I used to get caught up in political discussions (usually on rec.arts.sf.written) fairly easily. These days I try to abstain; kill files help a lot in this process, just as sometimes you have to browse slashdot at 1 or 2 just to block out the posts about grits and petrification.
Just looking at how a small fraction of the community here have managed to disrupt slashdot so much, you can imagine the feedback loops that happen on usenet. We all just need better newsreaders.
I hate to burst your bubble, but ball lightning is a credible phenomenon. Back when I was in college I had a research project going collecting reports, to look for an object that had been hit by ball lightning and analyze it. I never found something, because all the reports were too old, but reports tended to be associated way more with lightning storms than drunkedness.
At any rate, I don't think thisexplanation explains it. Two theories I think are more viable are the silicaceous material one are Paul Koloc's plasma theory (it's rather specific) and Piotr Kapitsa's microwave standing wave theory (which I think only applies to a small number of ball lightning phenomenon; it may be that there are multiple causes).
I also just remembered that the silicaceous material theory doesn't explain the related phenomenon of bead lightning and the like, and when bead lightning spawns ball lightning.
Re:It's logical to go to space
on
On to Mars
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I would say that the Apollo program itself has retarded space development. NASA got used to cost-is-no-object engineering, and since that flag-and-footprints mission ended, they've been waiting for the next flag-and-footprints mission to give them an absurd budget. In the meantime, they work with a favored few corporations; LockMart and Boeing are more like Soviet Design bureaus than private corporations in the west. Another factoid I'd like to point out is that Rotary Rocket is stuck waiting for further financing to finish development; they need about as much money as NASA spent crashing Mars Polar Lander. Their system would lower the cost of space launch by about a factor of ten.
NASA would rather sit around and wait for the massive funding increace than actually try a paradigm shift. If the computer industry had done that during the same time period, there'd probably be several thousand people on the net (tops), and we might finally be at the level of being able to buy an Apple II equivalent.
Re:*cough*rippoff!*cough*
on
YETI@Home
·
· Score: 1
If you look at both of them, it starts looking a lot more like independent creation than plagarism. The site linked to in the original slashdot article had some very funny bits, like the bit about how it'll run on a TRS-80 but not a mac (I have both, so I can relate:-)...
I'd like to second the nomination of Ray Bradbury at any rate, even if he's more of a fantasy than SF writer (although it isn't the commoditized fantasy that comes out these days; perhaps all the more reason to read him). As your niece gets older, I'd also recommend CJ Cherryh.
I know I'm late to the thread, but I just thought I'd ask, didn't Abuse have a lisp interpreter embedded in it? (Of course, so does Sawmill, which I'm using, and various versions of emacs, which I use, but that's besides the point; I wanted to mention a use of lisp in a game, in hopes it would be relevant.
I know it's not modern, but I think abuse was a very good game for its time.
Well, it seems to me that iTools would actually be enhanced if you could use it from other platforms. If it were usable from Linux, I could use it to move stuff from my mac to my linux box. If it were only usable from the MacOS, I could then use it to move stuff from my Mac to my Mac, which is pointless.
Actually, the bad part about this contest, IMHO, is that for about four or five of those forty-million-dollar tickets, one could fund development of a suborbital RLV (like TGV-Rocket's Michelle) or finish development of Rotary Rocket's Roton vehicle.
I think you're confusing the 40 bit key length with a back door; a short key length does not constitute a "back door" in and of itself. And AFAIK Microsoft does not rely on export subsidies to sell Windows. Finally, the NSA can't stop compliant-with-regulations software from being exported just because it doesn't have a secret back door. The regulations are a lot more specific than that.
Hold on a second; didn't Bruce Schneier look at the alleged NSA_Key stuff and conclude that it wasn't a back door, but merely a way to substitute your own system for windows if one wanted to?
Wouldn't that make Windows slightly more secure than it was, too?
The faults of Windows are many; there's no need to invent phony ones, and it makes us look bad.
When you get right down to it, this argument sounds like you're saying that the persecution the American Indians received in the old days justifies what China is doing today, or that we shouldn't criticize it. I wonder, have you actually gone out and started asking any American Indians how they felt about that argument?
Security may be a factor, but maybe not the way you think. The NSA's record in human rights, believe it or not, is much better than that of the Communist Party in China, or the Army there. If the NSA announced that it was creating its own version of Linux to be mandated for people in the US to use, we'd all go crazy looking for the back door, which may be hard if their version doesn't have source available. (I guess we'll have to wait and see about that).
Granted, they probably wouldn't be interested in eavesdropping on the average US college student, but they are targeting this distribution at people whose rights they respect a lot less than the US government agencies, with all their faults, respect ours.
Actually, as someone with some slight familiarity with similar bacteria, I think your fear is misplaced. The bacteria need sunlight and nutrients besides the oil in order to break down the oil.
I know someone who helped develop oil-eating bacteria. She's said the Feds haven't been helpful in the way they regulate it, otherwise it would have been used much more extensively in such things as the Prince William Sound oil spill.
I was always under the impression that Leonidas was at Thermopylae to guard the flank of a Greek fleet at Artemision, which was fighting to keep the Persians out of protected waters behind the island of Euboea, so that when the weather shifted many of their ships would sink. However, at the time of the battle, that fleet had already left, but there weren't decent communications and Leonidas didn't know that he could have pulled back from the pass.
There was also a faction of Spartans siding with the Persians, and Xerxes' minions had bribed the Oracle to declare that a Spartan king must fall (with the implication that he'd be replaced by the Spartan who was with Xerxes, who was a disaffected member of one of the Phaetries), or Sparta itself would be destroyed. Sparta herself wasn't unified enough to figure out what course of action they were going to take, so Leonidas, who was one of the kings at the time, went North with all the forces he could control himself or vassals and allies he could get to go. In a way, Leonidas' death was more important as a catalyst for the rest of the Spartans to get their act together and defend Greece, than it was in pure military terms.
It's all very interesting that at the time the battle was fought, according to the religious establishment at the time, the Greeks as a whole weren't just fighting the Persians, but going against the word of their Gods, as revealed to the Oracle. Impressive, huh?
Yes, the dog breeds are all members of the same species, but they also interbreed with coyotes, and produce apparently fertile offspring. Dogs and coyotes may be "subspecies" of each other, as well as wolves; it's all a tangled mess.
At any rate, the time of divergence between the domesticated cat and the African wildcat is less than ten thousand years ago: much less time than the separation time for the dog and coyote, I suspect. I wouldn't be suprised if they could interbreed and produce fertile offspring in the wild. The main difference between the two species (cats and african wildcats) is that the latter have larger brains. The part that's missing in the housecat, BTW, is the part that in the wildcat is dedicated to color vision. Housecats switched from being diurnal to nocturnal upon domestication, and don't have color vision as a result.
"I hope I'm not alone when I politely request that this sort of stuff not be posted here."
What then, is on topic? Space? Most geeks work in computers. Science fiction? Cute, but how relevant is William Gibson to anything? Linux? Most computer users use M$, and Linux is used by a minority. BSD? A smaller minority than Linux users.
For any conceivable slashdot topic, you could invent a rationale, albeit tired and stupid, as to why it doesn't fit in here. I was particularly amused by the idea of having strategic defense part of an "ask slashdot" topic, since slashdot seems to be populated by an increacing number of people who think being able to write perl makes them qualified to discuss physics and engineering.
For the record, I think Linux, Mars Probes, BSD, etc. are on topic here; the same for Neal Stephenson, Gibson, etc... but if you're going to stretch to catch the latter, then don't be too suprised to find Madeline Kahn there too. Frankenstein , by Mary Shelly, was one of the first real works of science fiction, and Young Frankenstein was a particularly noteworthy satire of a lot of the distorted film versions of that work. And she really helped make it work.
I'm rather irked that I feel I have to say this, but I think noting Ms. Kahn's death was entirely appropriate for this site. I know there are geeks out there who don't think Mel Brooks' stuff is part of "geek cvltvre" (but who mysteriously do think that Monty Python is; well, Monty Python is, but no more or less than Mel Brooks, IMHO), or that noting her passing is somehow horribly elitist, to which I'd point out: she helped make cultural artifacts that brought people together rather than apart. That should be enough.
I'm not quite sure where to put this question; it probably isn't a very good one for this topic, but I couldn't find the package description, as the package is no longer part of Debian. I was wondering why Debian dropped the Grail web browser. I'd like to contact the former Debian maintainer for Grail, if possible; however, the package description isn't available at the Debian web site, since the package was dropped. Any suggestions, anyone?
Actually, Carbon dating can work on more recent events. There's plenty of old organic matter of verifiable dating (tree rings and the like) that can be used to "calibrate" it.
Ah, sorry. My bad. I'm a CS geek, not a history or physics buff.:) My foot would be in my mouth but I'm not that flexible...
That's the problem with slashdot... too many CS majors who think they know everything about everything else. Oh well, at least they're better than the EE majors... (there's a thread going on in rec.arts.sf.written about EE majors and various trends in pseudoscience, like creationism, Velikovsky, etc...)
To the guy who was suggesting a new slashdot poll about how to get rid of immature, irresponsible, and boorish posters, well, I suspect someone's already come up with a solution. They send them over to slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to get caught up in political discussions (usually on rec.arts.sf.written) fairly easily. These days I try to abstain; kill files help a lot in this process, just as sometimes you have to browse slashdot at 1 or 2 just to block out the posts about grits and petrification.
Just looking at how a small fraction of the community here have managed to disrupt slashdot so much, you can imagine the feedback loops that happen on usenet. We all just need better newsreaders.
I hate to burst your bubble, but ball lightning is a credible phenomenon. Back when I was in college I had a research project going collecting reports, to look for an object that had been hit by ball lightning and analyze it. I never found something, because all the reports were too old, but reports tended to be associated way more with lightning storms than drunkedness.
At any rate, I don't think thisexplanation explains it. Two theories I think are more viable are the silicaceous material one are Paul Koloc's plasma theory (it's rather specific) and Piotr Kapitsa's microwave standing wave theory (which I think only applies to a small number of ball lightning phenomenon; it may be that there are multiple causes).
I also just remembered that the silicaceous material theory doesn't explain the related phenomenon of bead lightning and the like, and when bead lightning spawns ball lightning.
Actually, I would say that the Apollo program itself has retarded space development. NASA got used to cost-is-no-object engineering, and since that flag-and-footprints mission ended, they've been waiting for the next flag-and-footprints mission to give them an absurd budget. In the meantime, they work with a favored few corporations; LockMart and Boeing are more like Soviet Design bureaus than private corporations in the west. Another factoid I'd like to point out is that Rotary Rocket is stuck waiting for further financing to finish development; they need about as much money as NASA spent crashing Mars Polar Lander. Their system would lower the cost of space launch by about a factor of ten.
NASA would rather sit around and wait for the massive funding increace than actually try a paradigm shift. If the computer industry had done that during the same time period, there'd probably be several thousand people on the net (tops), and we might finally be at the level of being able to buy an Apple II equivalent.
If you look at both of them, it starts looking a lot more like independent creation than plagarism. The site linked to in the original slashdot article had some very funny bits, like the bit about how it'll run on a TRS-80 but not a mac (I have both, so I can relate :-)...
Well, if you wanted to read some context
for Starship Troopers, you can read Heinlein's
comments on it in _Expanded Universe_.
I'd like to second the nomination of Ray Bradbury at any rate, even if he's more of a fantasy than SF writer (although it isn't the commoditized fantasy that comes out these days; perhaps all the more reason to read him). As your niece gets older, I'd also recommend CJ Cherryh.
I know I'm late to the thread, but I just thought I'd ask, didn't Abuse have a lisp interpreter embedded in it? (Of course, so does Sawmill, which I'm using, and various versions of emacs, which I use, but that's besides the point; I wanted to mention a use of lisp in a game, in hopes it would be relevant.
I know it's not modern, but I think abuse was a very good game for its time.
Oh well.
"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach him to fish, and you can sell him tackle."
(origin unknown).
Hmm, is Motorola cooperating with Manhattan
Scientifics in this area? The article on Yahoo
wasn't very clear.
Well, it seems to me that iTools would actually be enhanced if you could use it from other platforms. If it were usable from Linux, I could use it to move stuff from my mac to my linux box. If it were only usable from the MacOS, I could then use it to move stuff from my Mac to my Mac, which is pointless.
Actually, the bad part about this contest, IMHO, is that for about four or five of those forty-million-dollar tickets, one could fund development of a suborbital RLV (like TGV-Rocket's Michelle) or finish development of Rotary Rocket's Roton vehicle.
I think you're confusing the 40 bit key length with a back door; a short key length does not constitute a "back door" in and of itself. And AFAIK Microsoft does not rely on export subsidies to sell Windows. Finally, the NSA can't stop compliant-with-regulations software from being exported just because it doesn't have a secret back door. The regulations are a lot more specific than that.
Hold on a second; didn't Bruce Schneier look at the alleged NSA_Key stuff and conclude that it wasn't a back door, but merely a way to substitute your own system for windows if one wanted to?
Wouldn't that make Windows slightly more secure than it was, too?
The faults of Windows are many; there's no need to invent phony ones, and it makes us look bad.
When you get right down to it, this argument sounds like you're saying that the persecution the American Indians received in the old days justifies what China is doing today, or that we shouldn't criticize it. I wonder, have you actually gone out and started asking any American Indians how they felt about that argument?
Security may be a factor, but maybe not the way you think. The NSA's record in human rights, believe it or not, is much better than that of the Communist Party in China, or the Army there. If the NSA announced that it was creating its own version of Linux to be mandated for people in the US to use, we'd all go crazy looking for the back door, which may be hard if their version doesn't have source available. (I guess we'll have to wait and see about that).
Granted, they probably wouldn't be interested in eavesdropping on the average US college student, but they are targeting this distribution at people whose rights they respect a lot less than the US government agencies, with all their faults, respect ours.
Actually, as someone with some slight familiarity with similar bacteria, I think your fear is misplaced. The bacteria need sunlight and nutrients besides the oil in order to break down the oil.
I know someone who helped develop oil-eating bacteria. She's said the Feds haven't been helpful in the way they regulate it, otherwise it would have been used much more extensively in such things as the Prince William Sound oil spill.
I was always under the impression that Leonidas was at Thermopylae to guard the flank of a Greek fleet at Artemision, which was fighting to keep the Persians out of protected waters behind the island of Euboea, so that when the weather shifted many of their ships would sink. However, at the time of the battle, that fleet had already left, but there weren't decent communications and Leonidas didn't know that he could have pulled back from the pass.
There was also a faction of Spartans siding with the Persians, and Xerxes' minions had bribed the Oracle to declare that a Spartan king must fall (with the implication that he'd be replaced by the Spartan who was with Xerxes, who was a disaffected member of one of the Phaetries), or Sparta itself would be destroyed. Sparta herself wasn't unified enough to figure out what course of action they were going to take, so Leonidas, who was one of the kings at the time, went North with all the forces he could control himself or vassals and allies he could get to go. In a way, Leonidas' death was more important as a catalyst for the rest of the Spartans to get their act together and defend Greece, than it was in pure military terms.
It's all very interesting that at the time the battle was fought, according to the religious establishment at the time, the Greeks as a whole weren't just fighting the Persians, but going against the word of their Gods, as revealed to the Oracle. Impressive, huh?
Yes, the dog breeds are all members of the same species, but they also interbreed with coyotes, and produce apparently fertile offspring. Dogs and coyotes may be "subspecies" of each other, as well as wolves; it's all a tangled mess.
At any rate, the time of divergence between the domesticated cat and the African wildcat is less than ten thousand years ago: much less time than the separation time for the dog and coyote, I suspect. I wouldn't be suprised if they could interbreed and produce fertile offspring in the wild. The main difference between the two species (cats and african wildcats) is that the latter have larger brains. The part that's missing in the housecat, BTW, is the part that in the wildcat is dedicated to color vision. Housecats switched from being diurnal to nocturnal upon domestication, and don't have color vision as a result.
What then, is on topic? Space? Most geeks work in computers. Science fiction? Cute, but how relevant is William Gibson to anything? Linux? Most computer users use M$, and Linux is used by a minority. BSD? A smaller minority than Linux users.
For any conceivable slashdot topic, you could invent a rationale, albeit tired and stupid, as to why it doesn't fit in here. I was particularly amused by the idea of having strategic defense part of an "ask slashdot" topic, since slashdot seems to be populated by an increacing number of people who think being able to write perl makes them qualified to discuss physics and engineering.
For the record, I think Linux, Mars Probes, BSD, etc. are on topic here; the same for Neal Stephenson, Gibson, etc... but if you're going to stretch to catch the latter, then don't be too suprised to find Madeline Kahn there too. Frankenstein , by Mary Shelly, was one of the first real works of science fiction, and Young Frankenstein was a particularly noteworthy satire of a lot of the distorted film versions of that work. And she really helped make it work.
I'm rather irked that I feel I have to say this,
but I think noting Ms. Kahn's death was entirely
appropriate for this site. I know there are geeks
out there who don't think Mel Brooks' stuff is
part of "geek cvltvre" (but who mysteriously do
think that Monty Python is; well, Monty Python
is, but no more or less than Mel Brooks, IMHO),
or that noting her passing is somehow horribly
elitist, to which I'd point out: she helped
make cultural artifacts that brought people
together rather than apart. That should be enough.
I'm not quite sure where to put this question;
it probably isn't a very good one for this topic,
but I couldn't find the package description, as
the package is no longer part of Debian. I was
wondering why Debian dropped the Grail web
browser. I'd like to contact the former Debian
maintainer for Grail, if possible; however,
the package description isn't available at the
Debian web site, since the package was dropped.
Any suggestions, anyone?
The examples you cite are violations of patent law; one is always supposed to be able to use results like that for basic research.
Actually, Carbon dating can work on more recent events. There's plenty of old organic matter of verifiable dating (tree rings and the like) that can be used to "calibrate" it.
That's the problem with slashdot... too many CS majors who think they know everything about everything else. Oh well, at least they're better than the EE majors... (there's a thread going on in rec.arts.sf.written about EE majors and various trends in pseudoscience, like creationism, Velikovsky, etc...)
To the guy who was suggesting a new slashdot
poll about how to get rid of immature, irresponsible,
and boorish posters, well, I suspect someone's
already come up with a solution. They send them
over to slashdot.