When he started at the University he was told that unlike The States, people can and do fail graduate school.
It happens in the States as well, you just have to do something incredibly stupid, like insulting the TA of a class that you are struggling in when he comes into the the lab 20+ hours a week to help the students.
'Do you subscribe to the theory that the lowest grade grad students get is a C?' 'No.'
Ever use a Craftsman screwdriver in a way for which it wasn't intended? Did you break it?
A better question would be have you ever used a screwdriver for its intended purpose? I took down, moved and put up a fence this weekend and used screwdrivers as chisels, pry bars, hammers, nail pullers, digging implements and to clean under my fingernails, but not once did I actually install or remove screws with them.
A lot of hard sf fans on usenet had some pretty big beefs with the science part of The Matrix. Using humans 'with a form of fusion power' as an energy source was the part that most of them choked on IIRC. After all, if you've got fusion power, the juice in a human body is a pretty trivial amount. Of course, that's assuming that Morpheus was correct...
Anyway, I'm just speculating, I probably would have voted for The Matrix (and Cryptonomicon).
On the Science Fiction Writing newsgroup there was (big surprise) a huge discussion about Cryptonomicon and whether or not it qualified as SF. One poster said that SF was fiction about 'knowing things', and that by that definition, Cryptonomicon was about the most SF novel he had ever read. I think that may not be the best definition of SF ever, but that's a pretty great description of Cryptonomicon.
(offtopic: but does anyone know how to turn off Javascript in Internet Explorer 5.0? Did you know that if you search for Javascript in IE5.0 help you get no matches!?)
When I read that I thought that can't be right, but doggone it, good ol' M$ has protected us from ourselves again AND kept us from even knowing about it. No mention of Java, JavaScript, or virtual machines anywhere in Help. You can mess with Java settings in Tools/Internet Options/Advanced (and Tools/Internet Options/Security IIRC) but that doesn't sound specific enough for your needs.
You're right, he does give credit, but is a one-sentence 'Thanks' an accurate desciption of how similar the sites are? It makes me think of stuff I would grade back in grad school where the students would have whole paragraphs lifted almost-but-not-quite verbatim from some journal, with a single reference at the bottom to the original source. Maybe if the colors were different or something the thanks would be sufficient, but...
I'm pretty disgusted with deja, too. I liked their big archives, but hated their interface - there's nothing more annoying than waiting for a page to load, then scrolling down through 100 lines of nested, poorly differentiated text only to find one line that wasn't relevant to what I wanted to read anyway. So I started using Remarq, and got along without the big archive, unless I had to go back to deja for something old, but loved seeing 25 responses at a time. Then Remarq got bought out and are now a PAY service. Now I'm stuck with a bad interface and not enough archive to be useful.
Is there any other usenet archive service?
Re:Breeding population
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
...changes things. What do they mean by "repaired"? I can only assume they's splice in the DNA from "a close relative" to fix it
Well, maybe, maybe not. If they get samples from lots of different fetuses, they might be able to mix and match ('Okay, this one has 4 good chromosomes, and this one 3 that ain't too bad...') to get a complete genome. Of course, this would reduce the genetic variability within the species, which is not good, but if we understood all the genetic interactions well enough (which we don't) we could probably force some substitutions that would add variability without screwing things up too much.
Maybe, we should just go back in time and catch a few of these bad boys...
Re:What surviving changes will they have ?
on
TigerCloning
·
· Score: 1
These cloned tigers will be either put in wild life very early, but they would need support as they have no parents, or later but then, they'll not be trained to survive in the wild and risk to be extermined by other races (not speaking of men).
This is the real problem with trying to re-create extinct species, especially large, complicated ones like mammals and birds. Does anybody have a good idea what the Taz tigers social structure was like (loners like 'real' tigers or pack hunters like lions)? How about what they hunted and how? Should the new young be taught to hunt introduced species like rabbits and the like (which the Taz tigers might be to slow/clumsy/noisy to catch), or should they stick to their traditional prey (which might be extinct, or just a lot less common)? For that matter, how are you going to teach them these sorts of complicated behaviors when the only natural history work done their behavior in the wild is about a century old and was probably done 'over the sights of a gun' as the saying goes?
In case you think that these behaviors are just 'instinct', consider all of the work it took to raise the young of the California Condor, which is an extant species and had been under extensive study for years before the capture and breeding work was undertaken. It's also probably a lot easier for a human to teach a bird to find and eat rotting meat than it is for a person to teach a mammal how to find, catch, kill and eat a smaller live mammal.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this project is impossible or a waste of time (I don't think it's either one, and frankly I think it's appalling that there are people who think it's morally wrong that we should try), but the Australians might be better off spending their no doubt limited cash for species preservation, rather than for species re-creation.
Exactly. This will create a huge bottleneck in the population. The tigers will have very little chance of having resistances to any new forms of disease that have arisen or recently appeared in their habitat. If the wrong rabbit sneezes on the tiger befor it gets eaten, it'll be 'Bye-bye, Misnamed Marsupial Carnivores.' Then humanity will have driven this species into extinction twice. Wow, that would be something to be proud of.
If we can bring back a certain species of animal then what role does God play?
God's role was to give us the capability/intelligence to things. When you see some poor kid dead after being hit by a car, you could say (and yes I realize that there are people who think this way - the proper term for them is idiots), 'Well it's God's will that Jenny Sue kicks the bucket, so what can we do?' or you can call 911 and get some EMTs to try and give her with blood transfusions and jump start her heart. (BTW, I fully realize that saving Jenny Sue is more important than resurrecting extinct animals, so let's not start a 'X is more important than Y' sub-thread, just in case anyone is tempted.)
Also, if I happened to offend anyone's religious beliefs by my analogy, well, too bad. If it makes you feel better, I've probably offended every other religous group (including atheists and agnostics) at some other point, so fuggedaboutit.
Yes, but which of the rampaging, man-eating beasts would be the scariest? Not the dinos or the sabre-toothed tigers, after all we've all seen those caveman movies so we're practically used to getting eaten by them. No, I think it will be a toss-up between the dodos (because getting killed and eaten by flightless birds is so humiliating it's horrific) or Ronald Reagan (Think zombie movie, except with Dittoheads saying 'Don't shoot he was the greatest President ever! Cut taxes! Raise spending! Trickle down! Arrgh he's eating my face!').
Maybe I shouldn't post so early in the morning, but that sounds like some kind of metaphor for the Reagan era...
Outside the legal profession PerfectOffice users are about as likely to upgrade to MS Office as they are to buy the newest version of PerfectOffice.
Does anybody know why lawyers are so addicted to WordPerfect? Is it just because the first judge to get an office suite went Corel and everyone had to follow along, or is there a more logical explanation?
Rather than just sticking the links within the body of the post, couldn't they just append a list of links at the end? It seems like both Deja and remarq.com (IMHO, a much better service)append messages saying 'Sent from Blahblahblah.com - We're great!' or somesuch at the end of the messages anyway, so why not a "If you're interested in x, y, or z, click on them." message? That would make it pretty obvious that the poster didn't include the links and would make deja look helpful, not intrusive.
Basically, Mulder has been abducted. And Scully is pregnant.:)
The father should be the next/. poll. Chances are they'll be obvious and make it Mulder, but there's always: - Skinner (Something about his reaction when Dana told him...) - CSM (They did have a 'date') - The Lone Gunman Whose Name Escapes Me At The Moment - Krichek - The Vampire Sheriff From A Few Seasons Back - An Alien (The 2nd most likely choice) - God (Hey, why not? Dana's Catholic,so it's not like there's no precedent, and she said she didn't know how she got pregnant...) - and of course CmndrTaco
Hey there, Badmovies, let's not forget about (IIRC) 'Night of the Lupines' where giant rabbits terrorize... uhm, people who are afraid of bunnies I guess. (I mean come on, RABBITS, couldn't you just poison the carrots or something?)
I haven't actually seen this no-doubt-terrifying movie, but I do recall it being referenced in the old TSR RPG 'Gamma World'...
My favorite reference in that book was somebody bringing 'shrooms to Thomas Huxley. It probably helped that I had just read 'The Doors of Perception' by Aldous Huxley and was discussing Tom in my Evolution class.
the ratio of bad open source programs to good open source programs is the same as the ratio of bad closed source programs to good closed source programs is the same as the ratio of bad movies to good movies
'79% of everything is crap' - Sturgeon's Law
Sturgeon was a SF author and was speaking about the SF writing, but the law has a broad application - movies, TV, software, restaurants, etc.
I think that in all the categories, nominations are decided by Academy members with that background - editors nominate editors, actors nominate actors, etc., but the whole academy votes for the winners. This is probably why films that get nominated for Best Picture tend to win in the editing, cinematography, what-have-you categories as well, even if say, Schindler's List didn't have better costumes than The Age of Innocence (to cite my favorite example). The old geezers who probably haven't even seen most of the movies just vote for the names they recognize/like ('Goodfellas was too foul-mouthed to have good editing - I'll vote for Dances With Wolves again') rather than thinking.
South Park probably never had a chance at winning, so it WAS an honor just to be nominated for them.
-You're right, thanks for encapsulating part of what I was trying to get at. Having a backdoor/killswitch is a must for this kind of thing, but it's not enough by itself. We'll still have to be careful about what gets introduced where. On a plant like purple loosestrife, a 99% effective backdoor will only by you time. And that 1% can now evolve additional resistance or a faster reproductive rate. It's better to be have the backdoor AND be reasonably sure the species won't cause problems.
Also, degrees don't mean much, they just let you make bigger mistakes. I mean, as a former B Gross Anatomy student and TA, I've never killed a patient in surgery, but you wouldn't want me to (try and) take out your appendix.
Tar baby is from an old B'rer Rabbit (I think, was it B'rer Fox?) story, which I believe came from the Southern US, explaining the racist sound I guess. Basically, B'rer Whoever made a 'baby' out of tar to trick whoever was chasing him for stealing... something. Anyway, the chaser tackled the tar baby and got stuck, but the harder he tried to get free the more he got stuck.
You can see how that sort of thing would come to mind if you were working with the government a lot...
Slashdot Mirror
Mmmm, Cloud Princess....
When he started at the University he was told that unlike The States, people can and do fail graduate school.
It happens in the States as well, you just have to do something incredibly stupid, like insulting the TA of a class that you are struggling in when he comes into the the lab 20+ hours a week to help the students.
'Do you subscribe to the theory that the lowest grade grad students get is a C?'
'No.'
Ever use a Craftsman screwdriver in a way for which it wasn't intended? Did you break it?
A better question would be have you ever used a screwdriver for its intended purpose? I took down, moved and put up a fence this weekend and used screwdrivers as chisels, pry bars, hammers, nail pullers, digging implements and to clean under my fingernails, but not once did I actually install or remove screws with them.
A lot of hard sf fans on usenet had some pretty big beefs with the science part of The Matrix. Using humans 'with a form of fusion power' as an energy source was the part that most of them choked on IIRC. After all, if you've got fusion power, the juice in a human body is a pretty trivial amount. Of course, that's assuming that Morpheus was correct...
Anyway, I'm just speculating, I probably would have voted for The Matrix (and Cryptonomicon).
On the Science Fiction Writing newsgroup there was (big surprise) a huge discussion about Cryptonomicon and whether or not it qualified as SF. One poster said that SF was fiction about 'knowing things', and that by that definition, Cryptonomicon was about the most SF novel he had ever read. I think that may not be the best definition of SF ever, but that's a pretty great description of Cryptonomicon.
(offtopic: but does anyone know how to turn off Javascript in Internet Explorer 5.0? Did you know that if you search for Javascript in IE5.0 help you get no matches!?)
When I read that I thought that can't be right, but doggone it, good ol' M$ has protected us from ourselves again AND kept us from even knowing about it. No mention of Java, JavaScript, or virtual machines anywhere in Help. You can mess with Java settings in Tools/Internet Options/Advanced (and Tools/Internet Options/Security IIRC) but that doesn't sound specific enough for your needs.
You're right, he does give credit, but is a one-sentence 'Thanks' an accurate desciption of how similar the sites are? It makes me think of stuff I would grade back in grad school where the students would have whole paragraphs lifted almost-but-not-quite verbatim from some journal, with a single reference at the bottom to the original source. Maybe if the colors were different or something the thanks would be sufficient, but...
Billy-Bob's attachment to her opposable thumb?
I'm pretty disgusted with deja, too. I liked their big archives, but hated their interface - there's nothing more annoying than waiting for a page to load, then scrolling down through 100 lines of nested, poorly differentiated text only to find one line that wasn't relevant to what I wanted to read anyway. So I started using Remarq, and got along without the big archive, unless I had to go back to deja for something old, but loved seeing 25 responses at a time. Then Remarq got bought out and are now a PAY service. Now I'm stuck with a bad interface and not enough archive to be useful.
Is there any other usenet archive service?
...changes things. What do they mean by "repaired"? I can only assume they's splice in the DNA from "a close relative" to fix it
Well, maybe, maybe not. If they get samples from lots of different fetuses, they might be able to mix and match ('Okay, this one has 4 good chromosomes, and this one 3 that ain't too bad...') to get a complete genome. Of course, this would reduce the genetic variability within the species, which is not good, but if we understood all the genetic interactions well enough (which we don't) we could probably force some substitutions that would add variability without screwing things up too much.
Maybe, we should just go back in time and catch a few of these bad boys...
These cloned tigers will be either put in wild life very early, but they would need support as they have no parents, or later but then, they'll not be trained to survive in the wild and risk to be extermined by other races (not speaking of men).
This is the real problem with trying to re-create extinct species, especially large, complicated ones like mammals and birds. Does anybody have a good idea what the Taz tigers social structure was like (loners like 'real' tigers or pack hunters like lions)? How about what they hunted and how? Should the new young be taught to hunt introduced species like rabbits and the like (which the Taz tigers might be to slow/clumsy/noisy to catch), or should they stick to their traditional prey (which might be extinct, or just a lot less common)? For that matter, how are you going to teach them these sorts of complicated behaviors when the only natural history work done their behavior in the wild is about a century old and was probably done 'over the sights of a gun' as the saying goes?
In case you think that these behaviors are just 'instinct', consider all of the work it took to raise the young of the California Condor, which is an extant species and had been under extensive study for years before the capture and breeding work was undertaken. It's also probably a lot easier for a human to teach a bird to find and eat rotting meat than it is for a person to teach a mammal how to find, catch, kill and eat a smaller live mammal.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this project is impossible or a waste of time (I don't think it's either one, and frankly I think it's appalling that there are people who think it's morally wrong that we should try), but the Australians might be better off spending their no doubt limited cash for species preservation, rather than for species re-creation.
Exactly. This will create a huge bottleneck in the population. The tigers will have very little chance of having resistances to any new forms of disease that have arisen or recently appeared in their habitat. If the wrong rabbit sneezes on the tiger befor it gets eaten, it'll be 'Bye-bye, Misnamed Marsupial Carnivores.' Then humanity will have driven this species into extinction twice. Wow, that would be something to be proud of.
If we can bring back a certain species of animal then what role does God play?
God's role was to give us the capability/intelligence to things. When you see some poor kid dead after being hit by a car, you could say (and yes I realize that there are people who think this way - the proper term for them is idiots), 'Well it's God's will that Jenny Sue kicks the bucket, so what can we do?' or you can call 911 and get some EMTs to try and give her with blood transfusions and jump start her heart.
(BTW, I fully realize that saving Jenny Sue is more important than resurrecting extinct animals, so let's not start a 'X is more important than Y' sub-thread, just in case anyone is tempted.)
Also, if I happened to offend anyone's religious beliefs by my analogy, well, too bad. If it makes you feel better, I've probably offended every other religous group (including atheists and agnostics) at some other point, so fuggedaboutit.
Yes, but which of the rampaging, man-eating beasts would be the scariest? Not the dinos or the sabre-toothed tigers, after all we've all seen those caveman movies so we're practically used to getting eaten by them. No, I think it will be a toss-up between the dodos (because getting killed and eaten by flightless birds is so humiliating it's horrific) or Ronald Reagan (Think zombie movie, except with Dittoheads saying 'Don't shoot he was the greatest President ever! Cut taxes! Raise spending! Trickle down! Arrgh he's eating my face!').
Maybe I shouldn't post so early in the morning, but that sounds like some kind of metaphor for the Reagan era...
Outside the legal profession PerfectOffice users are about as likely to upgrade to MS Office as they are to buy the newest version of PerfectOffice.
Does anybody know why lawyers are so addicted to WordPerfect? Is it just because the first judge to get an office suite went Corel and everyone had to follow along, or is there a more logical explanation?
Rather than just sticking the links within the body of the post, couldn't they just append a list of links at the end? It seems like both Deja and remarq.com (IMHO, a much better service)append messages saying 'Sent from Blahblahblah.com - We're great!' or somesuch at the end of the messages anyway, so why not a "If you're interested in x, y, or z, click on them." message? That would make it pretty obvious that the poster didn't include the links and would make deja look helpful, not intrusive.
Basically, Mulder has been abducted. And Scully is pregnant. :)
/. poll. Chances are they'll be obvious and make it Mulder, but there's always:
The father should be the next
- Skinner (Something about his reaction when Dana told him...)
- CSM (They did have a 'date')
- The Lone Gunman Whose Name Escapes Me At The Moment
- Krichek
- The Vampire Sheriff From A Few Seasons Back
- An Alien (The 2nd most likely choice)
- God (Hey, why not? Dana's Catholic,so it's not like there's no precedent, and she said she didn't know how she got pregnant...)
- and of course CmndrTaco
Hey there, Badmovies, let's not forget about (IIRC) 'Night of the Lupines' where giant rabbits terrorize ... uhm, people who are afraid of bunnies I guess. (I mean come on, RABBITS, couldn't you just poison the carrots or something?)
I haven't actually seen this no-doubt-terrifying movie, but I do recall it being referenced in the old TSR RPG 'Gamma World'...
And who breaks a TV trying to swat a bug?
What are they using? When I was a kid we tried to break an old tube with a baseball to no avail, are these people using firearms or what?
'Honey, those cockroaches that are always running around during fabric softener ads are back, could you bring me the 12-guage?'
My favorite reference in that book was somebody bringing 'shrooms to Thomas Huxley. It probably helped that I had just read 'The Doors of Perception' by Aldous Huxley and was discussing Tom in my Evolution class.
the ratio of bad open source programs to good open source programs is the same as the ratio of bad closed source programs to good closed source programs is the same as the ratio of bad movies to good movies
'79% of everything is crap' - Sturgeon's Law
Sturgeon was a SF author and was speaking about the SF writing, but the law has a broad application - movies, TV, software, restaurants, etc.
I think that in all the categories, nominations are decided by Academy members with that background - editors nominate editors, actors nominate actors, etc., but the whole academy votes for the winners. This is probably why films that get nominated for Best Picture tend to win in the editing, cinematography, what-have-you categories as well, even if say, Schindler's List didn't have better costumes than The Age of Innocence (to cite my favorite example). The old geezers who probably haven't even seen most of the movies just vote for the names they recognize/like ('Goodfellas was too foul-mouthed to have good editing - I'll vote for Dances With Wolves again') rather than thinking.
South Park probably never had a chance at winning, so it WAS an honor just to be nominated for them.
-You're right, thanks for encapsulating part of what I was trying to get at. Having a backdoor/killswitch is a must for this kind of thing, but it's not enough by itself. We'll still have to be careful about what gets introduced where. On a plant like purple loosestrife, a 99% effective backdoor will only by you time. And that 1% can now evolve additional resistance or a faster reproductive rate. It's better to be have the backdoor AND be reasonably sure the species won't cause problems.
Also, degrees don't mean much, they just let you make bigger mistakes. I mean, as a former B Gross Anatomy student and TA, I've never killed a patient in surgery, but you wouldn't want me to (try and) take out your appendix.
Hmmm, maybe my memory was wrong...
BR>I can't imagine that, I had all the other details - it was from a story, etc., etc.,
Tar baby is from an old B'rer Rabbit (I think, was it B'rer Fox?) story, which I believe came from the Southern US, explaining the racist sound I guess. Basically, B'rer Whoever made a 'baby' out of tar to trick whoever was chasing him for stealing ... something. Anyway, the chaser tackled the tar baby and got stuck, but the harder he tried to get free the more he got stuck.
You can see how that sort of thing would come to mind if you were working with the government a lot...