It's unfortunate that we live in a world where interests groups can set up 'grass-roots' web-sites to give their cause a fake air of respectability / newsworthiness / gravitas. Without WHOIS, the layman would have one less tool to find connections and follow the money.
I've been modded down before for citing one example (Flaimbait), but I believe the example is warranted. In the US 2004 Elections, the Swift Boat movement was portrayed in parts of the media as just a bunch of Vietnam Vets that wanted to get their opinion out there. WHOIS tied their websites to a think-tank named The Donatell Group, and gave SourceWatch.org the ability to show how orchestrated this 'grass-roots' effort really was.
I'd be interested to see exactly WHO is pushing for this curbing of WHOIS...
...if I could buy a legal working copy of OS X to run on 'em, I would in a heartbeat. Even at say $200/copy, with the same support I'd get from Microsoft if I were running Windows (read that as "none")....
You could buy a Mac mini for $600. Get Leopard pre-installed, you can run NeoOffice on it for free (so there's over $100 in software you don't need thanks to the non-purchase of Office 2007), and you won't have the malware headaches of a cheap PC. Oh, and 90 days of free telephone support and a one-year limited warranty. So that's some support, I guess.
The Cray-1 was succeeded in 1982 by the 800 MFLOPS Cray X-MP, the first Cray multi-processing computer. In 1985 the very advanced Cray-2, capable of 1.9 GFLOPS peak performance, succeeded the two first models but met a somewhat limited commercial success because of certain problems at producing sustained performance in real-world applications.
My favorite benchmark of how far we've come with computing power is the Dire Straits video for Money For Nothing in 1986. It took ages to render the video frame-by-frame...using a polygon count similar to Virtua Racing in 1992. I wonder how long it would have taken to render the video back in the mid-80s if they had upped the resolution and polygon count to ET:QW proportions. I guess it really helps to have dedicated graphics hardware.
If you today's newspaper back 15 years, you'd blow people's socks off.
I know I'd blow the socks off the bookies in Vegas / the High Street (delete as appropriate). Red Sox sweeping the Rockies in the 2007 World Series / Manchester United beating Middlesbrough 4-1 to go top of the league the same weekend / the election winners in France, Argentina, the US mid-terms etc.
I think the computing power thing would pale, compared to the whole time machine gizmo thing and the 1000-1 bets thing. With kowledge like that, you could break the bank.
This story is great news for people who worry about global warming, because however hot the earth gets, even if it gets hot enough to kill us all, when the earth eventually cools it seems that life 2.0 will spontaneously evolve.
You mean Life 6.0, surely.
The University of York just this week published a report showing a close association between Earth climate and extinctions in a study that examined the relationship over the past 520 million years -- almost the entire fossil record available.
"Matching data sets of marine and terrestrial diversity against temperature estimates, evidence shows that global biodiversity is relatively low during warm 'greenhouse' phases and extinctions relatively high, while the reverse is true in cooler 'icehouse' phases.
Moreover, future predicted temperatures are within the range of the warmest greenhouse phases that are associated with mass extinction events identified in the fossil record."
Of the five mass extinction events, four -- including the one that eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago -- are associated with greenhouse phases. The largest mass extinction event of all, the end-Permian, occurred during one of the warmest ever climatic phases and saw the estimated extinction of 95 per cent of animal and plant species.
Not if it gets hot enough to possibly kill us all. When it gets hot enough to possibly kill us all.
Many still think the KT asteroid snuffed out the dinosaurs...but the geological evidence doesn't support an asteroid / extinction link. Dinosaurs were on the wane at the time... and a mile-and-a-half-wide asteroid that formed the Manson Crater in present day Iowa a few million years before KT resulted in no known extinctions at all.
NASA says that Saturn's rings are being pulled into the planet... and if a Lunar Ring isn't properly created, the same would happen here....small moons that orbit through the outermost regions of the ring system are gaining angular momentum at the expense of the rings. "During the next few hundred million years," explains Cuzzi, "the outer half of the rings will fall toward the planet, and the little moons -- called shepherd satellites -- will be flung away. This is a young dynamical system."
Saturn's rings are composed from the same amount of material held in Mimas (the Death Star-looking moon). Mimas is around 130 miles wide, and the rings are falling into a safe-for-us gas giant millions of miles away. Our Moon is around 2300 miles wide, and for every fragment that gets flung outwards by gravity, another piece will be flung inwards. And those fragments will eventually be falling on you, me, and everyone else.
If we want a nice shiny ring, may I suggest Chinese toys painted with lead paint? Or maybe your own private Sputnik?
In 1952, Isaac Asimov wrote a story called "The Martian Way", where colonists on Mars got sick of paying Earth to export water (and Earth politicians said the colonists were Wasters anyhow). The Martian Scavengers flew to Saturn, chose a large fragment of ice, reshaped it into a cylinder, embeded their ships in it, and flew it like a giant ship back to Mars. Using the fragment's ice as reaction mass, they were able to make the return trip in five weeks.
We now know they'd have to melt many fragments together instead of having a cubic mile chip to reshape...but if something similar were undertaken in the future (fly a robot mission to the rings, fuse blocks together, return them to the inner Solar System), we could check the blocks of ice for traces of former life. Scientists are excited about the prospect of xenobiology under Europa's icy crust...it would be a lot easier to sift through the rubble of Saturn's rings for traces of dead organisms preserved in the vacuum of space than to send a Cryobot to melt through miles of ice in the hope of finding extraterrestrial life.
The US should increase Military spending and should concentrate on bulking up air power because after all the caterwauling over Iraq, the next war will be a bomb fest.
I don't think you realize how tiny our military has gotten compared to 12 years ago when Clinton shutdown so many of our bases and reduced the military force.
The number of active duty men and women in the U.S. armed forces as of Jan. 31, 2003... 1.4 million. link...but numbers don't tell the whole story. People that were shown the door a decade ago are now let in without question. Timothy McVeigh had to be happy with militia membership in his day...now he'd be on the streets of Baghdad.
...and it's so simple, just think of the metaphysical implications. Something as complex as an eye or a brain could be created with such limited initial parametes. No, never mind that: this thing can run Windows WITHOUT the major security flaws!
You know what? Just mark me as Flamebait on this one.
Hitler was very religious. Just go to the one book, written by himself, that steered a Reich...
This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief. The great masses of a nation are not composed of philosophers. For the masses of the people, especially faith is absolutely the only basis of a moral outlook on life. The various substitutes that have been offered have not shown any results that might warrant us in thinking that they might usefully replace the existing denominations....There may be a few hundreds of thousands of superior men who can live wisely and intelligently without depending on the general standards that prevail in everyday life, but the millions of others cannot do so.
Please, PLEASE, don't confuse what you think with what is real. That's how religions start. [/wink]
As for Stalin, Christopher Hitchens puts it like this:
For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the Czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you're Stalin, you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business if you can't exploit the pool of servility and docility that's ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity.
People are people. And people that want power will take advantage of what's in place to consolidate or improve their position. The same goes for every group, including the 21st Century Chinese. They will allow any religion as long as it isn't a threat to the Party. So following the writings of Lao Tzu or Moses is OK, but Falun Gong is seen as a threat to the established order so it's quashed because it's "jeopardising social stability".
You don't need a martyr and a temple to have a doctrine that people will follow, or are made to follow. You just need one person telling another person what to do (if they know what's good for them, that is).
I remember, back in the day, when ClarisWorks was the way to go. Disks full of.cwk files. Now it's 2007, and even Apple doesn't support software that will open older versions of AppleWorks CWF files. I have some AppleWorks5.cwf files that will need me to take the Beige G3 out of mothballs if I ever want to read them again. Guess I'd better get cracking before I lose that ability forever.
It's worse with Word (et al), especially now that Microsoft is calling.doc an "old file format" in an attempt to get people to switch to.docx...
That's why I now save important documents in as many file formats as possible. Text, HTML, RTF, ODF formats, soon in whatever the hell iWork 08 will save stuff as (my $100 iPhone rebate paid for that and an in-car charger, should be arriving any day now), even exporting to.doc and.docx using NeoOffice. It's not as though I'm short of CD-ROMs for storage, and I want to ensure I'll be able to open some of the files in years to come.
Of course, the CD-Rs will probably start to lose data. That's a whole new topic.
A black hole of 4.5 × 10 kg (about the mass of the Moon) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvins, absorbing as much radiation as it emits. Yet smaller primordial black holes would emit more than they absorb, and thereby lose mass.
...this particular black hole would just grow more than it evaporated. Which is kinda the whole point: black holes that swallow more than they evaporate will grow over time.
Right now unhappy teens can go hack some government server or shoot a couple of classmates. In 30 years they'll be able to make bacteria that make airborne AIDS look like heaven. Some may not even mean to kill anyone but just fuck up. That's assuming we don't nuke ourselves into the stone age or that our society doesn't implode.
Ah, you muat be young. You don't remember all the fuss about everyone having the bomb, how it was divided down into two camps (East -v- West), and how it would all be M.A.D.
And yet here we are. Doing exactly the same thing. Well, maybe those who failed to learn from history's lessons are repeating it. You get my drift.
I just love those prophecies of the end of the world. Pat Robertson said it would be 1992. Billy Graham said so in 1952 and died of old age. Jehovah's Witnesses said 1975. Marvelous.
...security spending will take up 155% of IT's budget in the year 2015.
Either someone has to increase IT's budget before the 100% mark is reached in 2013, or the DBAs should be sent out to pillage from Accounts Receivable.
"...only under one percent of the male population is 'gay'"...?
Not even the Religious Right leaders in the US that profess an anti-homosexual [wide] stance can claim to have a gay male population under 1% in their ranks.
Seriously: don't they get Google in your compound? Just throw that little factoid out there. Right after the 50% one. Care to back it up with a URL, anyone? I know there are enough right-wingers on this forum. Easy as copy & paste, this is a nerd site, should be no problem at all. It's computers you'll be using, after all.
Unless we all want to take it as understood that the whole basis of hate-based politics is a pile of lies, of course.
They know when the pictures were taken, based on the file info (mentioned in the AP story).
Once they get their suspect, the authorities check his past travel details. Every travel visa, every trip made on his passport, every aircraft manifest list will corroborate the initial evidence (unless this man was sly enough to travel with forged documents - and seeing as he was cocky enough to doctor the photo in the manner he did, I'm guessing he thought he was beyond the law). And as soon as they find one photo of him with the same curtain or wallpaper pattern behind him, with or without kids, that's more evidence. Then the witnesses can be brought in.
And the idea that we're somehow better than our pets, and they would eat us if circumstances were different?
I have a couple of friends that own a rabbit. And I get rabbits in my back yard. They're cute enough, but I know I'm just a couple of missed meals away from looking at any rabbit and thinking "lunch".
Pets are a lot more faithful than people are to other people. And it's not as though the pets got to choose who they decided to spend their lives with.
===
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." -- (Einstein)
Slashdot Mirror
It's unfortunate that we live in a world where interests groups can set up 'grass-roots' web-sites to give their cause a fake air of respectability / newsworthiness / gravitas. Without WHOIS, the layman would have one less tool to find connections and follow the money.
I've been modded down before for citing one example (Flaimbait), but I believe the example is warranted. In the US 2004 Elections, the Swift Boat movement was portrayed in parts of the media as just a bunch of Vietnam Vets that wanted to get their opinion out there. WHOIS tied their websites to a think-tank named The Donatell Group, and gave SourceWatch.org the ability to show how orchestrated this 'grass-roots' effort really was.
I'd be interested to see exactly WHO is pushing for this curbing of WHOIS...
You could buy a Mac mini for $600. Get Leopard pre-installed, you can run NeoOffice on it for free (so there's over $100 in software you don't need thanks to the non-purchase of Office 2007), and you won't have the malware headaches of a cheap PC. Oh, and 90 days of free telephone support and a one-year limited warranty. So that's some support, I guess.
Bad poster. Naughty poster. In your bed.
And Wiki says:
My favorite benchmark of how far we've come with computing power is the Dire Straits video for Money For Nothing in 1986. It took ages to render the video frame-by-frame
If you today's newspaper back 15 years, you'd blow people's socks off.
I know I'd blow the socks off the bookies in Vegas / the High Street (delete as appropriate). Red Sox sweeping the Rockies in the 2007 World Series / Manchester United beating Middlesbrough 4-1 to go top of the league the same weekend / the election winners in France, Argentina, the US mid-terms etc.
I think the computing power thing would pale, compared to the whole time machine gizmo thing and the 1000-1 bets thing. With kowledge like that, you could break the bank.
You mean Life 6.0, surely.
The University of York just this week published a report showing a close association between Earth climate and extinctions in a study that examined the relationship over the past 520 million years -- almost the entire fossil record available.
"Matching data sets of marine and terrestrial diversity against temperature estimates, evidence shows that global biodiversity is relatively low during warm 'greenhouse' phases and extinctions relatively high, while the reverse is true in cooler 'icehouse' phases.
Moreover, future predicted temperatures are within the range of the warmest greenhouse phases that are associated with mass extinction events identified in the fossil record."
Of the five mass extinction events, four -- including the one that eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago -- are associated with greenhouse phases. The largest mass extinction event of all, the end-Permian, occurred during one of the warmest ever climatic phases and saw the estimated extinction of 95 per cent of animal and plant species.
Not if it gets hot enough to possibly kill us all. When it gets hot enough to possibly kill us all.
Many still think the KT asteroid snuffed out the dinosaurs
Plenty of people smile with their mouth, but their eyes tell how happy they aren't.
Probably why Japanese emoticons reflect their emotions with the eyes instead of the mouth.
(^_^)(^_^)
The mouth isn't smiling, but the eyes say PAAARTY!
NASA says that Saturn's rings are being pulled into the planet... and if a Lunar Ring isn't properly created, the same would happen here. ...small moons that orbit through the outermost regions of the ring system are gaining angular momentum at the expense of the rings. "During the next few hundred million years," explains Cuzzi, "the outer half of the rings will fall toward the planet, and the little moons -- called shepherd satellites -- will be flung away. This is a young dynamical system."
Saturn's rings are composed from the same amount of material held in Mimas (the Death Star-looking moon). Mimas is around 130 miles wide, and the rings are falling into a safe-for-us gas giant millions of miles away. Our Moon is around 2300 miles wide, and for every fragment that gets flung outwards by gravity, another piece will be flung inwards. And those fragments will eventually be falling on you, me, and everyone else.
If we want a nice shiny ring, may I suggest Chinese toys painted with lead paint? Or maybe your own private Sputnik?
Saturn's rings are composed largely of water ice with some impurities. Frozen ugly bags of mostly water.
...but if something similar were undertaken in the future (fly a robot mission to the rings, fuse blocks together, return them to the inner Solar System), we could check the blocks of ice for traces of former life. Scientists are excited about the prospect of xenobiology under Europa's icy crust ...it would be a lot easier to sift through the rubble of Saturn's rings for traces of dead organisms preserved in the vacuum of space than to send a Cryobot to melt through miles of ice in the hope of finding extraterrestrial life.
In 1952, Isaac Asimov wrote a story called "The Martian Way", where colonists on Mars got sick of paying Earth to export water (and Earth politicians said the colonists were Wasters anyhow). The Martian Scavengers flew to Saturn, chose a large fragment of ice, reshaped it into a cylinder, embeded their ships in it, and flew it like a giant ship back to Mars. Using the fragment's ice as reaction mass, they were able to make the return trip in five weeks.
We now know they'd have to melt many fragments together instead of having a cubic mile chip to reshape
Right you are. His story makes for interesting reading, and there's the obligitory part about how he kept himself to himself. Always a red flag.
Bush reckons the bombs will be of one type only. Which makes you wonder why he's pushing for a missile shield when the cheerleaders are leaning more towards a James Bond-esque suitcase nuke.
Whatever gets people (that are in far more danger of natural disasters) afraid, I guess. Whatever gets 'em scared.
The number of active duty men and women in the U.S. armed forces as of Jan. 31, 2003
Let's not forget what the US military DID in the 1990s. Despite commentators on Fox News (and members of the Republican Party) surrendering to Milosevic and wondering how many body-bags there'd be in the former Yogoslavia, there were no combat deaths at all in Kosovo for the US. None. Nada. Zip. You get the idea. A country with multiple warring factions and we got the job done with no losses.
Sounds like they were playing smarter, not harder, back then. Sounds like a tactic they should be using today.
...and it's so simple, just think of the metaphysical implications. Something as complex as an eye or a brain could be created with such limited initial parametes. No, never mind that: this thing can run Windows WITHOUT the major security flaws!
You know what? Just mark me as Flamebait on this one.
Sorry.
Looking at Apple's share price rise over the last few years, I'd say the most significant update in the history of Mac OS X wasn't anything to do with the OS at all.
Unless you're including the 'OS X' in the iPhone.
Hitler was very religious. Just go to the one book, written by himself, that steered a Reich...
...There may be a few hundreds of thousands of superior men who can live wisely and intelligently without depending on the general standards that prevail in everyday life, but the millions of others cannot do so.
This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief. The great masses of a nation are not composed of philosophers. For the masses of the people, especially faith is absolutely the only basis of a moral outlook on life. The various substitutes that have been offered have not shown any results that might warrant us in thinking that they might usefully replace the existing denominations.
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 Chapter 10
Absolutely no room for interpretation there. It's documented up the wazoo.
Please, PLEASE, don't confuse what you think with what is real. That's how religions start. [/wink]
As for Stalin, Christopher Hitchens puts it like this:
For hundreds of years, millions of Russians had been told the head of state should be a man close to God, the Czar, who was head of the Russian Orthodox Church as well as absolute despot. If you're Stalin, you shouldn't be in the dictatorship business if you can't exploit the pool of servility and docility that's ready-made for you. The task of atheists is to raise people above that level of servility and credulity.
People are people. And people that want power will take advantage of what's in place to consolidate or improve their position. The same goes for every group, including the 21st Century Chinese. They will allow any religion as long as it isn't a threat to the Party. So following the writings of Lao Tzu or Moses is OK, but Falun Gong is seen as a threat to the established order so it's quashed because it's "jeopardising social stability".
You don't need a martyr and a temple to have a doctrine that people will follow, or are made to follow. You just need one person telling another person what to do (if they know what's good for them, that is).
I remember, back in the day, when ClarisWorks was the way to go. Disks full of .cwk files. Now it's 2007, and even Apple doesn't support software that will open older versions of AppleWorks CWF files. I have some AppleWorks5 .cwf files that will need me to take the Beige G3 out of mothballs if I ever want to read them again. Guess I'd better get cracking before I lose that ability forever.
.doc an "old file format" in an attempt to get people to switch to .docx ...
.doc and .docx using NeoOffice. It's not as though I'm short of CD-ROMs for storage, and I want to ensure I'll be able to open some of the files in years to come.
It's worse with Word (et al), especially now that Microsoft is calling
That's why I now save important documents in as many file formats as possible. Text, HTML, RTF, ODF formats, soon in whatever the hell iWork 08 will save stuff as (my $100 iPhone rebate paid for that and an in-car charger, should be arriving any day now), even exporting to
Of course, the CD-Rs will probably start to lose data. That's a whole new topic.
I occasionally take a look at Web Pages That Suck to get a feel for what NOT to do.
In summary: don't be doing this. It's not big, and it's not clever.
Are you expecting Donatelli Group to tell Bush to veto?
(said the Anonymous Coward.) Gaia has a church? Wouldn't that be a bit limiting for something 196,950,000 square miles big?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheetah's
Gentlemen's clubs are the enemies of Good Americans(TM) and so it's probably right that the PATRIOT Act be used to spy on their owners.
After all, the ladies inside wear g-strings. What do they have to hide?...
Ah, you muat be young. You don't remember all the fuss about everyone having the bomb, how it was divided down into two camps (East -v- West), and how it would all be M.A.D.
And yet here we are. Doing exactly the same thing. Well, maybe those who failed to learn from history's lessons are repeating it. You get my drift.
I just love those prophecies of the end of the world. Pat Robertson said it would be 1992. Billy Graham said so in 1952 and died of old age. Jehovah's Witnesses said 1975. Marvelous.
I want to know why someone from India isn't already an Asian.
Or is 'Indian' to be taken in the same context as 'Negro'?
...security spending will take up 155% of IT's budget in the year 2015.
Either someone has to increase IT's budget before the 100% mark is reached in 2013, or the DBAs should be sent out to pillage from Accounts Receivable.
"...only under one percent of the male population is 'gay'"...?
Not even the Religious Right leaders in the US that profess an anti-homosexual [wide] stance can claim to have a gay male population under 1% in their ranks.
Seriously: don't they get Google in your compound? Just throw that little factoid out there. Right after the 50% one. Care to back it up with a URL, anyone? I know there are enough right-wingers on this forum. Easy as copy & paste, this is a nerd site, should be no problem at all. It's computers you'll be using, after all.
Unless we all want to take it as understood that the whole basis of hate-based politics is a pile of lies, of course.
They know when the pictures were taken, based on the file info (mentioned in the AP story).
Once they get their suspect, the authorities check his past travel details. Every travel visa, every trip made on his passport, every aircraft manifest list will corroborate the initial evidence (unless this man was sly enough to travel with forged documents - and seeing as he was cocky enough to doctor the photo in the manner he did, I'm guessing he thought he was beyond the law). And as soon as they find one photo of him with the same curtain or wallpaper pattern behind him, with or without kids, that's more evidence. Then the witnesses can be brought in.
Building a case. Gotta love it.
And the idea that we're somehow better than our pets, and they would eat us if circumstances were different?
I have a couple of friends that own a rabbit. And I get rabbits in my back yard. They're cute enough, but I know I'm just a couple of missed meals away from looking at any rabbit and thinking "lunch".
Pets are a lot more faithful than people are to other people. And it's not as though the pets got to choose who they decided to spend their lives with.
===
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." -- (Einstein)
"We are a brutal kind." -- The Shins, So Says I.