly and the environment was anaerobic so that decay was slow and sufficiently incomplete to leave stains associated with trace impressions from the feathers. In other areas, notably in South America casts of dinosaur skin have been recovered. Pterosuars have been discovered so well preserved that what appears to be fur or fur- like feathers is visible.
One other thought. In paleontology, archaeology, and related professions, fraud has often been screamed because someone's favorite ox (theory, religious belief, doctrine, etc.) had been gored by an unanticipated discovery.
Maybe he will be thinking differently the next time the WAAS dependent plane he is in misses the runway because some berk, following his how-to has started GPS jamming near the airport. I have heard of the thick before, but... wow!
Just how is it that I talked about MS like it was fecal material? Did you read what I wrote? I argued that there is nothing inconsistent about what appeared in those slides and MS own arguments, posted on their own pages, administered by their own sysadmins.
They don't like GPL and go to great lengths to explain why. They are honest enough to delineate a fairly self serving attitude which you would hope for from a succesfull company. You may or may not agree with their argument. Personally, I consider it close to theft to take something paid for through taxes and use it to turn a profit without making the part paid for by public money available freely to the people who paid for it.
They also state that the GPL has GOOD points for some, such as individuals developing stand alone projects and for some small companies.
I don't happen to like their reasoning because it really isn't reasoning, just a motivating view point. It pretty much says they want to take work developed with tax dollars and sell it back to those self-same tax payers (you and I that is). Just how is that FUD, or do you even know what those letters stand for?
In fact, had many of the doubters looked through the slides they would have found an MS webpage URL on the last one. Checking this URL shows that it is indeed an MS page. Currently it redirects directly to a page on "shared source" and licensing that includes a pointer to a word doc covering MS's analysis of the GPL.
The slides are a dumbed-down, idiot's version of the longer discussion and look to be developed for marketing presentations - probably directed toward upper management types considering the pros and cons of the issues. The slides present a view that the GPL is probably good for some (individuals, small developers) but bad for business and "innovation."
One implication is that if code is GPL'd, companies can't grab it (e.g. government produced data and software) and then proceed to profit freely from releasing it through closed licensing schemes protected by the DMCA. Innovation seems in the context to consist of taking ideas and data from tax-dollar funded sources (academia and gov't) and passing it on to the customer, efectively making the user pay twice for the right to use the product. There is nothing revolutionary or self-evidently out character for MS in the slides except perhaps an unusually "liberal" view of OSS, and a blundering failure to appropriately present the "ecology" of innovation
...suspended in air will make a nice little flash too. My mother was heard to wonder how all the burn marks got into the kitchen table cloth - paper bag, put small amount powdered sugar in bag, shake well and immediately toss in fire place. Lucky we didn't burn the house down actually.
Indeed it did. The tree view of the history not only showed every page you had visited, it indicated through the tree structure how you navigated to a specific page. The browser was great, but most users were pushing for a version of Netscape rather than asking for the enhancements that would have allowed it to compete more freely.
Slashdot Mirror
You can go back to really old space operas like E.E.Smith's Lensman stories. Smith proposes several life forms that exist only partially in this 3-D existence of ours. Then, A.E.Merritt's dweller in the Moon Pool (1919) was both artificial and not bound by 3-space and neither were its makers. Many Scifi authors do seem to shrink from going to far into the unknown.
... those socks that vanish every time I do laundry have to go somewhere.
I kind of doubt that Linux will overtake MS anytime soon on the desktop. That said, if apps developers are bailing out of Windows, to develope server stuff on Linux, perhaps the near future may see a MS vs. everyone else world. Rather like Apple used to be.
it could be read as underlining the importance of controlling the output of greenhouse gases by technical civilization. The greenhouse gases are not just capturing more of the available solar radiation, they may be capturing more of the INCREASING solar radiation. Consequently, this would indicate that it is more important than ever to control greenhouse output. Facts are not apologist crap. Interpretations however may be.
Certainly looks like some sources disagree. Of course it also highlights the confused nature of some of these issues. As far as Jefferson's views about revolution are concerned, remember who he was. As the author of the Bill of Rights, you can get a very clear idea that he did not really trust government much, if at all.
Also, I rather suspect that if you really though that it is legitimate to compare Hoover and Jefferson, then perhaps you also trust Bush, Ashcroft, Rice and Rumsfeld to know what they are doing. You may also believe that US media give you fair and unbiased reportage.
The Barbary "pirates" were generally commanded by admirals (Reis) or lesser naval officers. What I have read indicates that the "pirates" were simply the respective navies of the various small states along the north coast enforcing the tribute requirements of the local governments. They were not independent operators and their vessels were not privately owned. Infact, while we treated with the individual city-states and regional governments, they were under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, which included Algiers and Tunisia by the end of the 17th century. The Ottomans were pretty lax in the region though. Tunisia and Algiers declared war on the US, and the reason we "brought war to them," to steal your phrase, is because Jefferson and his successors did not wish to pay tribute to the states of the Barbary Coast. The use of the term "pirates" is in part an attempt to lower the standing of the little states involved in the view of the populace and politicians of the US. Remember that even Jefferson's government was trying to negotiate the terms of a tribute sytem with Tunisia and Algiers, while TJ himself was rabidly opposed to the very idea ('course the present situation would piss him no end. He advocated the right to keep and bear arms as a soveriegn cure for politicians, and preyed that the US would never go 20 years without a revolution). No, the Barbary war really was a war with real states. They were penny-ante states, who could not really militarily threaten much more than merchant shipping. They were in no sense a parallel to the al Qaeda, though you could make a case for them resembling the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which was a pretty chicken-manure outfit.
This man lost his rights as a US citizen when he traveled overseas and conspired with a foreign government to harm the United States.
Which foreign government would that be? If he was conspiring with a foreign government, this was treason. If he was conspiring with terrorists, he is a criminal.
Jeeze, logging in to /. part way through composing a comment can be a mistake.
To conclude the forgoing, the author to whom I was commenting should probably dig a little deeper and be more careful with his choice of examples. The Barbary pirates were acting legally within the view of the governments that they served. They were not private, civilian criminals. The barbary pirates operated from military ships belonging to the navies of the respective Barbary states. The pirates WERE part of the respective navies. The states themselves were actually the "pirates." So aside from being Muslim, there is no parallel between the Barbary Pirates and the al Qaeda.
Barbary Pirates ... were acting within the view point of the governments of the small states along the coast of North Africa (Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, etc.). These governments regarded the "pirates" as a legitimate and important source of revenue from tribute, plunder, ransom and slaves. They were essentially privateers "legally" operating against shipping that traversed waters claimed by their governments. Most Eurpopean states who shipped in the Mediterranean basin paid tribute to the Barbary governments. These are not the same as real pirates operating in the Carribean and elsewhere, who were acknowledge outlaws. The US lost a frigate in the Barbary conflict and it was not lost to "pirates." The Bary war WAS waged with established governments. The fact they were feudal and unlike the contemporary European governments doesn't change that.
War actually was declared by Tripoli against the US. That is WHY the "shores of Tripoli" are mentioned in the Marine Corps anthem. The piracy was ended when treaties were signed between the US and presentatives of the Barbary states including Algiers. SO, perhaps
Or perhaps it just shows their willingness to admit that some of their past actions (i.e. supporting Linux) led in large part to their current slow death.
Their current slow death is due to their deeply ingrained lack of focus. They had one of the best installers applied to one of the worst distros of Linux. Did they improve their distro? Not hardly. Caldera has also grabbed up a DOS orphan, as well as SCO and the rights to one branch of the unix tree. They never have been able to settle down and do one thing right for very long. Changing their minds could have been a good idea. The old ones never were up to snuff. Unfortunately they apparently traded down.
of the ONLY great game ever turned out for OS/2. StarDock was originally supplied apps for OS/2. One - not a game - provided multiple desktops and otherwise took great advantage of the object oriented nature of the os. GC was multithreaded and had a vicious AI. GC also earned a Game of the Year Award at one point. Great news.
SO, you are saying we should swallow this bitter pill because it will give Apple a shot in the arm?
Exactly so. I noticed that the former Commander-in-chief was also quoted this week as being concerned that a move in Iraq by the US would move us into the colonial business for the first time. He does not think this is a good idea. Of course he is also considering running against Bush.
are not a new problem at the US Patent Office. Just one example is that there were many patents issued for nearly non-existent modifications to the basic ceramic tube insulator that was used in structural wiring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, they were issued for the addition of trivial details like tiny, paired projections that "locked" the tube in place. More than one patent was issued for very slightly different variations on this idea.
really tends to be a hegemonic power rather than a colonial one. You can say we colonized the portion of North America we occupy and the Hawaiian Islands and very little else. Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, the Ottoman Turks, were all big colonial powers at one time or another. Following the Spanish-American war we took over the administration of the Phillipines and some Caribbean islands such as Puerto Rico, but we did not colonize them in any logical sense. Nor has the US ever "colonized" any part of Africa. The nearest to that would have been the establishment of the nation of Liberia.
As far as eastern Europe is concerned, it was a mess before there WAS a US. The idea that the US could "help" there is wishful thinking. The Ottmans created that problem, just as Britain, France and Germany finished off the job for the Ottomans in the Middle East, creating the present hodge podge of borders. Even so, you can't track back through the region's (or the world's) history and point to some time when things were right. The idea is wishful thinking.
Specs from Moller's pages indicate that the vehicle is equipped with two parachutes that should be able to bring the entire vehicle down safely. The idea of providing entire aircraft with parachutes was originally explored I believe in a Scientific American article that argued that it was quite feasible to equip most aircraft with sets of parachutes that could bring a disabled craft down safely.
...and tectonics have mangled the landscape, ...
That should have read "...tectonics have not mangled the landscape..." Aging mind and fingers out of sinc.
I wasn't actually thinking that you were indicating your ox was being gored. My impression was that your sources might be seriously misleading you. Fossils, as I said, come in a lot of different conditions. If they did not occasionally occur in very high quality, we wouldn't have a clue that the Archaeopteryx, for example, was feathered. I can't off hand recall the deposits in Europe where the earliest "bird" was discovered, but it is the Jura Mountains district in Germany(?) I think. Some of the material recovered there is amazing. Provided that the animal was quickly buried, the matrix is fine grained (clay to fine grained silt), and tectonics have mangled the landscape, even large animal fossils can offer amazing preservation. The Ichthyosaur Park includes an example of an adult female that died giving birth. Thus we know that they gave live birth. High quality preservation may be unusual, but not inordinately so. The worst preserved examples are usually the really large animals that have undergone serious taphonomic changes before they stabilzed. So, if the scream of fraud was your scepticism, my apologies. Scepticism is good and little salt are good. However, you may be worrying pointlessly.
Fossils come in all kinds of states. The condition depends pretty much on the geological history of the region in which the deposit was located, the nature of the burial environment and post-burial events (insects and scavenging animals working the corpse). Having an NPR talking-head make an asinine statment like "fossils are very difficult to put together" screams "media meister with foot-in-mouth disease" to me. Besides which, anyone can look at the images on the Nature site and see that the fossil in question IS in several pieces.
The difficulty in assembling a fossil is USUALLY associated with the obstacles that size and disarticulation place on the "interpretation" of the skeleton. You have all, or at least a lot of the bones of a monstrous therapod, but there are two-hundred odd not counting fragments, all laid out on the museum's curation room floor. How do you relate them? Do you have sufficient skeletal material to make informed reconstructions of missing parts? Do you even know what you are doing?
One famous incidence of this problem was a nineteenth century reconstruction of a Brontosaurid. The lead scientist worked from living reptiles and decided the posture would look like a monstrous crocodilian or monitor lizard (hey it was a reptile after all) with the legs out to the sides and the belly on or near the ground. He was congratualated by a colleague for successfully showing why dinosaurs became extinct - they died from the pain of those disarticulated joints. I think this little contrempts may be described in *The Hotblooded Dinosaurs* if you want to read about it.
If you compare this with the Chinese find, the animal is much smaller, only a meter long. Consequently, the find can be removed in a few small pieces, rather than excavating indvidual bones and bring round the pickup. The skeleton is articulated so well that all the bones are in situ. Scarcely any assembly is required.
If you compare the quality and detail of the skeleton, it is quite similar to finds made in parts Europe, and about which there was an article in National Geographic a few years back. The archaeopteryx was in similar condition and quality when it was discovered at a European site. The European and presumably the Chinese sites are in very fine grained shale or mudstone that has under gone minimal deformation. The bodies were buried quickly and the environment was anaerobic so that decay was slow and sufficiently incomplete to leave stains associated with trace impressions from the feathers. In other areas, notably in South America casts of dinosaur skin have been recovered. Pterosuars have been discovered so well preserved that what appears to be fur or fur- like feathers is visible.
One other thought. In paleontology, archaeology, and related professions, fraud has often been screamed because someone's favorite ox (theory, religious belief, doctrine, etc.) had been gored by an unanticipated discovery.
Maybe he will be thinking differently the next time the WAAS dependent plane he is in misses the runway because some berk, following his how-to has started GPS jamming near the airport. I have heard of the thick before, but ... wow!
Just how is it that I talked about MS like it was fecal material? Did you read what I wrote? I argued that there is nothing inconsistent about what appeared in those slides and MS own arguments, posted on their own pages, administered by their own sysadmins.
They don't like GPL and go to great lengths to explain why. They are honest enough to delineate a fairly self serving attitude which you would hope for from a succesfull company. You may or may not agree with their argument. Personally, I consider it close to theft to take something paid for through taxes and use it to turn a profit without making the part paid for by public money available freely to the people who paid for it.
They also state that the GPL has GOOD points for some, such as individuals developing stand alone projects and for some small companies.
I don't happen to like their reasoning because it really isn't reasoning, just a motivating view point. It pretty much says they want to take work developed with tax dollars and sell it back to those self-same tax payers (you and I that is). Just how is that FUD, or do you even know what those letters stand for?
In fact, had many of the doubters looked through the slides they would have found an MS webpage URL on the last one. Checking this URL shows that it is indeed an MS page. Currently it redirects directly to a page on "shared source" and licensing that includes a pointer to a word doc covering MS's analysis of the GPL.
The slides are a dumbed-down, idiot's version of the longer discussion and look to be developed for marketing presentations - probably directed toward upper management types considering the pros and cons of the issues. The slides present a view that the GPL is probably good for some (individuals, small developers) but bad for business and "innovation."
One implication is that if code is GPL'd, companies can't grab it (e.g. government produced data and software) and then proceed to profit freely from releasing it through closed licensing schemes protected by the DMCA. Innovation seems in the context to consist of taking ideas and data from tax-dollar funded sources (academia and gov't) and passing it on to the customer, efectively making the user pay twice for the right to use the product. There is nothing revolutionary or self-evidently out character for MS in the slides except perhaps an unusually "liberal" view of OSS, and a blundering failure to appropriately present the "ecology" of innovation
...suspended in air will make a nice little flash too. My mother was heard to wonder how all the burn marks got into the kitchen table cloth - paper bag, put small amount powdered sugar in bag, shake well and immediately toss in fire place. Lucky we didn't burn the house down actually.
Indeed it did. The tree view of the history not only showed every page you had visited, it indicated through the tree structure how you navigated to a specific page. The browser was great, but most users were pushing for a version of Netscape rather than asking for the enhancements that would have allowed it to compete more freely.
.... a "none of the above" choice.