I have read comparisons, years ago now, between Heinlein's rolling roads idea and the big interstates. It isn't that unreasonable when you consider the "road cities" and the larger linear belts of development that appear along major freeways. The freeway conception is more efficient than the rolling roads could possibly be. However, the role of futureist and forecasting doesn't necessarily demand technological accuracy.
The peculiar society that develops along interstate corridors is complex and a distinct subset of our society at large. Enough so that epidemiological studies are beginning to be concerned about the poor understanding we have of that subsector and its roles in the spread of infectious and sexually transmitted diseases to name just two points.
If you have ever stepped in to a Flying J or similar establishment, there are number of distinct and interesting aspects about the stores, the conversations, and even the technology available. Conversations reveal interesting relationships that are maintained through truck-stop contacts. You hear things like, "Hey, So-and-so! Say, when was the last we ran into each other? Wasn't it outside Portland?... Oh yeah, Seattle, that's... No, no, it was Victoria in B.C. I saw the...es in Portland. They were heading this way. Have you seen them?" These may take place between long-distance truck drivers and truck driving couples, couples living in motor homes, and other denizens of the stops such as itenerant prostitutes.
While Heinlein blew the technology, he recognized the economic necessity and social consequences of the giant interstates. Which, really, is more than you can say for the characters who hand out the Golden Fleece awards and similar trendily uninformed criticisms that may or may not pick out the sillyness in research and more often than not demonstrate the judge's remarkable lack of imagination.
The article was interesting and enteraining. I did notice a couple of unconsidered aspects. First, the ring renders the wearer transparent to visible light. Depending on upon its response in the ultraviolet spectrum (UV-B exposure is necessary), this could have induced some Vitamin D deficiency. This would have been exacerbated by Gollum's increasing photophobia, growing nocturnal habits and finally his relocation to a subterranean habitat. In addition to rickets, restlessness and irritability are possible symptons of inadequate Vitamin D.
The notice I recieved didn't offer cash. It seemed to be offering MS software at reduced prices:
"... People and businesses that are covered by the settlement can get vouchers that may be redeemed for cash after buying eligible computer products...." - empahsis added.
You'ld think that MS would be able to look at it's registered users database and simply know who is elegible. After all, some of us who build our own systems have been paying the old MS tax for years, and dutifully registered everything in the faint hope that MS support just might be able to help some time.
I would just as soon the state collected the settlement and reduced taxes a little.
... to someone who had to read through miles of anthropological literature, it was obvious where much of the story derives from. Le Guin grew up the daughter of one of the single most influential anthropologists in North America and it shows. She was exposed to story, myth, ritual and material cultures from all over the world as child. The feeling for much of the story, especially Gont, is similar to myths and stories from the Northwest Coast culture area in North America, and also to Polynesia.
I know that when I read the stories, my impression was that the "race" card was just background colour (no pun intended) to provide texture. The only strong cultural differences were between the pale, piratical, sea raiding Karg and the rest of Earthsea, and also the raft-dwelling society, and those differences are cultural, though they correlate with "racial" differences in the story. I thought her complaints were pretty self conscious, but perhaps she a better writer than a complainer.
The real book-to-movie complaint to end complaints, especially if you are worried about race and cultural shifts is the transformation of Rico, in Henlein's Starship Troopers from a Tagalog-speaking Phillipino into Dolph Lundgren! That must have had Heinlein spinning.
I like Apple equipment, but its expensive. What you are describing is a gift, pure and simple. The machine costs alone show that. No computer vendor, let alone Apple, will simply replace hardware like that, especially not with hardware that isn't even on the market yet. In any other venue, that would have more than doubled the machine costs. As it is VT apparently just paid the differential between system and Apple refurbished the used machines and sold them again.
VT isn't lying, but Apple has taken advantage of the oppurtunity for some good public relations and positive marketing.
Science is ideally ground-up observation, hypothesization, experimentation, observation and so on. However, if some "ideal" factoid is intruded into the process, it can convert the lazy and unimaginative worker from a properly scientific sceptic to an authoritarian priest of current dogma.
Once this happens the only means of progress is by waiting for the old guardians of the faith to die of old age, or by shooting them earlier. The "sound barrier" had the magical authority of an equation behind it, "natural law" expressed in mathmematics. Given the ritual efficacy of a mathematical equation at freezing thought processes, it's a wonder we aren't STILL flying at less than the speed of sound. Actually, I suppose that generally we still are, but we know we don't have to.
Similar situations have occurred repeatedly in science. It's why we actually need crackpots. Occasionally the effort of debunking them can open up entire new vistas.
But it wasn't a straw man. Your indication to the previous presidency was. The issue of stem cell research funding was post-Clinton. Bush walked a line between angering wealthy Republicans who hope to live a lot longer through stem cell research and poor Republicans who want to foist their religious porridge off on the rest of us as science policy. He tried to please both camps by limiting funding to "existing" lines. That had nothing at all to do with any earlier presidency.
Clinton won twice with far greater margins and there was more controversy throughout his terms than Bush has experienced. Bush is no Rhodes scholar, has no "mandate" in the sense of a significant voting majority (if any) backing him, and may have "won" his first election through the Supreme's fiat. We will never know now.
His second election is now tainted by questionable results in key states, especially Ohio, the HOME of Diebold, where the discrepancy between the "vote" and the exit polling is so gross it looks as if the managers of the latest Ukrainian national election were in charge. The results were so questionable that in any other country the US would have been questioning them. His best serving cabinet members are gone and the proposed candidates are "yes" persons to a body, who have toed the president's line from the day they entered the Whitehouse as staff, despite the country's best interests.
If there isn't controversy over the president (any president really) the US is tetering on it's last legs as a democratic republic.
And want the aluminum hats off? The post you cite is from Diebold, so just how trustworthy is it? An independent source would be more appropriate. Also, the fact that the Diebold CEO is pro-Bush is troublesome at least. There is no objective reason to suspect him of anything worse than bad judgement in public statments, but... for the tin foil hat crowd, it couldn't look much worse now, could it.
Your argument for open source code is good, but the custodian idea is problematic. How would you insure non-partisanship in the custodian?
In the mean time we appear to be stuck with the sock puppet for another four years.
Everyone needs to remember that the purpose of the airwaves is to serve society and the public at large. Broadcasting something that 70-80% of the public at large finds patently offensive does not serve the public interest.
The public, to paraphrase, is an ass. The constitution protects free speech in order to defend the rights of minorities AS WELL as the majority. The fact that 20 to 30% of the public do want to watch (or hear) him, should guarantee their right to access. I can't in all honesty figure out what about loud, stupid and boring is so entertaining but then it isn't my choice.
Also the "airwaves" exist through physics not "purpose" and the argument that the they might have one is absurdly teleological. Broadcasters have purposes; physics just is.
The article also mentioned "many anthropologists have argued that in recent years, scientists have been adding too many new species to the human evolutionary tree. They say scientists have become too quick to call what may simply be an unusual individual a member of a whole new species."
Evidently these anthropologists have given up on science, perhaps in favour of post-modernism and critical theory. The argument is mathematically irrational. It implies, given the comparatively small number of ancient hominid finds, that through incredible luck, paleontological anthropologists are finding many "unusual" individuals without proportionate examples of "normal" ones.
The image of the skull in the article shows a more or less normal face with an unusually low cranial vault. Given additional examples, and they now report seven more, "species" or "subspecies" is looking appropriate.
BTW, did anyone else wonder about "hominins"? Evidently, since I was last taking courses in human evolution, genetic studies have inconventiently reduced the distinction between Hominoids and Anthropoids, while increasing the distance between the Chimps and Gorillas and the the other great apes. Chimps and Gorillas are now members of the Hominids. This was inconvenient taxonomically (or politically and religiously?) and a new level between Family and Genus was introduced called "tribe" and we humans are members of the tribe of hominini.
The accounts from Groklaw witnesses at the hearing are informative, especially since they were available long before O'Gara published this piece. Nothing was said remotely like what O'Gara claims. Her report isn't just vaguely confused; it appears to be an outright lie. It COULD be that someone "spun" it to her. However, as PJ notes, O'Gara's articles make it plain that she reads Groklaw. None of these people saw O'Gara there, so her source almost has to be secondary. Given the obvious bias in the story, she could be being lead around by the nose for PR purposes by TSG.
Unfortunately, since the TSG crew decided to read a confidential email outloud in court, the whole hearing transcript has been sealed by the judge. [This could even be why TSG made such a clossal "blunder" in court.] It prevents early and thorough critical review. So, O'Gara would have had no means of "independently" checking the "facts" - given she doesn't like Groklaw's unabashed partisanship, which is opposite hers and quite critical of her as well.
A lot of your issues are pretty much after the fact and reflect the behaviour of MS once they had established a dominant position they were trying to maintain and afraid they'ld lose.
The PC-Clone became available in the '80s. At that time I ran a CP/M Kaypro 2. Hardware for CP/M system was brutally expensive and that cost was what initially lead to buying a PC. When I bought my first PC clone, I had to decide what OS to get because at that time IBM and Compaq came with a preinstalled OS, but no clone did. Lots of new users simply pirated the OS from from either IBM or MS sources.
I knew CP/M and had become familiar enough with DOS to think that ZCPR enhanced CP/M was the best choice. However, software was fiendishly expensive back then and cost was a major decision factor. The choices for OS were MS-DOS, PC-DOS, and CP/M 86. MS and PC DOS both ran all the same software and I could usually borrow copies until I could afford a legal one of my own. CP/M 86 ran next to nothing and what was available put a new meaning to expensive. Software for CP/M also had to be carefully checked for compatibility since CP/M had a LOT of flavors and not all versions would run all software. "Backward compatibility" wasn't even considered. The decision was ultimately driven by economics. Just as now MS is really starting to feel pressure from a more economic choice in Linux.
This isn't intended to be a troll, but I just don't get space exploration. I mean, there are a lot of good causes that all these dollars could be going to right here on Earth: stopping wars, battling diseases, increasing literacy, fighting pollution.. What's the big deal with a vast area of unexplored vacuum?...
First, all "these dollars" are spent right here on earth anyway. The idea that somehow or other money spent on research for space or technology is gone when the space craft is launched seems to be a common fallacy. It is also a faovorite that is often promulgated by parties with an interest in keeping frontiers closed and humanity in bulk pig-ignorant (religious zealots, some political parties, etc.).
Second, I doubt that any amount of spending will "stop" a war. Wars are inherently economic at root. A Cheney or a bin Laden or a Bush, a Haliburton or an Enron is always, always in the background with an "interest" in the objective of any conflict. Ideals and religious rationalizations are used by all sides in a war, but curiously, neither the idealists nor the religious seem to supply more than cannon fodder. The commonest example of this these days are the leaders of Muslim terrortist groups. You don't see THEM with a pound of semtex strapped to their bodies, or out taking lessons in crashing airliners. Nope, its some poor sap with a burning desire to purify the land for his religion or to get even for a real or imagined harm done by some equyally misguided zealot on the other side. What would stop wars is for the "followers" to hand their leaders the bag and say, "O.K. boss, your turn."
The story is silly. It paints the Swiss law enforcement as incompetents. If they were under cover, what moron identified them as operatives in the first place? The police would not have. Anyone can stand around the fringes of a protest and take pictures and there are lots of news stringers that do. I think you are right that something is missing, probably the truth.
Zeno would have loved that discourse. You still have me wondering about the relativity of relativity so to speak. Partly of course, I asked a question that more or less begs for an interpretation of a "simulataneous" state between to very remote objects, which Einstein I think described as a nonsensical concern. Still, in this universe, can two objects have relative speeds that are greater than the speed of light? I guess my problem is that I more or less got the idea that the the BB involved an object of extremely small dimensions - again that doesn't make much sense if both space and time are really products of the BB. Any way, I assumed that once we have space and time, also those oldest photons would have gone bucketing on past any matter in the vicinity, have to have. But perhaps it was more or less zooming straight around some intensely curved geodesics, straight ahead all the way around space-time? That doesn't seem to add up however with a proposal that the universe was expanding faster than light. Nor does it really seem clear if 1) space expands faster than light, 2) it carries matter with it, and 3) old light is just catching up with us.
Isn't more that old light is coming back from a long trip that more or less circumnavigates space time? Regardless of which direction a telescope looks, it looks back in time, and it sees much the same structure of space and matter. If the BB is what produced space-time, then the remote sky that surrounds us has to represent a smaller universe than what we now occupy, no? So, that remotest, ancient image has to be more distorted than a fun house mirror, doesn't it? And reasonably, you can suspect that some of the matter we can see way, way out there near the beginning of time is the same as what we see when we are looking in some other direction? My head hurts.
Oooo-kay, this may be why I went into archaeology.
Hubble's constant is a ratio scale measure, the "speed" is protportionate to the distance being discussed. I remember that much from college physics. Now, I also remember George Gamow, in one of his books via a raisin bread analogy, explaining the red shift limit as a function of the expansion of the universe, and saying more or less that the apparent speed that remote bodies are receding is due to the cumulative expansion of the space in between. The farther apart two raisins in a loaf are, the faster they appear to separate as the loaf rises. We could n't see back to the BB because it was beyond the red-shift limit for us.
If I understood what you wrote though, it seemed that you are suggesting that the relative rate of separation between two remote bodies can be greater than SOL (e.g. the most separated of Gamow's "raisins"), but the article is implying that we can see almost all the way back to the BB.
If I understand the figures you used, then if the universe is 15 Gy across, then it will expand about 1.5 Gy in the next Gy. That looks as if it might mean that the universe is expanding 1.5 ly every year - more less. Wouldn't that mean that the objects far out on the opposite "edges" are "apparently" booking along faster than light relative to each other simply because the universe continues ot inflate?
Um, this particular aspect of the BBT has bothered me for awhile too. Presumably the universe and the matter in it could not expand more rapidly than light. Which means, one would suspect, that any radiation from the BB would be "ahead" of us traveling along the leading "edge" of the "inflation front" fron of the universe.
Now if you want to say that this means the universe is closed, I can see that, but would that not also mean that any radiation we see from "near the beginning" would have to be not less than twice as old as the universe, since it has had to completely traverse the circumference - so to speak - of the universe in order to reach us?
The effects of stopping caffeine consumption have been known medically for decades. There's nohting new in the report, except the lame idea of listing caffeine withdrawal as a "disorder." Besides, they have not offered any data to support this no is there any indication of where the study's funding came from. Two common sources for studies that typically find caffeine is bad for you are the Seventh Day Adventist Church and the Latter DDay Saints (Mormons). Both organizations hold through doctrine that caffeine is bad for you and happily fund efforts to "determine the risks" of caffeine. After all, the church founders SAID it was bad, therefore it must be, Q.E.D.
The report also neglects to discuss the kind of study, but seems to suggest that the results are from self-evaluation among the subjects. I would be far more impressed with a double blind experiment where the subjects behaviour is monitored by staff who don't know the subjects caffiene consumption.
A passenger jet in route between Texas and Utah should be about 30,000 feet in altiude. Even if you were to knock off a mile of altidue to estimate height over ground, the beam would have had to travel minimally nearly five miles (directly over head). To actually enter the cockpit window would require an oblique shot and to actually reach the pilot, it would have to be even more oblique. The most likely culprit was really the co-pilot playing silly ass with his keyring pointer. Terrorists, bah!
Slashdot Mirror
I have read comparisons, years ago now, between Heinlein's rolling roads idea and the big interstates. It isn't that unreasonable when you consider the "road cities" and the larger linear belts of development that appear along major freeways. The freeway conception is more efficient than the rolling roads could possibly be. However, the role of futureist and forecasting doesn't necessarily demand technological accuracy.
... Oh yeah, Seattle, that's ... No, no, it was Victoria in B.C. I saw the ...es in Portland. They were heading this way. Have you seen them?" These may take place between long-distance truck drivers and truck driving couples, couples living in motor homes, and other denizens of the stops such as itenerant prostitutes.
The peculiar society that develops along interstate corridors is complex and a distinct subset of our society at large. Enough so that epidemiological studies are beginning to be concerned about the poor understanding we have of that subsector and its roles in the spread of infectious and sexually transmitted diseases to name just two points.
If you have ever stepped in to a Flying J or similar establishment, there are number of distinct and interesting aspects about the stores, the conversations, and even the technology available. Conversations reveal interesting relationships that are maintained through truck-stop contacts. You hear things like, "Hey, So-and-so! Say, when was the last we ran into each other? Wasn't it outside Portland?
While Heinlein blew the technology, he recognized the economic necessity and social consequences of the giant interstates. Which, really, is more than you can say for the characters who hand out the Golden Fleece awards and similar trendily uninformed criticisms that may or may not pick out the sillyness in research and more often than not demonstrate the judge's remarkable lack of imagination.
The article was interesting and enteraining. I did notice a couple of unconsidered aspects. First, the ring renders the wearer transparent to visible light. Depending on upon its response in the ultraviolet spectrum (UV-B exposure is necessary), this could have induced some Vitamin D deficiency. This would have been exacerbated by Gollum's increasing photophobia, growing nocturnal habits and finally his relocation to a subterranean habitat. In addition to rickets, restlessness and irritability are possible symptons of inadequate Vitamin D.
The notice I recieved didn't offer cash. It seemed to be offering MS software at reduced prices:
..." - empahsis added.
"... People and businesses that are covered by the settlement can get vouchers that may be redeemed for cash after buying eligible computer products.
You'ld think that MS would be able to look at it's registered users database and simply know who is elegible. After all, some of us who build our own systems have been paying the old MS tax for years, and dutifully registered everything in the faint hope that MS support just might be able to help some time.
I would just as soon the state collected the settlement and reduced taxes a little.
... to someone who had to read through miles of anthropological literature, it was obvious where much of the story derives from. Le Guin grew up the daughter of one of the single most influential anthropologists in North America and it shows. She was exposed to story, myth, ritual and material cultures from all over the world as child. The feeling for much of the story, especially Gont, is similar to myths and stories from the Northwest Coast culture area in North America, and also to Polynesia.
I know that when I read the stories, my impression was that the "race" card was just background colour (no pun intended) to provide texture. The only strong cultural differences were between the pale, piratical, sea raiding Karg and the rest of Earthsea, and also the raft-dwelling society, and those differences are cultural, though they correlate with "racial" differences in the story. I thought her complaints were pretty self conscious, but perhaps she a better writer than a complainer.
The real book-to-movie complaint to end complaints, especially if you are worried about race and cultural shifts is the transformation of Rico, in Henlein's Starship Troopers from a Tagalog-speaking Phillipino into Dolph Lundgren! That must have had Heinlein spinning.
I like Apple equipment, but its expensive. What you are describing is a gift, pure and simple. The machine costs alone show that. No computer vendor, let alone Apple, will simply replace hardware like that, especially not with hardware that isn't even on the market yet. In any other venue, that would have more than doubled the machine costs. As it is VT apparently just paid the differential between system and Apple refurbished the used machines and sold them again.
VT isn't lying, but Apple has taken advantage of the oppurtunity for some good public relations and positive marketing.
Science is ideally ground-up observation, hypothesization, experimentation, observation and so on. However, if some "ideal" factoid is intruded into the process, it can convert the lazy and unimaginative worker from a properly scientific sceptic to an authoritarian priest of current dogma.
Once this happens the only means of progress is by waiting for the old guardians of the faith to die of old age, or by shooting them earlier. The "sound barrier" had the magical authority of an equation behind it, "natural law" expressed in mathmematics. Given the ritual efficacy of a mathematical equation at freezing thought processes, it's a wonder we aren't STILL flying at less than the speed of sound. Actually, I suppose that generally we still are, but we know we don't have to.
Similar situations have occurred repeatedly in science. It's why we actually need crackpots. Occasionally the effort of debunking them can open up entire new vistas.
But it wasn't a straw man. Your indication to the previous presidency was. The issue of stem cell research funding was post-Clinton. Bush walked a line between angering wealthy Republicans who hope to live a lot longer through stem cell research and poor Republicans who want to foist their religious porridge off on the rest of us as science policy. He tried to please both camps by limiting funding to "existing" lines. That had nothing at all to do with any earlier presidency.
Clinton won twice with far greater margins and there was more controversy throughout his terms than Bush has experienced. Bush is no Rhodes scholar, has no "mandate" in the sense of a significant voting majority (if any) backing him, and may have "won" his first election through the Supreme's fiat. We will never know now.
His second election is now tainted by questionable results in key states, especially Ohio, the HOME of Diebold, where the discrepancy between the "vote" and the exit polling is so gross it looks as if the managers of the latest Ukrainian national election were in charge. The results were so questionable that in any other country the US would have been questioning them. His best serving cabinet members are gone and the proposed candidates are "yes" persons to a body, who have toed the president's line from the day they entered the Whitehouse as staff, despite the country's best interests.
If there isn't controversy over the president (any president really) the US is tetering on it's last legs as a democratic republic.
Re:Iraq DID have ties to Al Qaeda
Let us guess: You believe George W. Bush wouldn't lie to the US public?
You believe GWB's handlers wouldn't lie to him?
You believe Rumsfeld is as honest as the day is long?
BTW, the word is spelled "misinformed." "Miss informed" suggests his unmarried lady friend told him so.
And want the aluminum hats off? The post you cite is from Diebold, so just how trustworthy is it? An independent source would be more appropriate. Also, the fact that the Diebold CEO is pro-Bush is troublesome at least. There is no objective reason to suspect him of anything worse than bad judgement in public statments, but ... for the tin foil hat crowd, it couldn't look much worse now, could it.
Your argument for open source code is good, but the custodian idea is problematic. How would you insure non-partisanship in the custodian?
In the mean time we appear to be stuck with the sock puppet for another four years.
... for understatment. "Not quite," heh!
The public, to paraphrase, is an ass. The constitution protects free speech in order to defend the rights of minorities AS WELL as the majority. The fact that 20 to 30% of the public do want to watch (or hear) him, should guarantee their right to access. I can't in all honesty figure out what about loud, stupid and boring is so entertaining but then it isn't my choice.
Also the "airwaves" exist through physics not "purpose" and the argument that the they might have one is absurdly teleological. Broadcasters have purposes; physics just is.
The article also mentioned "many anthropologists have argued that in recent years, scientists have been adding too many new species to the human evolutionary tree. They say scientists have become too quick to call what may simply be an unusual individual a member of a whole new species."
Evidently these anthropologists have given up on science, perhaps in favour of post-modernism and critical theory. The argument is mathematically irrational. It implies, given the comparatively small number of ancient hominid finds, that through incredible luck, paleontological anthropologists are finding many "unusual" individuals without proportionate examples of "normal" ones.
The image of the skull in the article shows a more or less normal face with an unusually low cranial vault. Given additional examples, and they now report seven more, "species" or "subspecies" is looking appropriate.
BTW, did anyone else wonder about "hominins"? Evidently, since I was last taking courses in human evolution, genetic studies have inconventiently reduced the distinction between Hominoids and Anthropoids, while increasing the distance between the Chimps and Gorillas and the the other great apes. Chimps and Gorillas are now members of the Hominids. This was inconvenient taxonomically (or politically and religiously?) and a new level between Family and Genus was introduced called "tribe" and we humans are members of the tribe of hominini.
The accounts from Groklaw witnesses at the hearing are informative, especially since they were available long before O'Gara published this piece. Nothing was said remotely like what O'Gara claims. Her report isn't just vaguely confused; it appears to be an outright lie. It COULD be that someone "spun" it to her. However, as PJ notes, O'Gara's articles make it plain that she reads Groklaw. None of these people saw O'Gara there, so her source almost has to be secondary. Given the obvious bias in the story, she could be being lead around by the nose for PR purposes by TSG.
Unfortunately, since the TSG crew decided to read a confidential email outloud in court, the whole hearing transcript has been sealed by the judge. [This could even be why TSG made such a clossal "blunder" in court.] It prevents early and thorough critical review. So, O'Gara would have had no means of "independently" checking the "facts" - given she doesn't like Groklaw's unabashed partisanship, which is opposite hers and quite critical of her as well.
A lot of your issues are pretty much after the fact and reflect the behaviour of MS once they had established a dominant position they were trying to maintain and afraid they'ld lose.
The PC-Clone became available in the '80s. At that time I ran a CP/M Kaypro 2. Hardware for CP/M system was brutally expensive and that cost was what initially lead to buying a PC. When I bought my first PC clone, I had to decide what OS to get because at that time IBM and Compaq came with a preinstalled OS, but no clone did. Lots of new users simply pirated the OS from from either IBM or MS sources.
I knew CP/M and had become familiar enough with DOS to think that ZCPR enhanced CP/M was the best choice. However, software was fiendishly expensive back then and cost was a major decision factor. The choices for OS were MS-DOS, PC-DOS, and CP/M 86. MS and PC DOS both ran all the same software and I could usually borrow copies until I could afford a legal one of my own. CP/M 86 ran next to nothing and what was available put a new meaning to expensive. Software for CP/M also had to be carefully checked for compatibility since CP/M had a LOT of flavors and not all versions would run all software. "Backward compatibility" wasn't even considered. The decision was ultimately driven by economics. Just as now MS is really starting to feel pressure from a more economic choice in Linux.
or it loads anyway. I'm not a fan of IM, so I don't have any correspondents to check with. You can simply install it from the DVD.
... cast iron helped as well.
First, all "these dollars" are spent right here on earth anyway. The idea that somehow or other money spent on research for space or technology is gone when the space craft is launched seems to be a common fallacy. It is also a faovorite that is often promulgated by parties with an interest in keeping frontiers closed and humanity in bulk pig-ignorant (religious zealots, some political parties, etc.).
Second, I doubt that any amount of spending will "stop" a war. Wars are inherently economic at root. A Cheney or a bin Laden or a Bush, a Haliburton or an Enron is always, always in the background with an "interest" in the objective of any conflict. Ideals and religious rationalizations are used by all sides in a war, but curiously, neither the idealists nor the religious seem to supply more than cannon fodder. The commonest example of this these days are the leaders of Muslim terrortist groups. You don't see THEM with a pound of semtex strapped to their bodies, or out taking lessons in crashing airliners. Nope, its some poor sap with a burning desire to purify the land for his religion or to get even for a real or imagined harm done by some equyally misguided zealot on the other side. What would stop wars is for the "followers" to hand their leaders the bag and say, "O.K. boss, your turn."
The story is silly. It paints the Swiss law enforcement as incompetents. If they were under cover, what moron identified them as operatives in the first place? The police would not have. Anyone can stand around the fringes of a protest and take pictures and there are lots of news stringers that do. I think you are right that something is missing, probably the truth.
We think the universe is globally close to flat...
;-)
Ah huh!
Zeno would have loved that discourse. You still have me wondering about the relativity of relativity so to speak. Partly of course, I asked a question that more or less begs for an interpretation of a "simulataneous" state between to very remote objects, which Einstein I think described as a nonsensical concern. Still, in this universe, can two objects have relative speeds that are greater than the speed of light? I guess my problem is that I more or less got the idea that the the BB involved an object of extremely small dimensions - again that doesn't make much sense if both space and time are really products of the BB. Any way, I assumed that once we have space and time, also those oldest photons would have gone bucketing on past any matter in the vicinity, have to have. But perhaps it was more or less zooming straight around some intensely curved geodesics, straight ahead all the way around space-time? That doesn't seem to add up however with a proposal that the universe was expanding faster than light. Nor does it really seem clear if 1) space expands faster than light, 2) it carries matter with it, and 3) old light is just catching up with us.
Isn't more that old light is coming back from a long trip that more or less circumnavigates space time? Regardless of which direction a telescope looks, it looks back in time, and it sees much the same structure of space and matter. If the BB is what produced space-time, then the remote sky that surrounds us has to represent a smaller universe than what we now occupy, no? So, that remotest, ancient image has to be more distorted than a fun house mirror, doesn't it? And reasonably, you can suspect that some of the matter we can see way, way out there near the beginning of time is the same as what we see when we are looking in some other direction? My head hurts.
Oooo-kay, this may be why I went into archaeology.
Hubble's constant is a ratio scale measure, the "speed" is protportionate to the distance being discussed. I remember that much from college physics. Now, I also remember George Gamow, in one of his books via a raisin bread analogy, explaining the red shift limit as a function of the expansion of the universe, and saying more or less that the apparent speed that remote bodies are receding is due to the cumulative expansion of the space in between. The farther apart two raisins in a loaf are, the faster they appear to separate as the loaf rises. We could n't see back to the BB because it was beyond the red-shift limit for us.
If I understood what you wrote though, it seemed that you are suggesting that the relative rate of separation between two remote bodies can be greater than SOL (e.g. the most separated of Gamow's "raisins"), but the article is implying that we can see almost all the way back to the BB.
If I understand the figures you used, then if the universe is 15 Gy across, then it will expand about 1.5 Gy in the next Gy. That looks as if it might mean that the universe is expanding 1.5 ly every year - more less. Wouldn't that mean that the objects far out on the opposite "edges" are "apparently" booking along faster than light relative to each other simply because the universe continues ot inflate?
Anyway thanks for the effort to unconfuse me.
Um, this particular aspect of the BBT has bothered me for awhile too. Presumably the universe and the matter in it could not expand more rapidly than light. Which means, one would suspect, that any radiation from the BB would be "ahead" of us traveling along the leading "edge" of the "inflation front" fron of the universe.
Now if you want to say that this means the universe is closed, I can see that, but would that not also mean that any radiation we see from "near the beginning" would have to be not less than twice as old as the universe, since it has had to completely traverse the circumference - so to speak - of the universe in order to reach us?
The effects of stopping caffeine consumption have been known medically for decades. There's nohting new in the report, except the lame idea of listing caffeine withdrawal as a "disorder." Besides, they have not offered any data to support this no is there any indication of where the study's funding came from. Two common sources for studies that typically find caffeine is bad for you are the Seventh Day Adventist Church and the Latter DDay Saints (Mormons). Both organizations hold through doctrine that caffeine is bad for you and happily fund efforts to "determine the risks" of caffeine. After all, the church founders SAID it was bad, therefore it must be, Q.E.D.
The report also neglects to discuss the kind of study, but seems to suggest that the results are from self-evaluation among the subjects. I would be far more impressed with a double blind experiment where the subjects behaviour is monitored by staff who don't know the subjects caffiene consumption.
A passenger jet in route between Texas and Utah should be about 30,000 feet in altiude. Even if you were to knock off a mile of altidue to estimate height over ground, the beam would have had to travel minimally nearly five miles (directly over head). To actually enter the cockpit window would require an oblique shot and to actually reach the pilot, it would have to be even more oblique. The most likely culprit was really the co-pilot playing silly ass with his keyring pointer. Terrorists, bah!