I found a nice old picture tube (MAG Innovations 17mumble; manufactured in 1993) at a thrift store for $8. The little plastic door that covers the controls is missing. Does 1280x1024 real nice.
It's the display for my Linux box that my brother cast off (AMD K6-II 450; 128 MB RAM. 56x CD; no -R, -RW or anything. New 80 GB HD.) So for a total investment of $48, I'm up and running. I when I get cash, I might splurge for a new MoBo.
Anyway, I really want a new Mac. If they made something like the mini, but with a G5 and a 3.5" HD. Yes, it would need a bigger box; maybe something VCR-sized?. The mini is about $300 less than the eMac, a decked-out Mac Midi should spec-out similar to, and be about $500 cheaper than the top-line iMac, or $1300. Compare the $1800 iMac with 20" LCD vs. Mac Midi plus $800 20" diplay for $2100.
Anyway, a KVM switch would let me run the Mac Midi and the Linux box with my existing monitor, and buy a nano-tube display in a year or two. When the computer is obsolete in five years, the display (Either the MAG or a flat panel) should be reusable.
Will HD DVD players, HD Tuners etc. come with VGA connectors? If a monitor can diplay 1280x1024, it can diplay 720p HDTV...
It's not quite that bad. You don't have to convince a fundamentalist that the words in their holey book of choice are in error. It would be sufficient to get them to consider the possibility that _their_interpretation_ of those words is not correct.
Of course, I have little hope that this will happen with any frequency.
It was creationism that caused me to give up on the Christian church.
The ID advocates will present a hand-waving argument. They have never presented anything resembling scientific evidence.
The ID advocates have lost in the court of science; they are now trying a political end-run around science to force teachers to present their position with their classroom authority.
The US Educational system will be damaged if they succeed.
[ Supernatural causes ]... Perhaps not directly observe, but if the supernatural act has a natural effect, that can be observed. Many things are inferred in science through observation of the effects the unseen has on the observable. We don't observe bosons directly. Often our observations may be several layers removed from the actual event.
But how, then, do you determine that cause X of observed phenomenon Y is supernatural?
The only recourse is Occam's Razor.
It could be that angels decide the course of the planets. In a matter that is completely consistent with Newton's Laws of Motion and Law of Universal Gravitation*. How do you tell the difference?
*Except Mercury. Dr. Einstein's work bears some relevance here.
OK, so how can we tell the difference between Newton being absolutely correct, and Angels altering the path of Mercury (i.e. the Supernatural) vs. Einstein being more correct than Newton (the natural).
And what if the date was 1902, and General Relativity hadn't been formulated yet? Then the choice seems to be supernatural Angels, vs. I-dont-know-yet. And that way lies the fallacy of God-of-the-gaps.
Another problem is that the Supernatural explanation closes off further investigation. We know that Angels are bending the orbit of Mercury; what else could it be? Those papers of Einstein's are worthless; they cannot explain why the Angels do what they do. Or worse yet, those papers are heretical.
Wait a minute. Didn't the Catholic Church recently apologize to the world for imprisoning Galileo?
Evolution is also falsifiable if you cannot show how a biological structure could develop through small, incremental, accidental changes to the genome. This is the heart of the ID argument.
I think this is backward. No theory is required to whip up answers to questions on demand, which is what you seem to be asking. Evolution would be falsified if one could show that a biological structure could not develop through incremental changes to the genome. The ID argument, specifically Behe's Irreducible Complexity argument, attempts to do this.
When we go back to the moon, I'd like to see an emphasis on two things: self-sufficiency, and energy production.
I'd like to at least hear talk that the goal was a self-sufficient lunar habitat. Could grow its own food, recycle its own oxygen. Do Biosphere 2 with real science instead of publicity stunts. How much plant life do you need to support one human? What can you do to cut down the 14.5 days of darkness?
And Scientific American had an interesting article a while back; the theme was a solar-powered automated factory that could build a solar-powered automated factory. Set one of those up (with instructions to stop building after a finite time). Then reap all the solar energy...
Apollo 7; test of command module Apollo 8; lunar orbit Apollo 9: earth-orbit test of Lunar Module and docking Apollo 10: Full Dress Rehearsal Apollo 11: First Lunar Landing Apollo 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Apollo-Soyuz, and three Skylab flights.
That's 15.
The difference is that Microsoft fixes the price of IE at 0, by passing the costs on to purchasers of Microsoft Windows, where Microsoft has a monopoly. What was criminal was the the use of the subsidy from Windows users who have no choice.
Anybody in any business is free to choose to sell their goods at a lower price than the competition. As long as you really are choosing to sell goods at a lower price, rather than passing those costs on to someone who has no choice about paying them.
I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that 25 fps and 50 fps formats were not included. To Heck with Europe! and European content. They don't even believe that Iraq's WMDs were a threat.
I don't have a problem with you believing what you believe. I choose toe disagree.
I do have a problem when people use the political process to mandate that what they believe in be taught in science classes, when it is very clearly not science.
First, intellegent design does not contradict evolution. Intellegent design does not support evolution. Then why do proponents of Intelligent Design claim that their body of work is an alternative to evolution? Secondly, regarding God needing a creator. Most fundimentalists consider God to be even outside time. Unchanging, simply existing. The same tired, old, rhetoric. If you are content with an uncreated god that is far more complex and powerful than anything, why do you object to a much less complex uncreated universe? And, of course, there is no physical evidence at all for your outside-of-time creator. It's wrong to suppose that God created fossils to test men's faith. God is not cruel or deceptive.
Of course, if you accept that fossils are what they appear to be, you have to give up on the idea of a literal interpretation of Genesis. Of which the literal story of Adam and Eve is a part. So once you admit that fossils are real, you pretty much end up with humans evolving from non-human, ape ancestors over a few million years.
And I'll let slide that you imply that you are a better-informed spokesperson for the Christian Fundamentalists. What you say is directly contradicted by Dobson, Falwell, and many others who claim to speak for Fundamentalism.
If you could prove evolution it would no longer be a scientific theory -- would then be a scientific law. Let's do some science. Let's test your assertion, that theories are replaced by laws. Consider Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, and Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation. Your assertion is that Laws replace Theories. If you were correct, we would see how Einstein's Theory of General Relativity has been replaced by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation.
Oh, wait. It happened the other way around. And there was actual evidence that the Law couldn't explain, and the Theory could. Your assertion is disproven.
You can demonstrate intelligence, by learning and showing that you've learned something, or you may continue to be a twit.
And the Theory of Evolution has been tested time and time again. On occasion, particular details of the theory of evolution have been updated to take into account results of clever new experiments.
Creationism, on the other hand, keeps on repeating the same old tired excuses; excuses that have been refuted so many times in the past that they can now only be described as lies.
Odd, then, that people are surprised when they catch American Theocrats telling more lies. Lies seem to be their stock in trade.
Young-Earth Creationists and their modern counterparts frequently pull out the "Last Thursday" argument, without knowing it. God made the earth with the fossils in it, with starlight from distant galaxies already en route, etc. There is no scientific evidence that could refute such an assertion. Similarly, there is no scientific evidence that could refute the notion that the universe was created Last Thursday, by my cat, Sidney . (Yeah, my site is ancient and moldy.) Any bit of evidence you could think of was created that way by God 6,009 years ago, or Last Thursday. Occam's razor cuts the argument off, though.
Old-earth creationists frequently argue that the biblical order in Genesis is exactly the order that geologists found. Except it isn't. Genesis has land plants before fish, and birds before land animals. So it's exactly correct, except for where it is wrong.
"Intelligent Design" is just creationism after the lawyers figured out a way around the 1987 case (whose cite escapes my poor brain.) The arguments in Behe's _Darwin's_Black_Box_ and Dembski's Explanatory Filter (that's a concept, not a title) have been refuted many times over.
Still, the American Taliban wants what it wants, and will keep getting it until a majority of American voters have their eyes open and see what they're doing to our country.
My copy is on the hard drive of a new Mac Mini (or, if they ever release it, a Mac Midi: basically, an iMac without a screen) that I can't quite afford yet. Tiger + iLife is almost 40% of the cost of a mini!
My 400 MHz G3 iMac (with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB HD) is still running MacOS 9.2.2. It would barely run Tiger. And Tiger would break my old UMax scanner.
Can you imagine if you bought a film camera and got consistently crappy prints from it unless you bought a pro-upgrade lab?
I had this exact problem with my film cameras. Consistently crappy prints from cheap photo labs. Changed to good photo labs, and all of a sudden, my pictures looked a lot better!
Mandate that very soon (nine months, a year; 18 months, tops) all television sets sold must include a digital tuner. That worked for the V-Chip.
That kind of scale will quickly drive the costs down. At the same time, mandate that three years after the date when digital tuners are required, analog broadcasts cease. CD players went from $1000 to $500 to $200 in two years, as volume ramped up. If the converter boxes could end up at $50, the DTV tuner incorporated into the set would add less than half of that to the price (no power supply, no chassis, no case.)
Fans of "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land" know that a "perfect fifth" interval has two notes, with a 3:2 ratio of frequencies. 1.5000000000000. And a major fourth interval has frequencies with a 4:3 ratio. 1.3333333333333....
Intro to music theory (or a little piano experience) notes that an octave is a doubling in frequency, and contains 12 half steps. A major fourth is five half steps, and a perfect fifth is seven. From an octave (2:1), one can compute the frequency ratio for a half step by solving for x: x^12 = 2. I get 1.0594630943592952645618252949463
Five of these gets a frequency ratio of 1.3348398541700343648308318811823, not 4/3. A touch sharp. Seven mathematical half-steps yields a frequency ratio of 1.4983070768766814987992807320264, not 1.5. A touch flat.
A piano tuner (or the designer of any instrument) can use the mathematical equal-tempered scale, and have fourth and fifth intervals sound a bit off. Or the tuner can make some, but not all, of the fourth and fifth intervals work perfectly. Choose which ones. Make too many perfect, and the other notes will sound off, and may sound horrible in chords.
Homosexuality is neither a choice (that's long ago been proven scientifically), nor is it particularly a disability.
That's not really true. Human beings are patterned to pursue things that cause them pleasure the same as Pavlov's dogs.
My experience, many moons ago, was that I knew that I was attracted to women long before I had experienced sexual ecstacy with a woman. Which contradicts your assertion that it is all learned.
I presume that gays and lesbians, for the most part, have had pretty similar experiences.
I say treat them the same - -that means NO special laws or consideration. Just like everybody else.
If you're talking marriage, then that's a different animal.
Please be consistent from one senetence of your post to the next.
Federal law assignes some 1,080 benefits to married couples. Gays and Lesbians are excluded from those benefits. That is clearly not treating the same! They don't want special laws or consideration; they want to be treated just like everybody else.
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I found a nice old picture tube (MAG Innovations 17mumble; manufactured in 1993) at a thrift store for $8. The little plastic door that covers the controls is missing. Does 1280x1024 real nice.
It's the display for my Linux box that my brother cast off (AMD K6-II 450; 128 MB RAM. 56x CD; no -R, -RW or anything. New 80 GB HD.) So for a total investment of $48, I'm up and running. I when I get cash, I might splurge for a new MoBo.
Anyway, I really want a new Mac. If they made something like the mini, but with a G5 and a 3.5" HD. Yes, it would need a bigger box; maybe something VCR-sized?. The mini is about $300 less than the eMac, a decked-out Mac Midi should spec-out similar to, and be about $500 cheaper than the top-line iMac, or $1300. Compare the $1800 iMac with 20" LCD vs. Mac Midi plus $800 20" diplay for $2100.
Anyway, a KVM switch would let me run the Mac Midi and the Linux box with my existing monitor, and buy a nano-tube display in a year or two. When the computer is obsolete in five years, the display (Either the MAG or a flat panel) should be reusable.
Will HD DVD players, HD Tuners etc. come with VGA connectors? If a monitor can diplay 1280x1024, it can diplay 720p HDTV...
Thicker glass. Beam strength increases with thickness; this is simply a glass beam uniformly loaded at 14.7 lbs/sq in.
It's not quite that bad. You don't have to convince a fundamentalist that the words in their holey book of choice are in error. It would be sufficient to get them to consider the possibility that _their_interpretation_ of those words is not correct.
Of course, I have little hope that this will happen with any frequency.
It was creationism that caused me to give up on the Christian church.
The ID advocates will present a hand-waving argument. They have never presented anything resembling scientific evidence.
The ID advocates have lost in the court of science; they are now trying a political end-run around science to force teachers to present their position with their classroom authority.
The US Educational system will be damaged if they succeed.
[ Supernatural causes ]...
Perhaps not directly observe, but if the supernatural act has a natural effect, that can be observed. Many things are inferred in science through observation of the effects the unseen has on the observable. We don't observe bosons directly. Often our observations may be several layers removed from the actual event.
But how, then, do you determine that cause X of observed phenomenon Y is supernatural?
The only recourse is Occam's Razor.
It could be that angels decide the course of the planets. In a matter that is completely consistent with Newton's Laws of Motion and Law of Universal Gravitation*. How do you tell the difference?
*Except Mercury. Dr. Einstein's work bears some relevance here.
OK, so how can we tell the difference between Newton being absolutely correct, and Angels altering the path of Mercury (i.e. the Supernatural) vs. Einstein being more correct than Newton (the natural).
And what if the date was 1902, and General Relativity hadn't been formulated yet? Then the choice seems to be supernatural Angels, vs. I-dont-know-yet. And that way lies the fallacy of God-of-the-gaps.
Another problem is that the Supernatural explanation closes off further investigation. We know that Angels are bending the orbit of Mercury; what else could it be? Those papers of Einstein's are worthless; they cannot explain why the Angels do what they do. Or worse yet, those papers are heretical.
Wait a minute. Didn't the Catholic Church recently apologize to the world for imprisoning Galileo?
I think this is backward. No theory is required to whip up answers to questions on demand, which is what you seem to be asking. Evolution would be falsified if one could show that a biological structure could not develop through incremental changes to the genome. The ID argument, specifically Behe's Irreducible Complexity argument, attempts to do this.
Evolution does not prohibit existance of exclusively homosexual behavior in animals. Kin selection is one way that such behavior is explained.
This is a good thing, as said behavior has been observed in the Penguin exhibit at New York's Central Park Zoo.
In redefining Science, the Kansas Board of Education has removed the requirement that explanations be natural.
I demand equal time for the Theory of the Great Green Arkleseezure.
When we go back to the moon, I'd like to see an emphasis on two things: self-sufficiency, and energy production.
I'd like to at least hear talk that the goal was a self-sufficient lunar habitat. Could grow its own food, recycle its own oxygen. Do Biosphere 2 with real science instead of publicity stunts. How much plant life do you need to support one human? What can you do to cut down the 14.5 days of darkness?
And Scientific American had an interesting article a while back; the theme was a solar-powered automated factory that could build a solar-powered automated factory. Set one of those up (with instructions to stop building after a finite time). Then reap all the solar energy...
Unmanned Test flights
Apollo 7; test of command module
Apollo 8; lunar orbit
Apollo 9: earth-orbit test of Lunar Module and docking
Apollo 10: Full Dress Rehearsal
Apollo 11: First Lunar Landing
Apollo 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Apollo-Soyuz, and three Skylab flights.
That's 15.
The difference is that Microsoft fixes the price of IE at 0, by passing the costs on to purchasers of Microsoft Windows, where Microsoft has a monopoly. What was criminal was the the use of the subsidy from Windows users who have no choice.
Anybody in any business is free to choose to sell their goods at a lower price than the competition. As long as you really are choosing to sell goods at a lower price, rather than passing those costs on to someone who has no choice about paying them.
I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that 25 fps and 50 fps formats were not included. To Heck with Europe! and European content. They don't even believe that Iraq's WMDs were a threat.
I don't have a problem with you believing what you believe. I choose toe disagree.
I do have a problem when people use the political process to mandate that what they believe in be taught in science classes, when it is very clearly not science.
Secondly, regarding God needing a creator. Most fundimentalists consider God to be even outside time. Unchanging, simply existing. The same tired, old, rhetoric. If you are content with an uncreated god that is far more complex and powerful than anything, why do you object to a much less complex uncreated universe? And, of course, there is no physical evidence at all for your outside-of-time creator.
It's wrong to suppose that God created fossils to test men's faith. God is not cruel or deceptive.
Of course, if you accept that fossils are what they appear to be, you have to give up on the idea of a literal interpretation of Genesis. Of which the literal story of Adam and Eve is a part. So once you admit that fossils are real, you pretty much end up with humans evolving from non-human, ape ancestors over a few million years.
And I'll let slide that you imply that you are a better-informed spokesperson for the Christian Fundamentalists. What you say is directly contradicted by Dobson, Falwell, and many others who claim to speak for Fundamentalism.
Oh, wait. It happened the other way around. And there was actual evidence that the Law couldn't explain, and the Theory could. Your assertion is disproven.
You can demonstrate intelligence, by learning and showing that you've learned something, or you may continue to be a twit.
And the Theory of Evolution has been tested time and time again. On occasion, particular details of the theory of evolution have been updated to take into account results of clever new experiments.
Creationism, on the other hand, keeps on repeating the same old tired excuses; excuses that have been refuted so many times in the past that they can now only be described as lies.
Odd, then, that people are surprised when they catch American Theocrats telling more lies. Lies seem to be their stock in trade.
Young-Earth Creationists and their modern counterparts frequently pull out the "Last Thursday" argument, without knowing it. God made the earth with the fossils in it, with starlight from distant galaxies already en route, etc. There is no scientific evidence that could refute such an assertion. Similarly, there is no scientific evidence that could refute the notion that the universe was created Last Thursday, by my cat, Sidney . (Yeah, my site is ancient and moldy.) Any bit of evidence you could think of was created that way by God 6,009 years ago, or Last Thursday. Occam's razor cuts the argument off, though.
Old-earth creationists frequently argue that the biblical order in Genesis is exactly the order that geologists found. Except it isn't. Genesis has land plants before fish, and birds before land animals. So it's exactly correct, except for where it is wrong.
"Intelligent Design" is just creationism after the lawyers figured out a way around the 1987 case (whose cite escapes my poor brain.) The arguments in Behe's _Darwin's_Black_Box_ and Dembski's Explanatory Filter (that's a concept, not a title) have been refuted many times over.
Still, the American Taliban wants what it wants, and will keep getting it until a majority of American voters have their eyes open and see what they're doing to our country.
It's still on the front page, and has over 1,500 comments. So the only chance for your prediction to come through is to roll the counter over...
My copy is on the hard drive of a new Mac Mini (or, if they ever release it, a Mac Midi: basically, an iMac without a screen) that I can't quite afford yet. Tiger + iLife is almost 40% of the cost of a mini!
My 400 MHz G3 iMac (with 1 GB RAM and 40 GB HD) is still running MacOS 9.2.2. It would barely run Tiger. And Tiger would break my old UMax scanner.
Cry Havoc, and loose the new IT graduates!
Or something like that.
- Can you imagine if you bought a film camera and got consistently crappy prints from it unless you bought a pro-upgrade lab?
I had this exact problem with my film cameras. Consistently crappy prints from cheap photo labs. Changed to good photo labs, and all of a sudden, my pictures looked a lot better!The solution is obvious.
Mandate that very soon (nine months, a year; 18 months, tops) all television sets sold must include a digital tuner. That worked for the V-Chip.
That kind of scale will quickly drive the costs down. At the same time, mandate that three years after the date when digital tuners are required, analog broadcasts cease. CD players went from $1000 to $500 to $200 in two years, as volume ramped up. If the converter boxes could end up at $50, the DTV tuner incorporated into the set would add less than half of that to the price (no power supply, no chassis, no case.)
Ahhh, tuning. There are subtleties there.
Fans of "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land" know that a "perfect fifth" interval has two notes, with a 3:2 ratio of frequencies. 1.5000000000000. And a major fourth interval has frequencies with a 4:3 ratio. 1.3333333333333....
Intro to music theory (or a little piano experience) notes that an octave is a doubling in frequency, and contains 12 half steps. A major fourth is five half steps, and a perfect fifth is seven. From an octave (2:1), one can compute the frequency ratio for a half step by solving for x:
x^12 = 2. I get 1.0594630943592952645618252949463
Five of these gets a frequency ratio of 1.3348398541700343648308318811823, not 4/3. A touch sharp. Seven mathematical half-steps yields a frequency ratio of 1.4983070768766814987992807320264, not 1.5. A touch flat.
A piano tuner (or the designer of any instrument) can use the mathematical equal-tempered scale, and have fourth and fifth intervals sound a bit off. Or the tuner can make some, but not all, of the fourth and fifth intervals work perfectly. Choose which ones. Make too many perfect, and the other notes will sound off, and may sound horrible in chords.
It's all about tradeoffs.
Wearing cotten-polyester blends.
That's not really true. Human beings are patterned to pursue things that cause them pleasure the same as Pavlov's dogs.
My experience, many moons ago, was that I knew that I was attracted to women long before I had experienced sexual ecstacy with a woman. Which contradicts your assertion that it is all learned.
I presume that gays and lesbians, for the most part, have had pretty similar experiences.
If you're talking marriage, then that's a different animal.
Please be consistent from one senetence of your post to the next.
Federal law assignes some 1,080 benefits to married couples. Gays and Lesbians are excluded from those benefits. That is clearly not treating the same! They don't want special laws or consideration; they want to be treated just like everybody else.