I am not at all convinced that there are such things as "natural" rights, especially inalienable ones. Constitutional rights are another issue and far more deserving of defense. On the other hand, as a statment of an ideal of equality, then "rights" become essential in understanding just how equal an idealist thinks we should be.
Ease of use may be far more a matter of training and experience than of design.
I think that the preference of key board versus mouse and GUI is more a generational (and "retro") issue than anything else. Those of us who started out with CP/M or some other of the older command line systems are often still more comfortable using a command line. Some of the younger users and hackers also prefer the command line, especially if they really know the commands and switches they are using, in which case, typing can be faster than sight hunting, clicking, and executing.
When it comes down to it, the habits and assumptions we pick up through experience bias our preferences and choices. If you are used to Windows, it is simply a matter of pulling down the right screens and picking the right settings. But, although there is no functional difference, the same user may feel that typing in switches at the command line is obscure and confusing, even though there is no less demand to know what you are doing in the GUI than at the command line.
At the same time, while GUIs, windows, buttons, scrolling pick-lists, and switches seem quite simple once you are used to them, to a command line user, they can be a consumate PTA. You may feel you have to visually check ALL of the settings to find the right ones rather than type in just the ones of interest.
The whole argument is beside the point. Various distros now detect new hardware and generally will install the drivers, if they are available. You can also, in SuSE and in Mandrake, use a hardware probe to locate new hardware and enable it. It will even work better than W2k's hardware install much of the time. W2K still won't recognize my USB modem regardless of driver installs and careful following of instructions far more complex than three linux commands, and linux doesn't REQUIRE the reboot. The difficulty depends greatly on the hardware, the driver, and the software you plan to use. Linux utilities for CD burning still assume a scsi device, consequently an ATAPI cdrw is aliased as/dev/sr*. This will go away when someone decides the older utilities are nolonger "good enough."
It looks to me as if you missed Ian's point. The only really viable data - from the RIAA itself - indicates a very clear gain for the labels during the heyday of Napster. In other words, sharing sells CDs. It also sells books and other forms of content as well, but that's irrelevant.
As you say the labels are very scared, but not because of the idea that some how the internet will displace them from the market. Remember, Napster made money for them. What they fear is that with time ARTISTS will abandon them. Labels control artists. With the internet and available recording technology any serious artist can begin to build their own "label" and burn and market their own CDS without being subject to contracts that are so thieving they would make Fagin proud. Without artists, the swimming pools dry up, the Mercedes run out of gas, and the estates become low income housing. The members of the RIAA have to get real jobs.
True science is much more humble and unpretensious, eager to discover truth through the metrics of usefulness(1). At least it should be.
I would not go THAT far. If scientists were particularly humble, we would still be in the Middle Ages. I would say that scientists in general have to be not only egotisitical enough that they believe they can identify an issue of nature or society, but that they can also explain it, AND defend their explanation on the assumption that is as good as any and better than most. In this sense the process of science is quite Darwinian and the property of "utility" is the locality upon which selection operates.
No, there has to be plenty of ego in science. In fact, I suggest that key themes in stories like Frankenstein are founded upon the common social distrust of such egoism. But then, I like to think I do science and that I do it as well as most;-).
The orignial post was not talking about radio carbon dating, which could not have been applied. Radio carbon dating is limited in usefulness to the later Pleistocene. As regards secular variation and the other sources of error in radio carbon dating, well, that is why tree ring calibration was developed. It enhances accuracy considerably. Even so, youn still mistake the point regarding theory. Theory justifies methods. Dates used in geology, paleontology, and archaeology (except for speaking engagements and dinner) are based upon methods, which in turn are based upon theory. The theory can be falsified or modified, which will alter the methods and any dates dependent upon them. You don't "falsify" dates.
For example the original half-life of radio carbon was underestimated resulting in systematically under-estimating ages and dates. Calendrical calibration from old world sites was consistently in conflict with radiocarbon dates and ultimately lead to improved physics of radiocarbon.
Variation in radio carbon saturation in the atmosphere is a different problem. Since the amount of new radio carbon is a product solar weather, there are significant random variations from year to year and apparently across larger time spans as well. As you mentioned, during the period from about 2500 to 2000 years ago there some big variations that effect the use of radio carbon. These were found because of tree ring calibrations carried out with wood from the bristlecone pine. But, and this is somthing that seems to always pass under "creation science" radar, prior to the Reformation, ALL corrections to radio carbon dates have tended to yield OLDER dates. After the Reformation, the Seuss effect begins to come into play as fossil carbon from coal and later from oil dilute atmospheric radio carbon, artificially aging modern radio carbon dates. Then, finally, with the advent of atomic weapons testing, there is a brief period when there is an enhancement of atmospheric radio carbon, which at least partially offsets the Seuss effect.
The bottom line is still that you don't falsify dates. You have to falsify the theory that justified the methods, which in turn yielded the dates. And no one outside of "creation science" should argue that such methodologically based dates are "absolute in the calendrical sense, which happens to be the strawman argument that cs employs when attempting to befuddle and bewilder their audiences.
Now, to be fair, you DO encounter the terms: "calendrical," "absolute," and "relative" dates in archaeological literature. The usage derives from trying to differentiate between extremely different approaches to dating in archaeology. One approach is based upon historical, calendrical data (Biblical dates, Egyptian dates, Mayan dates etc.) With some exceptions, these are considered unarguable - there is no means by which they could be wrong, or so one might think. There are however serious discrepancies between Egyptian and Biblical dates that apparently cannot be reconciled. In China and Egypt whole segments of history have been concealed or deleted from most records. Calendrical dates are therefore known to have problems and there is no stated error margin that can give you an estimate of accuracy. You hope the historian you are depending upon is not lying. You hope that the corrections you are using to convert from calendar another are not mistaken.
"Relative" dates are based upon known stratigraphic relationships of various materials in other archaeological sites. This allows us to "relatively" date our site because using methods such as seriation and intersite comparisons, the relative age of a site compared to others can be guessed.
You will find archaeologists referring to geochemical dates as "absolute," but this means that the date can't change without a change in the theory upon which the date is based, or new methods that better implement the implications of the theory. And, since the archaeologist is "absolutely" dependent upon some else's arithmetic . . . However, texts, such as Martha Joukowsky's, that use the term also warn about the error margins that geochemical dates are subject to. So "absolute" is not being applied in an "absolute" sense.
This is in direct contrast to your garden variety creationist telling you absolutely that the earth was created in 6,000 BC, on October 23, at 9:00 AM. The term "absolute" is being used in profoundly different ways and the creationist will not be offering any error margins. Before there can be any legitimate discussion between such different views, there has to be some aggreement upon language.
Speaking as an archaeologist, it was NOT an archaeological find. The pertinent fields are paleobotany and paleontology. Archaeology deals with human traces and the remains of human activities. The events discussed in the article relate to a period long before there were any homonids, let alone any humans. I realize many bookstores shelve dinosaur books right there alongside archaeological books, but that is merely a failing in modern education.
The idea that geological dating methods are "unfalsifiable" is a view pushed by "Creation Science" - an "oxymaroon". Besides being the darling idea of Creationists and "young earthers," the idea happens to be based upon assumptions about science and geology that are either wrong or straw-man arguments. Geological dating methods are methodologoically justified estimates based upon empirical observation and generalization. They are not theories. If you do not like the dates and have some reason for challenging them, go out, collect the necessary data and offer your own estimate. Charles Lyell could do it; so can you. Geological dates are not considered absolute by anyone who produces or uses them. That is a practice only encountered in politics and religion.
If you want to know more about the crater, point a search engine - google is good - at "K-T boundary Yucatan" and you will receive many pointers to large numbers of web pages. The name of the crater, BTW, is "Chicxulub."
It's interesting to consider the issues about this. I had never considered that vegetation populations would be slow to recover from the K-T event. You would think that after the primary dust load had settled, vegetation would start to rebound. That would imply no more than decades for the earliest paleocene plant communities to begin to re-form. The most successfull early colonists would be forms that were not dependent upon external polinators. There would be a period following where plant populations partially dependent upon animal and insect vectors to spread and reproduce waited until the necessary vectors appeared, or the plant species adapted or became fully extinct.
OS/2 is still my favorite OS in many ways. Until I could switch pretty much constantly to Linux, OS/2 was the word in stability from my view point. The HPFS was also outstanding. The installation and back-stepping were excellent, better than WinME by leagues. The GUI was incredibly flexible; I used to use Stardock's OfficeDesktop which wasn't comparable to any thing available for Windows after CentralPoint went away. The scripting language, Rexx, is great - though I have to admit liking dBase programming as well.
MS used lots of code written forOS/2 in the early versions of NT. As late as 3.51 you could list system files in NT and find the "OS2" string in many of their names. When OS/2 first came out IBM was still trying to recover from the embarassment of inventing the open system design and making it possible for PC clones to capture a large part of IBM's market share. IBM further protected themselves from accusations of monopoly by pricing their OS, development and hardware systems well beyond what any sane person would spend.
However, for a brief, golden moment, wiser heads were - well not exactly dominant - at IBM and they started releasing OS/2 at more reasonable prices and shifting from the presentation manager to the Work Place Shell. By the time that OS/2 2.* and later, OS/2 3.0 (Warp) came out, MS was worried that OS/2 would compete successfully with NT. However, OS/2 was best compared with Win95 (whose lunch it could easily eat). Without the internet capabilities of Warp, which automatically set up network connections during installation, and introduced desktop network connection and URL link icons, MS users would still probably be stuck with the glorified MS bulletin board service that originally came with Win95.
Probably even more interesting and strange are the polar switches. The article implies that switches are infrequent, but from my geology classes I seem to recall that there is a polar swap every time the field drops to zero, which seems to be going to be happening again soon (within a few millenia). I would realy like to know whether the reactor theory can handle the polar switches as well as the on again, off again pattern.
...from what I've read, studies have shown that societies go through stages in terms of pollution.
Unfortunately, just as anyone can appropriately argue that our time base for climate studies is too short to say that industrial civilization causes global warming, it is also really impossible to talk about cyclic patterns in complex societies. There haven't been that many of them, and ours is the only one that has been conscious of chemical and physical pollution as an issue of survival.
Another "fact" that is often stated but can't be proven is that the present global warming trends are outside natural rates. In fact, at the end of the last glacial, things may very well have been changing as fast as the present temperature shifts. Current information suggests that shifts from "glacial" to "interstadial" climatic conditions may happen in a matter of years. Other changes were also happening on a grand scale as continental ice sheets melted and tremendous amounts of fresh water entered marine ecosystems.
I regard myself as a conservative too, registered republican, though more of a libertarian bent these days. I can see very little difference between Bush and Gore, and I believe that the Bush - Gore election was the worst catastrophe to the US and to constitutional government since Income Tax. I suspect that in the choice offered between Bush and Gore, US politics finally achieved the least common political denominator.
I was actually joking (obviously due to 9/11 obscure humour has become bad karma;-)) and rather doubt that the Bush administration could really be stupid. Instead, they are testing the limits of executive privelege and accountability and how far the US can be pushed toward giving up constitutional freedoms in the name of security. "Homeland security" has a dreadful ring to it that would catch the ear of both Adolf Hitler and Stalin. Saddam Hussein is probably telling his people the phrase was plagiarized from him. I see the US party system gradually decaying into unreasoning partisanship where the core leadership of the major parties is demanding a "my party right or wrong" view.
The author of the parent article argued in a response to comments that one particular area where he thought OS was the wrong way to go was in government software requirements. The author implied that to get adequate software for government purpose, the government should go with closed source software. My feeling is that this is outright stupidity. For years the federal government assumed that for most government products the public had ALREADY paid for the right to the data, service, or product. As a result Soil Conservation Service county reports were (and still are) free. USGS topo maps were of minimal cost, largely just covering printing. Recently there has been a decline in the availablilty of quality government information due to the fallacious argument that private sector entities could do things better. Sometimes this is true, but by and large even when it is, the private sector costs for equivalent products are much higher than government sources are or were. This shuts out large sectors of the public from products, which if produced by the government, would be readily available as long as the government reasoned that paying taxes paid for the product.
An example of a government initiated software product that was not only free, but was also open source is GRASS (Geographic Analysis Support System). Developed originally by the US Army Corps of Engineers, GRASS was released to public domain. The USACE is no longer involved in the development GRASS, having apparently surrendered to pressure to use private sector software.
GRASS remains the most available GIS analysis system for most people since it really is free, open-source software. Private sector (closed source) software of equivalent power (ArcInfo, MapInfo, MicroImages TNTmips, etc.)costs thousands of dollars and usually requires a hardware key. GRASS compares favorably in raw power with any commerical product. It is presently more opaque to learners but is improving quickly thanks to an active development community. It also supports more platforms than any of the commercial products.
The UnitedLinux group plans to release a source-only/wo binaries. The OS movement opposes binary-only software/wo source. I usually dl source versions and compile - and I am just a user. Compiling seems to suit my system resulting in fewer problems and a better idea of how things are working. Even the dimmest of us users can generally dope out how to compile a program or an entire package of them given an adequate documentation of the necessary steps - check out GRASS as an example. What was the problem here?
Are you sure you are Canadian, or are you an emigrant from the U. S. A.? The half-baked, uninformed, ignorant diatribe you posted is an embarrassment to those of us Americans with Canadian parents and relatives. Next time try doing a web search for the topic BEFORE ingesting your foot. More nutritious and easier to swallow too. The Canadian-French-Hawaii telescope is real and is named just as the OP sent.
The older explosive ordinance was packed with black powder and fused so that it would ignite when fired from a gun. The problem with black powder is that while wet, it is perfectly safe. When it dries out it is unstable. I have participated in archaeological monitoring where the UEO guys were working to locate and safe ammunition ranging in age from Viet Nam War back to the Civil War. That ammunition occasionally still contained black powder that WOULD detonate (actually deflagrate I suppose) when dry. "Ancient exploding cannon balls" could very well ruin your whole day if not treated with some real respect.
The "review" provides a remarkably useless screen image of the "preferences" or setup screens for the three browsers of choice.
Regarding Opera, he reviews the "static" build which has a download about twice as large as the "shared." I registered Opera years ago. It has always been superior to IE with multiple pages displayed, speed, and price, since the "adware" ads are pretty much indistinguishable from the eye clutter on the standard web page these days any way. However, for less than $40 you can still let MS know there is web software that is really worth the price. It is worth noting that many of us who use Opera register it. The company has survived in a market where ALL the competition is free, which I believe really speaks to the browser's quality.
The biggest Opera handicap is programmers of secure webpages that test for browser versions rather than available security services and send you messages to "upgrade" to something more secure - like IE.
Regarding IE, there was an article on CNET a couple of months ago where the writer, Robert Vamosi, asserted that IE had an increasingly dated interface due to the appearance of tabbed browing (which was pioneered by Opera.)
They are afraid that technology will make them redundant. Once a music consumer can go directly to the musicians they like at a price they like, the Labels and RIAA have to go back to working for a living. The potential technology offers makes them twits indeed.
I suspect that what Labels fear is the loss of their stables of musicians and their markets. It is NOT misunderstanding of the technology that moves them. Historically economics have shown that middle-men can skim the cream off of transactions, and that the middle tends to be the place where wealth has the greatest potential for concetration. The history of railroads like the Central/Southern Pacific for instance, and the Teamsters Union as a couple of examples, reflect the potential for profiting from positioning yourself in the middle of a transaction.
The internet and the availability of high quality, digital, recording gear means that independent artists could potentially by-pass Lables entirely. The conmbination could create a direct producerconsumer relation that has no "label" in the middle. Because of this the labels and the RIAA have taken advantage of the recent recession-like economy's effects on their profits to attack a potential source of competition they fear. They know their arguments are horse manure. The proof of this is that they are emphasizing attacks on technology, not the "pirates." The "pirates" here are their market after all. Far from "misunderstanding" technology, they fear it.
I believe you missed the entire point of the entire debate. Labels decide who will be successful, and when their success will end during the normal course of things. So your - and most other small groups - hopes are pretty slim regardless because the odds that a "label" might notice you are next to zero. Not to mention that as a musician you get a pittance out of a $15 sale, if you are lucky.
So as an alternate tactic, perhaps musicians need to do several things with out having their hands held and their souls in hock to "labels." First, form a musician's collective or guild that admits only independent musicians, has a membership fee, and then setup a general guild web site that carries samples of member's music for free. This will save costs for all those individual, obscure little sites and allow a more robust site because of shared costs. Do not use lyrics and tunes published by labels.
Second, offer your tunes on CDs you cut with or without the help of your guild. There is vastly more than sufficient talent out there to clean the clocks of all the labels and the RIAA.
Third, do not quit your day job until your public market tells you, you're good enough. Last, next time put the URL up any way. Sites survive being slash-dotted and once the furor dies down, if your work is good enough, you might sell a thousand cds in a week. Of course, you may really not want to find out either.
bash deliberately behaves differently when invoked as/sbin/sh to make it compatible with the system scripts
Yep, and nearly all scripts, system or not invoke it that way. But, system scripts are mostly borrowed other unices are they not? They depend not so much open sh as upon their own assumptions about it amd the other scripts, which is why I mentioned DOS. Command.com had bugs in it that became "features," since there were a number of programs that were dependent on the bugs. There was an article or three about this little weirdness years ago. It was one of the issues that the programmers of 4DOS had to address before their substitute command shell for DOS could begin to catch on. I have customarily avoided standard MS interfaces whenever possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not at all convinced that there are such things as "natural" rights, especially inalienable ones. Constitutional rights are another issue and far more deserving of defense. On the other hand, as a statment of an ideal of equality, then "rights" become essential in understanding just how equal an idealist thinks we should be.
Ease of use may be far more a matter of training and experience than of design.
I think that the preference of key board versus mouse and GUI is more a generational (and "retro") issue than anything else. Those of us who started out with CP/M or some other of the older command line systems are often still more comfortable using a command line. Some of the younger users and hackers also prefer the command line, especially if they really know the commands and switches they are using, in which case, typing can be faster than sight hunting, clicking, and executing.
When it comes down to it, the habits and assumptions we pick up through experience bias our preferences and choices. If you are used to Windows, it is simply a matter of pulling down the right screens and picking the right settings. But, although there is no functional difference, the same user may feel that typing in switches at the command line is obscure and confusing, even though there is no less demand to know what you are doing in the GUI than at the command line.
At the same time, while GUIs, windows, buttons, scrolling pick-lists, and switches seem quite simple once you are used to them, to a command line user, they can be a consumate PTA. You may feel you have to visually check ALL of the settings to find the right ones rather than type in just the ones of interest.
The whole argument is beside the point. Various distros now detect new hardware and generally will install the drivers, if they are available. You can also, in SuSE and in Mandrake, use a hardware probe to locate new hardware and enable it. It will even work better than W2k's hardware install much of the time. W2K still won't recognize my USB modem regardless of driver installs and careful following of instructions far more complex than three linux commands, and linux doesn't REQUIRE the reboot. The difficulty depends greatly on the hardware, the driver, and the software you plan to use. Linux utilities for CD burning still assume a scsi device, consequently an ATAPI cdrw is aliased as /dev/sr*. This will go away when someone decides the older utilities are nolonger "good enough."
It looks to me as if you missed Ian's point. The only really viable data - from the RIAA itself - indicates a very clear gain for the labels during the heyday of Napster. In other words, sharing sells CDs. It also sells books and other forms of content as well, but that's irrelevant.
As you say the labels are very scared, but not because of the idea that some how the internet will displace them from the market. Remember, Napster made money for them. What they fear is that with time ARTISTS will abandon them. Labels control artists. With the internet and available recording technology any serious artist can begin to build their own "label" and burn and market their own CDS without being subject to contracts that are so thieving they would make Fagin proud. Without artists, the swimming pools dry up, the Mercedes run out of gas, and the estates become low income housing. The members of the RIAA have to get real jobs.
True science is much more humble and unpretensious, eager to discover truth through the metrics of usefulness(1). At least it should be.
I would not go THAT far. If scientists were particularly humble, we would still be in the Middle Ages. I would say that scientists in general have to be not only egotisitical enough that they believe they can identify an issue of nature or society, but that they can also explain it, AND defend their explanation on the assumption that is as good as any and better than most. In this sense the process of science is quite Darwinian and the property of "utility" is the locality upon which selection operates.
No, there has to be plenty of ego in science. In fact, I suggest that key themes in stories like Frankenstein are founded upon the common social distrust of such egoism. But then, I like to think I do science and that I do it as well as most;-).
The orignial post was not talking about radio carbon dating, which could not have been applied. Radio carbon dating is limited in usefulness to the later Pleistocene. As regards secular variation and the other sources of error in radio carbon dating, well, that is why tree ring calibration was developed. It enhances accuracy considerably. Even so, youn still mistake the point regarding theory. Theory justifies methods. Dates used in geology, paleontology, and archaeology (except for speaking engagements and dinner) are based upon methods, which in turn are based upon theory. The theory can be falsified or modified, which will alter the methods and any dates dependent upon them. You don't "falsify" dates.
For example the original half-life of radio carbon was underestimated resulting in systematically under-estimating ages and dates. Calendrical calibration from old world sites was consistently in conflict with radiocarbon dates and ultimately lead to improved physics of radiocarbon.
Variation in radio carbon saturation in the atmosphere is a different problem. Since the amount of new radio carbon is a product solar weather, there are significant random variations from year to year and apparently across larger time spans as well. As you mentioned, during the period from about 2500 to 2000 years ago there some big variations that effect the use of radio carbon. These were found because of tree ring calibrations carried out with wood from the bristlecone pine. But, and this is somthing that seems to always pass under "creation science" radar, prior to the Reformation, ALL corrections to radio carbon dates have tended to yield OLDER dates. After the Reformation, the Seuss effect begins to come into play as fossil carbon from coal and later from oil dilute atmospheric radio carbon, artificially aging modern radio carbon dates. Then, finally, with the advent of atomic weapons testing, there is a brief period when there is an enhancement of atmospheric radio carbon, which at least partially offsets the Seuss effect.
The bottom line is still that you don't falsify dates. You have to falsify the theory that justified the methods, which in turn yielded the dates. And no one outside of "creation science" should argue that such methodologically based dates are "absolute in the calendrical sense, which happens to be the strawman argument that cs employs when attempting to befuddle and bewilder their audiences.
Now, to be fair, you DO encounter the terms: "calendrical," "absolute," and "relative" dates in archaeological literature. The usage derives from trying to differentiate between extremely different approaches to dating in archaeology. One approach is based upon historical, calendrical data (Biblical dates, Egyptian dates, Mayan dates etc.) With some exceptions, these are considered unarguable - there is no means by which they could be wrong, or so one might think. There are however serious discrepancies between Egyptian and Biblical dates that apparently cannot be reconciled. In China and Egypt whole segments of history have been concealed or deleted from most records. Calendrical dates are therefore known to have problems and there is no stated error margin that can give you an estimate of accuracy. You hope the historian you are depending upon is not lying. You hope that the corrections you are using to convert from calendar another are not mistaken.
"Relative" dates are based upon known stratigraphic relationships of various materials in other archaeological sites. This allows us to "relatively" date our site because using methods such as seriation and intersite comparisons, the relative age of a site compared to others can be guessed.
You will find archaeologists referring to geochemical dates as "absolute," but this means that the date can't change without a change in the theory upon which the date is based, or new methods that better implement the implications of the theory. And, since the archaeologist is "absolutely" dependent upon some else's arithmetic . . . However, texts, such as Martha Joukowsky's, that use the term also warn about the error margins that geochemical dates are subject to. So "absolute" is not being applied in an "absolute" sense.
This is in direct contrast to your garden variety creationist telling you absolutely that the earth was created in 6,000 BC, on October 23, at 9:00 AM. The term "absolute" is being used in profoundly different ways and the creationist will not be offering any error margins. Before there can be any legitimate discussion between such different views, there has to be some aggreement upon language.
Speaking as an archaeologist, it was NOT an archaeological find. The pertinent fields are paleobotany and paleontology. Archaeology deals with human traces and the remains of human activities. The events discussed in the article relate to a period long before there were any homonids, let alone any humans. I realize many bookstores shelve dinosaur books right there alongside archaeological books, but that is merely a failing in modern education.
The idea that geological dating methods are "unfalsifiable" is a view pushed by "Creation Science" - an "oxymaroon". Besides being the darling idea of Creationists and "young earthers," the idea happens to be based upon assumptions about science and geology that are either wrong or straw-man arguments. Geological dating methods are methodologoically justified estimates based upon empirical observation and generalization. They are not theories. If you do not like the dates and have some reason for challenging them, go out, collect the necessary data and offer your own estimate. Charles Lyell could do it; so can you. Geological dates are not considered absolute by anyone who produces or uses them. That is a practice only encountered in politics and religion.
If you want to know more about the crater, point a search engine - google is good - at "K-T boundary Yucatan" and you will receive many pointers to large numbers of web pages.
The name of the crater, BTW, is "Chicxulub."
It's interesting to consider the issues about this. I had never considered that vegetation populations would be slow to recover from the K-T event. You would think that after the primary dust load had settled, vegetation would start to rebound. That would imply no more than decades for the earliest paleocene plant communities to begin to re-form. The most successfull early colonists would be forms that were not dependent upon external polinators. There would be a period following where plant populations partially dependent upon animal and insect vectors to spread and reproduce waited until the necessary vectors appeared, or the plant species adapted or became fully extinct.
OS/2 is still my favorite OS in many ways. Until I could switch pretty much constantly to Linux, OS/2 was the word in stability from my view point. The HPFS was also outstanding. The installation and back-stepping were excellent, better than WinME by leagues. The GUI was incredibly flexible; I used to use Stardock's OfficeDesktop which wasn't comparable to any thing available for Windows after CentralPoint went away. The scripting language, Rexx, is great - though I have to admit liking dBase programming as well.
:-)
The good old days
MS used lots of code written forOS/2 in the early versions of NT. As late as 3.51 you could list system files in NT and find the "OS2" string in many of their names. When OS/2 first came out IBM was still trying to recover from the embarassment of inventing the open system design and making it possible for PC clones to capture a large part of IBM's market share. IBM further protected themselves from accusations of monopoly by pricing their OS, development and hardware systems well beyond what any sane person would spend.
However, for a brief, golden moment, wiser heads were - well not exactly dominant - at IBM and they started releasing OS/2 at more reasonable prices and shifting from the presentation manager to the Work Place Shell. By the time that OS/2 2.* and later, OS/2 3.0 (Warp) came out, MS was worried that OS/2 would compete successfully with NT. However, OS/2 was best compared with Win95 (whose lunch it could easily eat). Without the internet capabilities of Warp, which automatically set up network connections during installation, and introduced desktop network connection and URL link icons, MS users would still probably be stuck with the glorified MS bulletin board service that originally came with Win95.
Probably even more interesting and strange are the polar switches. The article implies that switches are infrequent, but from my geology classes I seem to recall that there is a polar swap every time the field drops to zero, which seems to be going to be happening again soon (within a few millenia). I would realy like to know whether the reactor theory can handle the polar switches as well as the on again, off again pattern.
Unfortunately, just as anyone can appropriately argue that our time base for climate studies is too short to say that industrial civilization causes global warming, it is also really impossible to talk about cyclic patterns in complex societies. There haven't been that many of them, and ours is the only one that has been conscious of chemical and physical pollution as an issue of survival.
Another "fact" that is often stated but can't be proven is that the present global warming trends are outside natural rates. In fact, at the end of the last glacial, things may very well have been changing as fast as the present temperature shifts. Current information suggests that shifts from "glacial" to "interstadial" climatic conditions may happen in a matter of years. Other changes were also happening on a grand scale as continental ice sheets melted and tremendous amounts of fresh water entered marine ecosystems.
I regard myself as a conservative too, registered republican, though more of a libertarian bent these days. I can see very little difference between Bush and Gore, and I believe that the Bush - Gore election was the worst catastrophe to the US and to constitutional government since Income Tax. I suspect that in the choice offered between Bush and Gore, US politics finally achieved the least common political denominator.
;-)) and rather doubt that the Bush administration could really be stupid. Instead, they are testing the limits of executive privelege and accountability and how far the US can be pushed toward giving up constitutional freedoms in the name of security. "Homeland security" has a dreadful ring to it that would catch the ear of both Adolf Hitler and Stalin. Saddam Hussein is probably telling his people the phrase was plagiarized from him. I see the US party system gradually decaying into unreasoning partisanship where the core leadership of the major parties is demanding a "my party right or wrong" view.
I was actually joking (obviously due to 9/11 obscure humour has become bad karma
You mean they aren't?
The author of the parent article argued in a response to comments that one particular area where he thought OS was the wrong way to go was in government software requirements. The author implied that to get adequate software for government purpose, the government should go with closed source software. My feeling is that this is outright stupidity. For years the federal government assumed that for most government products the public had ALREADY paid for the right to the data, service, or product. As a result Soil Conservation Service county reports were (and still are) free. USGS topo maps were of minimal cost, largely just covering printing. Recently there has been a decline in the availablilty of quality government information due to the fallacious argument that private sector entities could do things better. Sometimes this is true, but by and large even when it is, the private sector costs for equivalent products are much higher than government sources are or were. This shuts out large sectors of the public from products, which if produced by the government, would be readily available as long as the government reasoned that paying taxes paid for the product.
An example of a government initiated software product that was not only free, but was also open source is GRASS (Geographic Analysis Support System). Developed originally by the US Army Corps of Engineers, GRASS was released to public domain. The USACE is no longer involved in the development GRASS, having apparently surrendered to pressure to use private sector software.
GRASS remains the most available GIS analysis system for most people since it really is free, open-source software. Private sector (closed source) software of equivalent power (ArcInfo, MapInfo, MicroImages TNTmips, etc.)costs thousands of dollars and usually requires a hardware key. GRASS compares favorably in raw power with any commerical product. It is presently more opaque to learners but is improving quickly thanks to an active development community. It also supports more platforms than any of the commercial products.
The UnitedLinux group plans to release a source-only /wo binaries. The OS movement opposes binary-only software /wo source. I usually dl source versions and compile - and I am just a user. Compiling seems to suit my system resulting in fewer problems and a better idea of how things are working. Even the dimmest of us users can generally dope out how to compile a program or an entire package of them given an adequate documentation of the necessary steps - check out GRASS as an example. What was the problem here?
That should have read "Canada-France-..." but fingers leads their own lives and, after all, my Dad was Canadian.
Are you sure you are Canadian, or are you an emigrant from the U. S. A.? The half-baked, uninformed, ignorant diatribe you posted is an embarrassment to those of us Americans with Canadian parents and relatives. Next time try doing a web search for the topic BEFORE ingesting your foot. More nutritious and easier to swallow too. The Canadian-French-Hawaii telescope is real and is named just as the OP sent.
The older explosive ordinance was packed with black powder and fused so that it would ignite when fired from a gun. The problem with black powder is that while wet, it is perfectly safe. When it dries out it is unstable. I have participated in archaeological monitoring where the UEO guys were working to locate and safe ammunition ranging in age from Viet Nam War back to the Civil War. That ammunition occasionally still contained black powder that WOULD detonate (actually deflagrate I suppose) when dry. "Ancient exploding cannon balls" could very well ruin your whole day if not treated with some real respect.
The "review" provides a remarkably useless screen image of the "preferences" or setup screens for the three browsers of choice.
Regarding Opera, he reviews the "static" build which has a download about twice as large as the "shared." I registered Opera years ago. It has always been superior to IE with multiple pages displayed, speed, and price, since the "adware" ads are pretty much indistinguishable from the eye clutter on the standard web page these days any way. However, for less than $40 you can still let MS know there is web software that is really worth the price. It is worth noting that many of us who use Opera register it. The company has survived in a market where ALL the competition is free, which I believe really speaks to the browser's quality.
The biggest Opera handicap is programmers of secure webpages that test for browser versions rather than available security services and send you messages to "upgrade" to something more secure - like IE.
Regarding IE, there was an article on CNET a couple of months ago where the writer, Robert Vamosi, asserted that IE had an increasingly dated interface due to the appearance of tabbed browing (which was pioneered by Opera.)
The Galeon interface has nothing to do with the OS, defaults or otherwise. The GUI in linux is independent of the OS.
They are afraid that technology will make them redundant. Once a music consumer can go directly to the musicians they like at a price they like, the Labels and RIAA have to go back to working for a living. The potential technology offers makes them twits indeed.
I suspect that what Labels fear is the loss of their stables of musicians and their markets. It is NOT misunderstanding of the technology that moves them. Historically economics have shown that middle-men can skim the cream off of transactions, and that the middle tends to be the place where wealth has the greatest potential for concetration. The history of railroads like the Central/Southern Pacific for instance, and the Teamsters Union as a couple of examples, reflect the potential for profiting from positioning yourself in the middle of a transaction.
The internet and the availability of high quality, digital, recording gear means that independent artists could potentially by-pass Lables entirely. The conmbination could create a direct producerconsumer relation that has no "label" in the middle. Because of this the labels and the RIAA have taken advantage of the recent recession-like economy's effects on their profits to attack a potential source of competition they fear. They know their arguments are horse manure. The proof of this is that they are emphasizing attacks on technology, not the "pirates." The "pirates" here are their market after all. Far from "misunderstanding" technology, they fear it.
I believe you missed the entire point of the entire debate. Labels decide who will be successful, and when their success will end during the normal course of things. So your - and most other small groups - hopes are pretty slim regardless because the odds that a "label" might notice you are next to zero. Not to mention that as a musician you get a pittance out of a $15 sale, if you are lucky.
So as an alternate tactic, perhaps musicians need to do several things with out having their hands held and their souls in hock to "labels." First, form a musician's collective or guild that admits only independent musicians, has a membership fee, and then setup a general guild web site that carries samples of member's music for free. This will save costs for all those individual, obscure little sites and allow a more robust site because of shared costs. Do not use lyrics and tunes published by labels.
Second, offer your tunes on CDs you cut with or without the help of your guild. There is vastly more than sufficient talent out there to clean the clocks of all the labels and the RIAA.
Third, do not quit your day job until your public market tells you, you're good enough.
Last, next time put the URL up any way. Sites survive being slash-dotted and once the furor dies down, if your work is good enough, you might sell a thousand cds in a week. Of course, you may really not want to find out either.
bash deliberately behaves differently when invoked as /sbin/sh to make it compatible with the system scripts
Yep, and nearly all scripts, system or not invoke it that way. But, system scripts are mostly borrowed other unices are they not? They depend not so much open sh as upon their own assumptions about it amd the other scripts, which is why I mentioned DOS. Command.com had bugs in it that became "features," since there were a number of programs that were dependent on the bugs. There was an article or three about this little weirdness years ago. It was one of the issues that the programmers of 4DOS had to address before their substitute command shell for DOS could begin to catch on. I have customarily avoided standard MS interfaces whenever possible.