Just because IE hasn't been innovative doesn't mean that Microsoft hasn't been innovative. Come on, we've all done this dance before:
TehAngar (302512): Microsoft is evil and they've never done anything good. They copied everything and stoole the rest.
Normal (58176): Actually, though they've done a lot of horrible things, they've made dramatic pushes in UI, essentially created the modern office suite, are responsible for lots of very interesting rendering and typography research, and deployed the first instance of the current generation in standard game networking platforms.
TehAngar (302512): Microsoft is evil, they stole all their interface stuff from Apple
TehOtharAngar (89194): Apple stole their UI stuff from Xerox, who stole it from Vannevar Bush, who stole it from Victorian England, who stole it from Maltheos the Destroyer, who stole it from The Elves, who rendered the first interface from the silmaril embedded in Morgoth's Forehead, so Microsoft is clearly Morgoth
TehMoron (883245): First Post Hot Grits Apple Suxkszorz
Normal (58176): But really, Microsoft did do a few good things
TehAngar (302512): OMG YOU ARE SUCH AN IDIOT WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING YOU ARE A FALLACY MOD PARENT DOWN
Yeah yeah yeah. Microsoft has shown quite a bit of innovation, and nobody over seventeen is fooled. There is no honor in pretending that the people inside Microsoft which actually are doing good things aren't, just because Microsoft's advertisers and lawyers are the scum of the earth. Grow up.
Not so much anymore, at least in the United States. Take a look at the fortunes of prefab manufacturers such as General Steel - they're growing at an astonishing rate.
Much of the problem was that prefab building designs' manufactury setups don't generally mix well, since they're so reliant on specific-fit steel panels; because places like fast food chains and industrial sites were the few companies which would consider prefab, and since their particular needs led to peculiar shapes which didn't well suit home design, the costs of prefab which are extremely heavily dependant on economy of scale just didn't suit home design.
That said, some manufacturers found a fair amount of work in expanding existing buildings (to look at their commercials, it seems that religious buildings are a good market; all of the companies mention them explicitly at least once down here in Southern California.) Those buildings tend to be less peculiar in design (most people don't want homes which look like Taco Bell.) As a result, home-appropriate parts began manufactury.
Now, the prefab costs for what most of us would consider normal buildings are beginning to be reasonable. The home industry is by far and away the shiny golden ring in construction; whereas on individual jobs a contractor will take down more money for a skyscraper, housing is more plentiful, more regular, has a much larger market for expansion, is lower risk, and the margins are comparatively huge. As the prefab market is now able to start moving reasonably into homes, we're going to see costs plummet (if there isn't a market cornering, but given the heavyweights in traditional construction I doubt that'll happen) and designs proliferate.
We're already getting used to homes which look like one another; standard issue joke about Orange County. Why should it matter what the underlying materials are? If someone spends appropriately, you can't even tell a prefab steel building is steel; they get surfaced in exactly the same way that wooden frame and girdered buildings do. The economics are better, the homes have the potential to last longer, the installations are faster and less problem prone, and the metal sheets block out mind control rays from Martians.
You ask me, prefab is something we're going to see a hell of a lot of in the near future. Steel is already starting to surmount the economic difficulties, and with cemented fabrics, memory alloy plastics and potentially even nanites in the near future, I expect that before the average slashdotter dies (daystar fearing burrito hogs aside) we'll all be shaking our heads in bemusement telling our grandchildren (daystar fearing burrito hogs aside) how people actually used to put buildings together out of nails, rivets and screws, that we saw construction sites set up next to the road which took more than a week, and that yes, we really lived through earthquakes which could take buildings down.
Just because there is a school for something, it doesn't mean you can't do that job without going to that school.
Don't put words in my mouth: there was no point at which I said he couldn't write articles. What I said is that he's not a journalist, and that as such he does not get journalistic protections.
(With exceptions like medical school. Journalism does NOT compare to med school, sorry)
This is a non-sequitor. Carpentry also doesn't compare to being a doctor, yet you can't get insurance on a new house unless your carpenters are bonded and licensed. If you don't believe me, call a contractor and ask.
Not when I'm right.
You mean that the courts said you were wrong in acting the contrary to what you suggest is law wasn't enough of a hint to you that you're not right? Here's a hint: judges know the law better than you do. The judge said "you're not licensed and you've never gone to school; therefore although you do indeed write articles, you are not a journalist."
Consider that there is legal precedent that book authors also do not recieve journalistic protections. If someone who writes a novel isn't a journalist, then why do you believe that some yokel on the web is, when the reason the book author isn't is that they don't have a journalism degree?
It's time for you to talk to a first year criminal law student; press rights are one of the earliest things covered after simple principles like double jeopardy, miranda, right to counsel and habeas corpus, when discussing the basic mechanisms of court proceedings. You aren't a journalist just because you say you are; otherwise any random yokel could say "I'm a journalist, and so I don't have to expose my sources" just by publishing a blog.
Yes, you do. Consider the ten undergraduate programs at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, including journalism, media management or mass communications.
The requirements for getting licensure vary from state to state. There are states which require degrees, states which require tests, and states which don't require anything. In New York City, for example, they're called "press credentials," and one can only acquire credentials if 1) one has had them previously, 2) works for an established news service, or 3) takes an exam. In fact, if you knew much about the media, you'd know that these passes were used to prevent minority journalists from succeeding quite frequently, and more recently were used to shut Michael Bloomber's electronic newspaper out of most every significant political event in Washington DC, despite his long-established career.
Wow, indeed. Just because you're not aware of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, even if you know of a phrase which sounds superficially similar. Doesn't it bother you to be so presumptuous?
Ahem. Walter Cronkite has a school of journalism named after him, earned five media degrees from the University of Texas and recieved almost a dozen honorary degrees. Edward Murrow had media degrees from Stanford, U.Washington and Washington State.
So yes, they were journalists. Why? Because they went to school for it.
Pompeii was nowhere near that big. Whereas it's impossible to say with certainty, it's believed that Pompeii released less than 30 megatons of TNT in energy, going by the amount of rock remaining. Chances are you're thinking of Toba, the only supervolcano eruption known in history, which we believe occurred roughly 73,000 years ago. I'm no geologist, but with some quick math based on the numbers at that wikipedia page, I think the eruption was about 550 megatons; unfortunately the wikipedia page doesn't actually say.
Hell, Mount Saint Helens barely has that size distinction as one of the largest volcanic events known, and that's only because we stopped serious large nuke testing in the late seventies. The 1980 Mount Saint Helens event was by far and away the most devastating volcanic event in US history. Wikipedia suggests that the 1980 event had the cumulative power of 27,000 Little Boy explosions. Little boy, the bomb which exploded over Hiroshima, had a yield of 13,000 kilotons, giving the US' largest volcanic eruption ever a yield of approximately 351 megatons.
By contrast, the largest weapon ever tested on Earth was the Tsar Bomba, whose design allows for a hundred megaton yield, though the tested version was scaled back to 50 megaton; even so the mushroom cloud was taller than the atmosphere of the planet, and would have given fatal third degree radiation burns at a hundred kilometers from the blast site.
That device was capable of a hundred megatons in 1961, meaning that three and a half of that bomb would match mount saint helens. By modern standards the Tsar Bomba is modest but reasonable, for a single warhead on a MIRV. A MIRV frequently carries twenty or more times the power of the 1980 Mount Saint Helens event on a single rocket. Current bomb designs are often twice or more the size of the mount saint helens 1980 event in a single device; they just haven't been set off. There are more than a dozen US nuclear designs where a single bomb is larger than the theoretical Toba event.
Just because we haven't been stupid enough to set off the bombs of ours which are that large doesn't mean we can't bring to bear significant power. There are some which believe a bomb of that size might be enough to ignite Jupiter.
It also takes mother earth hundreds of thousands of years, tens of millions of cubic yards of molten rock and a significant portion of her total thermal energy - nearly a quarter of a percent - to set one of those events off. By contrast, a nuke these days can be huge, be made out of a hundred fifty pounds of expensive metal, and set off in under a thousandth of a second.
Look, Mother Earth has events whose power just makes us look stupid. Earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes. Volcanoes just aren't one of them, as impressive as they seem. It's a bunch of molten rock and ash; big deal. Earthquakes deal with continental pressure, which makes some hot ground's kinetic energy run for cover. Tsunami involve pressure fronts crossing an ocean-sized body of water, carrying far more than enough water to put mount saint helens out of its misery. Hurricanes are atmospheric events involving huge amounts of thermal energy, water weight and electrical discharge. "But volcanoes are much hotter than hurricanes!" Yes, and they're far smaller. Hurricanes are miles across and three dimensional. Volcanoes are a few hot spurts of rock.
The ancient romans managed to collect it. What makes you think we can't? The bulk of it will be within three miles of the volcano, besides. Hell, I have a vial of ash from Mt. St. Helens' eruption around 25 years ago as a souvenier, and it's far more valuable as underwater concrete than as souveniers...
DarkFader is hardly the original DS hacker. Please stop hanging onto him like this; his passthrough was the implementation of two other people's designs, and four people had an implementation up before he did. Darkfader leaks emulators against the emulator authors' wishes, gives passthrough code to game pirates and maintains a nasty efNet channel.
You would do well to look into Firefly, sgstair, darkain, or joat if you want to see real DS people. DarkFader has been an also-ran for some time now.
Given that you failed to research the needs of being a journallist when talking about your opinions of a legal matter which a judge had ruled on clearly, and given that you also failed to research the judicial ruling, yes, I think it's fairly obvious that research is just too hard for the random moron on the web.
As far as thinking I'm something else, no, I'm just tired of people which whine about things they utterly fail to understand, as if they had a better idea of the law than a judge which has been in school for a rock bottom of ten years and has at least ten years experience as a lawyer. Trust me, it's not me who's putting on superior aires, much less those utterly unearned.
Is the Star paper that you can pick up in your supermaket journalism? No.
Wrong. Just because it's bad journalism doesn't mean it isn't journalism. For purposes of legal defense, Star, Sun, the Weekly World News and so forth have their journalistic licenses.
Even if the bloggers are better than newspapers, they're not journalists until they've got a degree and a license. This one's cut and dried. It has nothing to do with the quality of the content - I could be a better surgeon than a licensed doctor, but until I have that degree and license, I'm still not allowed to operate, and I'm still not a real doctor.
It's all about the quality.
It has nothing to do with the quality. It has to do with a legal background, an educational background and a license, just like essentially every other profession in this country.
Well, luckily for us, not everything which goes into print, be it here or on the web, is journalism. If I start writing pamphlets, even on newspaper print at newspaper scale at newspaper density, it's still not a newspaper, and therefore I don't magically gain rights that other people don't have - much like I can't cut someone open even if I'm in a hospital wearing scrubs.
Much seemingly to Slashdot's surprise, journalism is a Real Profession (tm), with schools, extra laws, and a license. Until your blogger has a license and a degree, s/he isn't a journalist, even if he's rambling to people which will listen.
Therefore, since there's law on the matter, it really doesn't matter what you consider. Read the reasoning for the judge's decision before deciding it's wrong, please; this has had precedent since two years after the country existed. There aren't many laws in this country as old as the one you're considering wrong.
You aren't a journalist for picking up a pen. Go to school, get your license, and then and only then are you a special individual recieving special permissions.
Yeah, I thought that was a good episode of the X-Files, too. Where they had to catch the underground militia trying to spray the bacteria on the money in the bank which they'd tested on the kids in the movie theater, and so on...
Um. It doesn't really matter what you're convinced of. The primary basis of Hitler's political platform was that Darwin's work provided a mechanism by which a human subspecies could be qualitatively better than others. Hitler suborned scientists to claim that there was evidence of Aryan "supremacy" and that that subspecies was further along the path to a greater man, which he supported with a perversion of Nietzsche's übermensche dialogue device. That was his justification for the murder of his fellow man.
You might as well suggest that Mao didn't believe in the power of the people. Look, horrible people can believe in reasonable science. It doesn't make the science bad, and you don't have to fool yourself by distancing the monsters from the science. Hitler was hyperfascinated with evolution. To suggest otherwise is a characteristic ignorance of the man's justifications for his pathological murder.
Never fool yourself into believing that Hitler was insane. He was sociopathic, not insane. Hitler was sane, and moreover he was brilliant. Nobody could have guiled an entire nation and taken it from near-desperate economic collapse into a war machine which threatened the globe in 25 years without being brilliant. Moreover, though nobody could challenge him in the last ten years, they most certainly could have in the first ten; you need to remember that at first Hitler was giving very strong very convincing logical arguments built on rarely more than a single fallacy, in order for the people to have a platform on which to follow him.
Just because the end was unjustified madness doesn't mean the beginning was. Before Hitler Germany was a reasonable nation, as it has been afterwards, and it's not like his showing up just threw a lightswitch and changed the Germans from weird to evil. The rise to power was gradual, and planned, and at the beginning very skillfully cloaked both politically and scientifically.
Never undercredit a man which can do that much evil. That's how they slip past you, because you're so busy reassuring yourself that they're evil because they're incapable that they end up managing to take advantage.
Hitler not only accepted but embraced and perverted Darwin's theories. Remember that as a defense against other political or social agendas masking themselves behind science. It happens a lot, these days.
You suggested that a fifteen year old game which takes an hour and a half to play and about fifteen pages of rules to explain was an embetterment of a three year old game which takes sometimes the better part of a day to play and whose rulebook vies for size with some holy books.
Uh, sorry, but that just doesn't make sense. You're confusing limits of archaeology and the fossil record with the behavior of natural selection.
The fossil record is punctuated because virtually nothing survives as a fossil. If I remember correctly - and I probably don't, but whether the number's wrong isn't terribly germane here - Nova recently claimed that a creature from the Paleozoic era has less than a one in one billion chance of surviving until today as a fossil of the quality that current human science can identify.
On the other hand, natural selection most certainly is a smooth progress. Well-meaning amateurs often use tiny seed populations to suggest how huge sets of adaptations would show up among a tiny group. There is a minimum size a population can be before it begins to succumb to serious problems from the emergence and doubling of recessive traits through repeated inbreeding.
Even in the shockingly unlikely case that more than one beneficial adaptation were to show up in a single individual at a time, and even in a miniscule population bottleneck, one would see the adaptation go out in parts in the immediate few generations before it started to double up; that's just the nature of gene exchange. There is a blend between states.
The phrase "punctuated equilibrium" is a very common catchphrase for one viewpoint regarding the status of the fossil record. I should be forward that I believe in this viewpoint, but that it's just a theory, and there are competing theories which are equally sound.
The punctuated equilibrium viewpoint suggests that the fossil record has been largely governed by dice. Given some preposterous unlikelihood of survival over that timeframe, there will be some individuals in the slightly preposterously larger summation of all life forms in the history of Earth which manage to get themselves quite literally written into stone. If one believes firmly in the current viewpoint of statistics (as I do,) it becomes natural to suggest that despite a generally equal distribution of life forms which get fossilized, some areas which ought to be represented "roll low" and don't get any fossils while others "roll high" and get more than their fair share. (Dungeons and Dragons players are now nodding their heads sagely.)
From that viewpoint, that there are holes in the fossil record is just the upshot of the game of chance, and so even when there ought to be a smooth transition from bacteria to Frenchman to monkey to modern man, there are just gaps where the smooth transition (and this is before we deal with branching, treeing, reuptake, or any of the other mess of nonlinear issues which should smooth the shape of the genetic pool locus out) just never got stuck in the right kind of swamp to make a pretty picture in the rock.
That's where the phrase "punctuated equilibrium" comes in - there should be an equilibrium in the adaptation annealing to environmental pressures, but it's punctuated by holes in the fossil line due to dumb luck. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the way evolution works. It's fossilization, instead: it's about how you die, and just how badass your corpse really is. Evolution is smooth. Rotting leaves holes, in many senses.
The hell are you talking about? There is no such game as Civilization Advanced.
The game to which you're almost certainly referring - Advanced Civilization - is almost fifteen years old, and predates the video game line by two years. The two board games (Advanced Civilization and Sid Meier's Civilization) aren't related - Advanced Civ is the sequel to a much older game called Civilization which Avalon Hill acquired from Hartland Trefoil, which was in turn probably coarse inspiration for the original video game, but nothing more. Both the original and Civ Adv are pretty much just Risk with trading (oddly, disasters are treated as negative resources to be traded) and a minor science system of no serious importance.
I think Mr. Ray is at the pinnacle of meaningless drivel
Then you have entirely missed the point of that website. You might as well say that Landover Baptist was a heretic church, or The Onion a disreputable journal of opinion.
Just because it's stupid doesn't mean the author is stupid. Feel free to learn about humor. It'll help you in the interactions with mammals.
You know, grandparent post was quite clear in that he was looking for a reply which would explain things rather than to dismiss them, and what you did was to turn around and dismiss what he had to say as based on apparently flawed math or logic, with no explanation whatsoever.
Furthermore, what he said is a tenable fringe belief in physics, and there is not in fact a good contradiction of his viewpoint currently known. The next time you choose to take such a tone with someone, have the decency to explain yourself, or to be utterly silent.
If you want to tell me I'm wrong, you will have to give a specific explanation of why, including examples and a counter-argument. What you did to the grandparent was nothing better than to waste his time karma whoring.
you'll just have to trust me when I say there is *nothing* of value in your idea.
This sort of response is not warranted even if the parent post contained random line noise. He wasn't being rude to you, and you've been nothing but condescending to each of the people to whom you've responded.
Turn it down a notch, Jack. That we're not all physicists isn't a personal insult to you.
You know, if you ask a pothead to rotate within a line, they'll just grab their bong and spin it on its tall axis.
Apologies - IANAP and I might be asking further nonsense. However, given all of the ways in which one tries to hide dimensions in existing single dimensional spaces with things like Kaluza Klein collapsed intrinsic dimensions, are you sure that either the notion of uniaxial rotation and moving dimensions are nonsense?
Pardon the ascription, but the world as round was uncontionable nonsense once, too.
If UML is soooo important,then perhaps it should be part of an IDE, when you hit NEW PROJECT.
I believe the first such IDE showed up in 1996. It's always helpful to find out whether something exists before opining that it doesn't, especially when it's potentially ten years old.
1) Acquire dictionary; register template ad for every word, thereby defeating ad system's appropriacy filters and effectively drowning out other ads, garnering bulk eyeballs for vapid schemes which appeal to the gulliable people which inevitably crop up in every field, including quantum mechanics 2) ??? 3) Profit.
1) Predict overreaction to joke beaten into ground by moderators, trolls, replies. 2) ??? 3) Proph... nevermind.
Actually, if you look, the size of nanotechnological devices is well-defined; viruses are far too large to be nanodevices, and they're clearly not technology of any form.
The prions of which we are currently aware are all slightly too large to be nanolife, but the prion scale of things is right around that teetering edge, and we're still having trouble finding things that small (remember how long it took us to identify Cruetzfeld-Jacob and BSE.) Therefore, there are probably many prions which qualify as nanolife.
No natural life is technology. Nanolife is not nanotechnology. The mistake about the scale of things is quite understandable, but about the technology bit be more careful please.
Anything mankind could come up with would be wimpy by comparison.
Don't be absurd. Nature has been outengineered by man on almost every front. Weaponized anthrax and GRID-2 make pure-natural virii look positively silly by comparison. In fact, there's a good reason for natural viruses to never get as bad as what we made during the 1970s: they kill too fast, and so their carriers cannot infect further carriers. Our weaponized bacteria are so deadly that they'd kill before a contagion could even start. They're too deadly to survive in the wild. In order to understand viral propogation, you must remember that virii are parasites; parasites have a limited range of reasonable effect on the host, before they begin killing themselves too.
Man-made virii have no such limits. They're developed artificially in labs, and their habitat is developed specifically to keep them alive out of materials which can't be affected. The virii are fed, for christ's sake. Even the simple efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, effectively just tinkering with existing viruses, made things so appallingly potent that even the country which set off the first nuclear bomb in an age where we were still afraid it'd light the atmosphere on fire doesn't have the balls to try them.
Now, please remember that these are natural viruses. They work from existing mechanisms and the body is designed to fight them. They're made from naturally available and naturally metabolizable materials. There's a reason no predator ever evolved a sword, even though the design is simple and the construction straightforward: there isn't a reasonable biological process with which to excrete bulk iron, at least with the available compounds on Earth.
Remember also that man-made devices, such as actual swords, have no such limitation. Y'see, engineers have access to bulk materials, to machine tools, and can design things which are totally preposterous - they don't need to be viable, self supporting, resistant to attack from other predators, or to be able to survive as their prey or environment change. None of the natural pressures apply to them. All a man-made virus needs to be able to do is survive aerosolization, infect through the skin, and kill.
We could easily design murder devices small enough to hide inside of prions. We don't even know if mother nature has developed anything that small yet. The idea that if something was possible nature would have found it is badly flawed. Yes, nature is very inventive, and yes, nature has come up with many things we haven't, at scales so broad that we're not even aware of many of said inventions, let alone still unware how they're done. Still, that doesn't mean that nature does everything under the sun. If so, the sears tower wouldn't be as tall as a redwood, 747s wouldn't be able to carry more than a bald eagle, radio wouldn't reach further than wolf calls, nutrasweet wouldn't be as sweet as honeysuckle, self defense sprays wouldn't have anything to say to cayenne peppers, teflon wouldn't be as slick as wax, and television... well, good luck even finding nature's parallel to that.
There are some, myself included, who believe that mankind's engineering is primarily the extension and eventual rep
Slashdot Mirror
- TehAngar (302512): Microsoft is evil and they've never done anything good. They copied everything and stoole the rest.
- Normal (58176): Actually, though they've done a lot of horrible things, they've made dramatic pushes in UI, essentially created the modern office suite, are responsible for lots of very interesting rendering and typography research, and deployed the first instance of the current generation in standard game networking platforms.
- TehAngar (302512): Microsoft is evil, they stole all their interface stuff from Apple
- TehOtharAngar (89194): Apple stole their UI stuff from Xerox, who stole it from Vannevar Bush, who stole it from Victorian England, who stole it from Maltheos the Destroyer, who stole it from The Elves, who rendered the first interface from the silmaril embedded in Morgoth's Forehead, so Microsoft is clearly Morgoth
- TehMoron (883245): First Post Hot Grits Apple Suxkszorz
- Normal (58176): But really, Microsoft did do a few good things
- TehAngar (302512): OMG YOU ARE SUCH AN IDIOT WHY ARE YOU STILL TALKING YOU ARE A FALLACY MOD PARENT DOWN
Yeah yeah yeah. Microsoft has shown quite a bit of innovation, and nobody over seventeen is fooled. There is no honor in pretending that the people inside Microsoft which actually are doing good things aren't, just because Microsoft's advertisers and lawyers are the scum of the earth. Grow up.Not so much anymore, at least in the United States. Take a look at the fortunes of prefab manufacturers such as General Steel - they're growing at an astonishing rate.
Much of the problem was that prefab building designs' manufactury setups don't generally mix well, since they're so reliant on specific-fit steel panels; because places like fast food chains and industrial sites were the few companies which would consider prefab, and since their particular needs led to peculiar shapes which didn't well suit home design, the costs of prefab which are extremely heavily dependant on economy of scale just didn't suit home design.
That said, some manufacturers found a fair amount of work in expanding existing buildings (to look at their commercials, it seems that religious buildings are a good market; all of the companies mention them explicitly at least once down here in Southern California.) Those buildings tend to be less peculiar in design (most people don't want homes which look like Taco Bell.) As a result, home-appropriate parts began manufactury.
Now, the prefab costs for what most of us would consider normal buildings are beginning to be reasonable. The home industry is by far and away the shiny golden ring in construction; whereas on individual jobs a contractor will take down more money for a skyscraper, housing is more plentiful, more regular, has a much larger market for expansion, is lower risk, and the margins are comparatively huge. As the prefab market is now able to start moving reasonably into homes, we're going to see costs plummet (if there isn't a market cornering, but given the heavyweights in traditional construction I doubt that'll happen) and designs proliferate.
We're already getting used to homes which look like one another; standard issue joke about Orange County. Why should it matter what the underlying materials are? If someone spends appropriately, you can't even tell a prefab steel building is steel; they get surfaced in exactly the same way that wooden frame and girdered buildings do. The economics are better, the homes have the potential to last longer, the installations are faster and less problem prone, and the metal sheets block out mind control rays from Martians.
You ask me, prefab is something we're going to see a hell of a lot of in the near future. Steel is already starting to surmount the economic difficulties, and with cemented fabrics, memory alloy plastics and potentially even nanites in the near future, I expect that before the average slashdotter dies (daystar fearing burrito hogs aside) we'll all be shaking our heads in bemusement telling our grandchildren (daystar fearing burrito hogs aside) how people actually used to put buildings together out of nails, rivets and screws, that we saw construction sites set up next to the road which took more than a week, and that yes, we really lived through earthquakes which could take buildings down.
Yay for progress.
Just because there is a school for something, it doesn't mean you can't do that job without going to that school.
Don't put words in my mouth: there was no point at which I said he couldn't write articles. What I said is that he's not a journalist, and that as such he does not get journalistic protections.
(With exceptions like medical school. Journalism does NOT compare to med school, sorry)
This is a non-sequitor. Carpentry also doesn't compare to being a doctor, yet you can't get insurance on a new house unless your carpenters are bonded and licensed. If you don't believe me, call a contractor and ask.
Not when I'm right.
You mean that the courts said you were wrong in acting the contrary to what you suggest is law wasn't enough of a hint to you that you're not right? Here's a hint: judges know the law better than you do. The judge said "you're not licensed and you've never gone to school; therefore although you do indeed write articles, you are not a journalist."
Consider that there is legal precedent that book authors also do not recieve journalistic protections. If someone who writes a novel isn't a journalist, then why do you believe that some yokel on the web is, when the reason the book author isn't is that they don't have a journalism degree?
It's time for you to talk to a first year criminal law student; press rights are one of the earliest things covered after simple principles like double jeopardy, miranda, right to counsel and habeas corpus, when discussing the basic mechanisms of court proceedings. You aren't a journalist just because you say you are; otherwise any random yokel could say "I'm a journalist, and so I don't have to expose my sources" just by publishing a blog.
In short, don't be ridiculous.
Yes, you do. Consider the ten undergraduate programs at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, including journalism, media management or mass communications.
The requirements for getting licensure vary from state to state. There are states which require degrees, states which require tests, and states which don't require anything. In New York City, for example, they're called "press credentials," and one can only acquire credentials if 1) one has had them previously, 2) works for an established news service, or 3) takes an exam. In fact, if you knew much about the media, you'd know that these passes were used to prevent minority journalists from succeeding quite frequently, and more recently were used to shut Michael Bloomber's electronic newspaper out of most every significant political event in Washington DC, despite his long-established career.
Wow, indeed. Just because you're not aware of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist, even if you know of a phrase which sounds superficially similar. Doesn't it bother you to be so presumptuous?
Ahem. Walter Cronkite has a school of journalism named after him, earned five media degrees from the University of Texas and recieved almost a dozen honorary degrees. Edward Murrow had media degrees from Stanford, U.Washington and Washington State.
So yes, they were journalists. Why? Because they went to school for it.
Pompeii was nowhere near that big. Whereas it's impossible to say with certainty, it's believed that Pompeii released less than 30 megatons of TNT in energy, going by the amount of rock remaining. Chances are you're thinking of Toba, the only supervolcano eruption known in history, which we believe occurred roughly 73,000 years ago. I'm no geologist, but with some quick math based on the numbers at that wikipedia page, I think the eruption was about 550 megatons; unfortunately the wikipedia page doesn't actually say.
Hell, Mount Saint Helens barely has that size distinction as one of the largest volcanic events known, and that's only because we stopped serious large nuke testing in the late seventies. The 1980 Mount Saint Helens event was by far and away the most devastating volcanic event in US history. Wikipedia suggests that the 1980 event had the cumulative power of 27,000 Little Boy explosions. Little boy, the bomb which exploded over Hiroshima, had a yield of 13,000 kilotons, giving the US' largest volcanic eruption ever a yield of approximately 351 megatons.
By contrast, the largest weapon ever tested on Earth was the Tsar Bomba, whose design allows for a hundred megaton yield, though the tested version was scaled back to 50 megaton; even so the mushroom cloud was taller than the atmosphere of the planet, and would have given fatal third degree radiation burns at a hundred kilometers from the blast site.
That device was capable of a hundred megatons in 1961, meaning that three and a half of that bomb would match mount saint helens. By modern standards the Tsar Bomba is modest but reasonable, for a single warhead on a MIRV. A MIRV frequently carries twenty or more times the power of the 1980 Mount Saint Helens event on a single rocket. Current bomb designs are often twice or more the size of the mount saint helens 1980 event in a single device; they just haven't been set off. There are more than a dozen US nuclear designs where a single bomb is larger than the theoretical Toba event.
Just because we haven't been stupid enough to set off the bombs of ours which are that large doesn't mean we can't bring to bear significant power. There are some which believe a bomb of that size might be enough to ignite Jupiter.
It also takes mother earth hundreds of thousands of years, tens of millions of cubic yards of molten rock and a significant portion of her total thermal energy - nearly a quarter of a percent - to set one of those events off. By contrast, a nuke these days can be huge, be made out of a hundred fifty pounds of expensive metal, and set off in under a thousandth of a second.
Look, Mother Earth has events whose power just makes us look stupid. Earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes. Volcanoes just aren't one of them, as impressive as they seem. It's a bunch of molten rock and ash; big deal. Earthquakes deal with continental pressure, which makes some hot ground's kinetic energy run for cover. Tsunami involve pressure fronts crossing an ocean-sized body of water, carrying far more than enough water to put mount saint helens out of its misery. Hurricanes are atmospheric events involving huge amounts of thermal energy, water weight and electrical discharge. "But volcanoes are much hotter than hurricanes!" Yes, and they're far smaller. Hurricanes are miles across and three dimensional. Volcanoes are a few hot spurts of rock.
would have smited (smitten?)
Smote.
Close enough, if we start work on the canal right now .
The ancient romans managed to collect it. What makes you think we can't? The bulk of it will be within three miles of the volcano, besides. Hell, I have a vial of ash from Mt. St. Helens' eruption around 25 years ago as a souvenier, and it's far more valuable as underwater concrete than as souveniers...
DarkFader is hardly the original DS hacker. Please stop hanging onto him like this; his passthrough was the implementation of two other people's designs, and four people had an implementation up before he did. Darkfader leaks emulators against the emulator authors' wishes, gives passthrough code to game pirates and maintains a nasty efNet channel.
You would do well to look into Firefly, sgstair, darkain, or joat if you want to see real DS people. DarkFader has been an also-ran for some time now.
Given that you failed to research the needs of being a journallist when talking about your opinions of a legal matter which a judge had ruled on clearly, and given that you also failed to research the judicial ruling, yes, I think it's fairly obvious that research is just too hard for the random moron on the web.
As far as thinking I'm something else, no, I'm just tired of people which whine about things they utterly fail to understand, as if they had a better idea of the law than a judge which has been in school for a rock bottom of ten years and has at least ten years experience as a lawyer. Trust me, it's not me who's putting on superior aires, much less those utterly unearned.
Is the Star paper that you can pick up in your supermaket journalism? No.
Wrong. Just because it's bad journalism doesn't mean it isn't journalism. For purposes of legal defense, Star, Sun, the Weekly World News and so forth have their journalistic licenses.
Even if the bloggers are better than newspapers, they're not journalists until they've got a degree and a license. This one's cut and dried. It has nothing to do with the quality of the content - I could be a better surgeon than a licensed doctor, but until I have that degree and license, I'm still not allowed to operate, and I'm still not a real doctor.
It's all about the quality.
It has nothing to do with the quality. It has to do with a legal background, an educational background and a license, just like essentially every other profession in this country.
Well, luckily for us, not everything which goes into print, be it here or on the web, is journalism. If I start writing pamphlets, even on newspaper print at newspaper scale at newspaper density, it's still not a newspaper, and therefore I don't magically gain rights that other people don't have - much like I can't cut someone open even if I'm in a hospital wearing scrubs.
Much seemingly to Slashdot's surprise, journalism is a Real Profession (tm), with schools, extra laws, and a license. Until your blogger has a license and a degree, s/he isn't a journalist, even if he's rambling to people which will listen.
Therefore, since there's law on the matter, it really doesn't matter what you consider. Read the reasoning for the judge's decision before deciding it's wrong, please; this has had precedent since two years after the country existed. There aren't many laws in this country as old as the one you're considering wrong.
You aren't a journalist for picking up a pen. Go to school, get your license, and then and only then are you a special individual recieving special permissions.
Mod parent down.
Yeah, I thought that was a good episode of the X-Files, too. Where they had to catch the underground militia trying to spray the bacteria on the money in the bank which they'd tested on the kids in the movie theater, and so on...
Um. It doesn't really matter what you're convinced of. The primary basis of Hitler's political platform was that Darwin's work provided a mechanism by which a human subspecies could be qualitatively better than others. Hitler suborned scientists to claim that there was evidence of Aryan "supremacy" and that that subspecies was further along the path to a greater man, which he supported with a perversion of Nietzsche's übermensche dialogue device. That was his justification for the murder of his fellow man.
You might as well suggest that Mao didn't believe in the power of the people. Look, horrible people can believe in reasonable science. It doesn't make the science bad, and you don't have to fool yourself by distancing the monsters from the science. Hitler was hyperfascinated with evolution. To suggest otherwise is a characteristic ignorance of the man's justifications for his pathological murder.
Never fool yourself into believing that Hitler was insane. He was sociopathic, not insane. Hitler was sane, and moreover he was brilliant. Nobody could have guiled an entire nation and taken it from near-desperate economic collapse into a war machine which threatened the globe in 25 years without being brilliant. Moreover, though nobody could challenge him in the last ten years, they most certainly could have in the first ten; you need to remember that at first Hitler was giving very strong very convincing logical arguments built on rarely more than a single fallacy, in order for the people to have a platform on which to follow him.
Just because the end was unjustified madness doesn't mean the beginning was. Before Hitler Germany was a reasonable nation, as it has been afterwards, and it's not like his showing up just threw a lightswitch and changed the Germans from weird to evil. The rise to power was gradual, and planned, and at the beginning very skillfully cloaked both politically and scientifically.
Never undercredit a man which can do that much evil. That's how they slip past you, because you're so busy reassuring yourself that they're evil because they're incapable that they end up managing to take advantage.
Hitler not only accepted but embraced and perverted Darwin's theories. Remember that as a defense against other political or social agendas masking themselves behind science. It happens a lot, these days.
You suggested that a fifteen year old game which takes an hour and a half to play and about fifteen pages of rules to explain was an embetterment of a three year old game which takes sometimes the better part of a day to play and whose rulebook vies for size with some holy books.
C'mon.
Uh, sorry, but that just doesn't make sense. You're confusing limits of archaeology and the fossil record with the behavior of natural selection.
The fossil record is punctuated because virtually nothing survives as a fossil. If I remember correctly - and I probably don't, but whether the number's wrong isn't terribly germane here - Nova recently claimed that a creature from the Paleozoic era has less than a one in one billion chance of surviving until today as a fossil of the quality that current human science can identify.
On the other hand, natural selection most certainly is a smooth progress. Well-meaning amateurs often use tiny seed populations to suggest how huge sets of adaptations would show up among a tiny group. There is a minimum size a population can be before it begins to succumb to serious problems from the emergence and doubling of recessive traits through repeated inbreeding.
Even in the shockingly unlikely case that more than one beneficial adaptation were to show up in a single individual at a time, and even in a miniscule population bottleneck, one would see the adaptation go out in parts in the immediate few generations before it started to double up; that's just the nature of gene exchange. There is a blend between states.
The phrase "punctuated equilibrium" is a very common catchphrase for one viewpoint regarding the status of the fossil record. I should be forward that I believe in this viewpoint, but that it's just a theory, and there are competing theories which are equally sound.
The punctuated equilibrium viewpoint suggests that the fossil record has been largely governed by dice. Given some preposterous unlikelihood of survival over that timeframe, there will be some individuals in the slightly preposterously larger summation of all life forms in the history of Earth which manage to get themselves quite literally written into stone. If one believes firmly in the current viewpoint of statistics (as I do,) it becomes natural to suggest that despite a generally equal distribution of life forms which get fossilized, some areas which ought to be represented "roll low" and don't get any fossils while others "roll high" and get more than their fair share. (Dungeons and Dragons players are now nodding their heads sagely.)
From that viewpoint, that there are holes in the fossil record is just the upshot of the game of chance, and so even when there ought to be a smooth transition from bacteria to Frenchman to monkey to modern man, there are just gaps where the smooth transition (and this is before we deal with branching, treeing, reuptake, or any of the other mess of nonlinear issues which should smooth the shape of the genetic pool locus out) just never got stuck in the right kind of swamp to make a pretty picture in the rock.
That's where the phrase "punctuated equilibrium" comes in - there should be an equilibrium in the adaptation annealing to environmental pressures, but it's punctuated by holes in the fossil line due to dumb luck. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the way evolution works. It's fossilization, instead: it's about how you die, and just how badass your corpse really is. Evolution is smooth. Rotting leaves holes, in many senses.
Mod parent down as confused.
The hell are you talking about? There is no such game as Civilization Advanced.
The game to which you're almost certainly referring - Advanced Civilization - is almost fifteen years old, and predates the video game line by two years. The two board games (Advanced Civilization and Sid Meier's Civilization) aren't related - Advanced Civ is the sequel to a much older game called Civilization which Avalon Hill acquired from Hartland Trefoil, which was in turn probably coarse inspiration for the original video game, but nothing more. Both the original and Civ Adv are pretty much just Risk with trading (oddly, disasters are treated as negative resources to be traded) and a minor science system of no serious importance.
Informative my ass. Mod parent down.
I think Mr. Ray is at the pinnacle of meaningless drivel
Then you have entirely missed the point of that website. You might as well say that Landover Baptist was a heretic church, or The Onion a disreputable journal of opinion.
Just because it's stupid doesn't mean the author is stupid. Feel free to learn about humor. It'll help you in the interactions with mammals.
You know, grandparent post was quite clear in that he was looking for a reply which would explain things rather than to dismiss them, and what you did was to turn around and dismiss what he had to say as based on apparently flawed math or logic, with no explanation whatsoever.
Furthermore, what he said is a tenable fringe belief in physics, and there is not in fact a good contradiction of his viewpoint currently known. The next time you choose to take such a tone with someone, have the decency to explain yourself, or to be utterly silent.
If you want to tell me I'm wrong, you will have to give a specific explanation of why, including examples and a counter-argument. What you did to the grandparent was nothing better than to waste his time karma whoring.
you'll just have to trust me when I say there is *nothing* of value in your idea.
This sort of response is not warranted even if the parent post contained random line noise. He wasn't being rude to you, and you've been nothing but condescending to each of the people to whom you've responded.
Turn it down a notch, Jack. That we're not all physicists isn't a personal insult to you.
You know, if you ask a pothead to rotate within a line, they'll just grab their bong and spin it on its tall axis.
Apologies - IANAP and I might be asking further nonsense. However, given all of the ways in which one tries to hide dimensions in existing single dimensional spaces with things like Kaluza Klein collapsed intrinsic dimensions, are you sure that either the notion of uniaxial rotation and moving dimensions are nonsense?
Pardon the ascription, but the world as round was uncontionable nonsense once, too.
If UML is soooo important ,then perhaps it should be part of an IDE, when you hit NEW PROJECT.
I believe the first such IDE showed up in 1996. It's always helpful to find out whether something exists before opining that it doesn't, especially when it's potentially ten years old.
1) Acquire dictionary; register template ad for every word, thereby defeating ad system's appropriacy filters and effectively drowning out other ads, garnering bulk eyeballs for vapid schemes which appeal to the gulliable people which inevitably crop up in every field, including quantum mechanics
2) ???
3) Profit.
1) Predict overreaction to joke beaten into ground by moderators, trolls, replies.
2) ???
3) Proph... nevermind.
Actually, if you look, the size of nanotechnological devices is well-defined; viruses are far too large to be nanodevices, and they're clearly not technology of any form.
... well, good luck even finding nature's parallel to that.
The prions of which we are currently aware are all slightly too large to be nanolife, but the prion scale of things is right around that teetering edge, and we're still having trouble finding things that small (remember how long it took us to identify Cruetzfeld-Jacob and BSE.) Therefore, there are probably many prions which qualify as nanolife.
No natural life is technology. Nanolife is not nanotechnology. The mistake about the scale of things is quite understandable, but about the technology bit be more careful please.
Anything mankind could come up with would be wimpy by comparison.
Don't be absurd. Nature has been outengineered by man on almost every front. Weaponized anthrax and GRID-2 make pure-natural virii look positively silly by comparison. In fact, there's a good reason for natural viruses to never get as bad as what we made during the 1970s: they kill too fast, and so their carriers cannot infect further carriers. Our weaponized bacteria are so deadly that they'd kill before a contagion could even start. They're too deadly to survive in the wild. In order to understand viral propogation, you must remember that virii are parasites; parasites have a limited range of reasonable effect on the host, before they begin killing themselves too.
Man-made virii have no such limits. They're developed artificially in labs, and their habitat is developed specifically to keep them alive out of materials which can't be affected. The virii are fed, for christ's sake. Even the simple efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, effectively just tinkering with existing viruses, made things so appallingly potent that even the country which set off the first nuclear bomb in an age where we were still afraid it'd light the atmosphere on fire doesn't have the balls to try them.
Now, please remember that these are natural viruses. They work from existing mechanisms and the body is designed to fight them. They're made from naturally available and naturally metabolizable materials. There's a reason no predator ever evolved a sword, even though the design is simple and the construction straightforward: there isn't a reasonable biological process with which to excrete bulk iron, at least with the available compounds on Earth.
Remember also that man-made devices, such as actual swords, have no such limitation. Y'see, engineers have access to bulk materials, to machine tools, and can design things which are totally preposterous - they don't need to be viable, self supporting, resistant to attack from other predators, or to be able to survive as their prey or environment change. None of the natural pressures apply to them. All a man-made virus needs to be able to do is survive aerosolization, infect through the skin, and kill.
We could easily design murder devices small enough to hide inside of prions. We don't even know if mother nature has developed anything that small yet. The idea that if something was possible nature would have found it is badly flawed. Yes, nature is very inventive, and yes, nature has come up with many things we haven't, at scales so broad that we're not even aware of many of said inventions, let alone still unware how they're done. Still, that doesn't mean that nature does everything under the sun. If so, the sears tower wouldn't be as tall as a redwood, 747s wouldn't be able to carry more than a bald eagle, radio wouldn't reach further than wolf calls, nutrasweet wouldn't be as sweet as honeysuckle, self defense sprays wouldn't have anything to say to cayenne peppers, teflon wouldn't be as slick as wax, and television
There are some, myself included, who believe that mankind's engineering is primarily the extension and eventual rep