100 years ago Flight was quite literally a dream for 99.99999999% of the world.
No, birds had been doing it for millions of years. The principles of flight had been demonstrated quite clearly in nature. All it took for humans to copy this was some keen observation and engineering talent.
If you know of some creature that regularly travels faster than the speed of light, that is easily observable, then I'll entertain the validity of your analogy.
For 50 years one thought they couldn't travel faster than sound.
I don't know who this 'one' is that thought that we couldn't travel faster than sound. Those designing airplanes certainly weren't convinced. They tried incredibly hard to go faster than sound and in fact did so in propeller aircraft first. At the time everyone knew bullets travelled faster than sound, so it was, at least in principle, possible for airplanes to do so as well.
in the Late 1970's IBM asked would an home person want a computer.
More of a failure of marketting imagination than anything else. Regardless, the computers they built then, are virtually identical in terms of working principles, to the computers built today. Today's computers are simply many orders of magnitude smaller and faster.
Do you know of some means by which miniaturization could lead to the discovery of FTL?
no, more like: man ps pg dn pg dn ^C ps vr Damn, not right man ps pg dn pg dn pg dn pg dn ^C ps vOr crap, what about mem usage... Well maybe awk. Where is that script I wrote last month?
Are you British? Often times the British confuse bad jokes with saracasm and assume that because we aren't laughing that the American sense of humor lacks subtlety. No - we get it. It's just not funny.
Isolation is required for speciation (the creation of a new species distinct from the original species) it is not required for evolution to change an existing species.
Evolution is driven by the environment and selective pressures. If the environment changes, the species must adapt or die out.
In the abstract, each species inhabits a 'fitness landscape', think of it as a mountainous landscape - those poorly adapted inhabit the low lands, those well adapted inhabit the summits.
A particular species is ever changing, exploring other peaks, and sometimes getting lost in the valleys. The landscape can change as well, thrusting up the lowlands and making previously ill-adapted specimins quite well adapted (think of the tiny little rodents that did so well after the climate change that killed off the dynosaurs).
So, to the people who claim that human evolution has ended because of our technology's ability to compensate for suboptimal genetic mutations and variation - you couldn't be more wrong. Techonology has merely become integrated into our fitness landscape, like fire and tools have been for millenia.
There are many examples of where technology has massively altered the fitness landscape. The valley of near-sightedness is no longer so deep, and the summit of intelligence has lost a couple thousand feet. This dramatically changing fitness itself will drive evolution. The nature of the changes doesn't matter. Evolution isn't 'trying' to make us smarter. It isn't trying to make us stronger, faster, or more attractive.
Think about it this way. Yes, technology allows women who have narrow hips or large babies to give birth, when in the past they would have died in child birth. The result, there is less selective pressure on the width of hips in women and the size of babies. We can expect to see more variation in hip with, more narrow hips, and larger babies. In the future it might be exceedingly rare for women to give brth without a C-section.
Is this good or bad? Who knows, it allows our genome to explore previously unexplored territory - women with smaller hips, or who have larger babies in utero. What will be the result? Who knows. Perhaps there is some hidden adaptive benefit in these traits. Perhaps not. Maybe the genes that cause mutations or disease that used to kill before reproductive age have hidden benefits that are revealed when techology allows these people to survive and reproduce. Or perhaps they just open the path to a different peak in the fitness landscape.
As for those who point to the developed world's most successful reproducers, the poor, as evidence of our devolution - I ask you why you assume these people to be inferior? Sure, many are not self-supporting, but many are - raising large families on their own incomes. Seems these people are quite successful at making and raising babies. Their genes will have proportionally higher representation in the coming generations than will those of us who choose to have one or two children.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because these people are poor they are somehow less intelligent or in some way inferior. Less educated certainly. But less intelligent? Remember that current human intelligence evolved in pre-literate societies.
Even the worst of the trailer trash functions at a relatively high level compared to our neolithic progenitors. Jim Bob knows how to operate a complex machine called a pick-up truck, even at high speeds. He can read, has a vocabulary well north of 5,000 words, can do basic math, and is mostly likely required to have highly developed hand-eye coordination in whatever work he does (if it is manual labor). These tax human intelligence far beyond the selective pressures that lead to the evolution of our current level of intelligence. Even the poorest among us need all our vaunted human intelligence just to survive.
I have run across these sorts of programs several times. Never had to blow away the entire installation. Most often there is a service, or pair of services that are involved in monitoring for the program's removal. You just have to stop these, delete the programs and the startup entries, and you're fine.
I now make it a standard practice when deleting spyway startup entries to hit refresh for about a minute to see if they come back.
Someone logged on to the credit card company's web site as me and changed my password, and then my address, and then attempted to charge $1500 at an online computer store.
To do so they had to have had the cc number, the 3 digit code on the back of the card, my user id, and my ssn. I guarantee you they did not get this information hacking my network or my personal computers. The information just isn't there. Neither is it in the shredded documents I stick in the garbage.
Moral of the story? The security of your personal data is only as good as the weakest security among those who hold your personal data in their databases. All it takes is one bad employee at the bank, or a credit card company, or an online vendor, or the mortgage company...
This guy is sticking his fingers in the small portion of the dike he controls, while the rest of it leaks personal information like a sieve.
You can't tell if the cab is currently occupied. So even assuming they update locations enough that you could say "oh look, one's coming!" and run outdoors, most likely it'd be taken.
I live in Chicago. Around here, either you live a in neighborhood where you catch a cab by standing on the corner for five minutes or less, or you don't, and you have to call for one.
This cool little hack doesn't help in either of those cases.
I've had friends work for the US gov in IT. From what they've told me, it basically a Union. Once your in the game, you actually have to TRY and get fired. It's totally the opposite of the corporate word.
Nope, sounds exactly like every Fortune 500 corporation I've worked for.
"It's ok that the Earth radically re-organized itself in the distant past before humans came along.
It's not ok from a human standpoint for the Earth to radically re-organize itself now."
Really? Why? The most radical reorg came about when a strange new bacteria discovered photosynthensis. This little organism was wildly successful. It and it's descendent set about polluting the Earth's atmosphere with a previously poisonous gas - oxygen. This gas exterminated many of the species that came before, but helped some others that could figure out how to use the new gas (our ancestors). Replacing 20% of the atmosphere with oxygen most certainly wrought massive global climate change as well.
This change was a direct result of the actions of a particular species on the planet. It's actions were no more or less 'natural' than those of homo sapiens.
I have to point out, though, that it's actually only a Finite State Machine, like a pocket calculator, not a general-purpose device
Yes, and your desktop computer is also another example of a finite state machine. Granted, all those little silicon switches have an enomorous number of possible states, but rest assured, the total number is indeed finite.
I think this is, in general, also a big problem in the real world. The fact that there are idiots, who often hold strong, but incorrect opinions and viewpoints, isn't unique to Wikipedia.
The minute any company complains about the ads returned when their company name is used as a search term, Google removes all search results for that particular term. "Louis Vuitton" - zero results found - no ads.
They can honestly claim they are doing their best to avoid any possibility of trademark infringement, while at the same time punishing those who attempt overzealous IP enforcement.
This solution though is perhaps a tad too 'evil' for Google.
It took me 2 hours to compile my first simple Fortran program, because I didn't realize that the first 5 columns were off limits. That's where the line numbers used to be on the punch cards.
Why this limitation persisted into a verion of Fortran that no longer even required line numbers - no idea.
What does the other 99% of the planet that doesn't have easy access to geothermal energy do? What works for Iceland won't work just about anywhere else on the planet.
I used to see lower tech versions of this scheme when I worked as a cashier in college. The simple price tag switchero. Most often people would try this with items of clothing, as the tags were attached with that little plastic whatchamawhosis, which made switching easier. Even so it was pretty obvious when a tag had been switched. And generally they were so stupid they'd put ridiculously low prices on the items. For any cashier that was half awake, it was easy to spot.
Usually I would just call the clothing department for a price check, at which point the nervous shopper would claim that they didn't want the item afterall.
Given those odds, and the fact that until about 1000 years ago there weren't very many of us humans around, I find it amazing we got this far. Our hominid ancestors have survived and thrived for many millions of years in this perilous environment.
Obviously the many thousands of events this 1/450 statistic predicts over the span of our evolutionary past weren't enough to wipe our ancestors out, I doubt such events will wipe us out.
What's more, usually you cannot download one second of movie in one second of time, unless you have a crazy tricked out connection.
1.5 Mbps DSL here. Downloading compressed movies from Starz online movie service I regular have download times that are 2/3rds to 1/2 the playing time of the movie. Granted, these are heavily compressed, but they are better than VHS quality, and I would not call my connection "tricked out"
I recently bought a Canon 20D. Although I am very happy with the purchase, I have to admit that in most situations my old Canon G3 produces photos that look just as good. Granted the 20D's shots will always have twice as many pixel, but 95% of the time they are not needed.
The one place where the 20D and other DSLRs excel is that their much larger sensor allow for very low noise, even at very high ISO settings. But again, 95% of the time you are never going to notice the difference, and programs like Neat Image and Grain Surgery do an amazing job in situations where there noise is noticable.
Another problem with DSLRs is that good lenses are very very expensive. Even in DSLR bundles, the lens that comes with the camera is not likely to be as versatile as the built-in lens of a good 'pro-sumer' camera like the G3. Granted, DSLR lenses are probably much higher quality than the built-ins, but again, it's quality that you don't notice most of the time. So you will end up spending extra money for a wide-angle and a zoom lens, and these things are not cheap.
I guess the moral to the story is, that unless you really know what you are doing, and know you want to explore that 5% of photography where the DSLR excels, you are better off with a good pro-sumer model.
This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago. Instead we have the shuttle debacle, and a NASA that is still trying to pretend that the shuttle program is viable.
Hell, all they have to do is provide a torrent for the content with Ads, and a high quality seed server and most people won't bother trying to track down the ad-stripped version.
Slashdot Mirror
100 years ago Flight was quite literally a dream for 99.99999999% of the world.
No, birds had been doing it for millions of years. The principles of flight had been demonstrated quite clearly in nature. All it took for humans to copy this was some keen observation and engineering talent.
If you know of some creature that regularly travels faster than the speed of light, that is easily observable, then I'll entertain the validity of your analogy.
For 50 years one thought they couldn't travel faster than sound.
I don't know who this 'one' is that thought that we couldn't travel faster than sound. Those designing airplanes certainly weren't convinced. They tried incredibly hard to go faster than sound and in fact did so in propeller aircraft first. At the time everyone knew bullets travelled faster than sound, so it was, at least in principle, possible for airplanes to do so as well.
in the Late 1970's IBM asked would an home person want a computer.
More of a failure of marketting imagination than anything else. Regardless, the computers they built then, are virtually identical in terms of working principles, to the computers built today. Today's computers are simply many orders of magnitude smaller and faster.
Do you know of some means by which miniaturization could lead to the discovery of FTL?
no, more like:
....
man ps
pg dn
pg dn
^C
ps vr
Damn, not right
man ps
pg dn
pg dn
pg dn
pg dn
^C
ps vOr
crap, what about mem usage... Well maybe awk. Where is that script I wrote last month?
man find
pg dn
Are you British? Often times the British confuse bad jokes with saracasm and assume that because we aren't laughing that the American sense of humor lacks subtlety. No - we get it. It's just not funny.
Isolation is required for speciation (the creation of a new species distinct from the original species) it is not required for evolution to change an existing species.
Evolution is driven by the environment and selective pressures. If the environment changes, the species must adapt or die out.
In the abstract, each species inhabits a 'fitness landscape', think of it as a mountainous landscape - those poorly adapted inhabit the low lands, those well adapted inhabit the summits.
A particular species is ever changing, exploring other peaks, and sometimes getting lost in the valleys. The landscape can change as well, thrusting up the lowlands and making previously ill-adapted specimins quite well adapted (think of the tiny little rodents that did so well after the climate change that killed off the dynosaurs).
So, to the people who claim that human evolution has ended because of our technology's ability to compensate for suboptimal genetic mutations and variation - you couldn't be more wrong. Techonology has merely become integrated into our fitness landscape, like fire and tools have been for millenia.
There are many examples of where technology has massively altered the fitness landscape. The valley of near-sightedness is no longer so deep, and the summit of intelligence has lost a couple thousand feet. This dramatically changing fitness itself will drive evolution. The nature of the changes doesn't matter. Evolution isn't 'trying' to make us smarter. It isn't trying to make us stronger, faster, or more attractive.
Think about it this way. Yes, technology allows women who have narrow hips or large babies to give birth, when in the past they would have died in child birth. The result, there is less selective pressure on the width of hips in women and the size of babies. We can expect to see more variation in hip with, more narrow hips, and larger babies. In the future it might be exceedingly rare for women to give brth without a C-section.
Is this good or bad? Who knows, it allows our genome to explore previously unexplored territory - women with smaller hips, or who have larger babies in utero. What will be the result? Who knows. Perhaps there is some hidden adaptive benefit in these traits. Perhaps not. Maybe the genes that cause mutations or disease that used to kill before reproductive age have hidden benefits that are revealed when techology allows these people to survive and reproduce. Or perhaps they just open the path to a different peak in the fitness landscape.
As for those who point to the developed world's most successful reproducers, the poor, as evidence of our devolution - I ask you why you assume these people to be inferior? Sure, many are not self-supporting, but many are - raising large families on their own incomes. Seems these people are quite successful at making and raising babies. Their genes will have proportionally higher representation in the coming generations than will those of us who choose to have one or two children.
Don't fall into the trap of assuming that just because these people are poor they are somehow less intelligent or in some way inferior. Less educated certainly. But less intelligent? Remember that current human intelligence evolved in pre-literate societies.
Even the worst of the trailer trash functions at a relatively high level compared to our neolithic progenitors. Jim Bob knows how to operate a complex machine called a pick-up truck, even at high speeds. He can read, has a vocabulary well north of 5,000 words, can do basic math, and is mostly likely required to have highly developed hand-eye coordination in whatever work he does (if it is manual labor). These tax human intelligence far beyond the selective pressures that lead to the evolution of our current level of intelligence. Even the poorest among us need all our vaunted human intelligence just to survive.
It definitely works, I just compil..0xdeadbeef
I have run across these sorts of programs several times. Never had to blow away the entire installation. Most often there is a service, or pair of services that are involved in monitoring for the program's removal. You just have to stop these, delete the programs and the startup entries, and you're fine.
I now make it a standard practice when deleting spyway startup entries to hit refresh for about a minute to see if they come back.
Someone logged on to the credit card company's web site as me and changed my password, and then my address, and then attempted to charge $1500 at an online computer store.
To do so they had to have had the cc number, the 3 digit code on the back of the card, my user id, and my ssn. I guarantee you they did not get this information hacking my network or my personal computers. The information just isn't there. Neither is it in the shredded documents I stick in the garbage.
Moral of the story? The security of your personal data is only as good as the weakest security among those who hold your personal data in their databases. All it takes is one bad employee at the bank, or a credit card company, or an online vendor, or the mortgage company...
This guy is sticking his fingers in the small portion of the dike he controls, while the rest of it leaks personal information like a sieve.
-josh
A major factor in my switch to Macintosh as my primary platform was that I could run both perl and Excel on the same machine.
You could have saved yourself some money and downloaded and installed Cygwin for free.
You can't tell if the cab is currently occupied. So even assuming they update locations enough that you could say "oh look, one's coming!" and run outdoors, most likely it'd be taken.
I live in Chicago. Around here, either you live a in neighborhood where you catch a cab by standing on the corner for five minutes or less, or you don't, and you have to call for one.
This cool little hack doesn't help in either of those cases.
I've had friends work for the US gov in IT. From what they've told me, it basically a Union. Once your in the game, you actually have to TRY and get fired. It's totally the opposite of the corporate word.
Nope, sounds exactly like every Fortune 500 corporation I've worked for.
"It's ok that the Earth radically re-organized itself in the distant past before humans came along.
It's not ok from a human standpoint for the Earth to radically re-organize itself now."
Really? Why? The most radical reorg came about when a strange new bacteria discovered photosynthensis. This little organism was wildly successful. It and it's descendent set about polluting the Earth's atmosphere with a previously poisonous gas - oxygen. This gas exterminated many of the species that came before, but helped some others that could figure out how to use the new gas (our ancestors). Replacing 20% of the atmosphere with oxygen most certainly wrought massive global climate change as well.
This change was a direct result of the actions of a particular species on the planet. It's actions were no more or less 'natural' than those of homo sapiens.
I have to point out, though, that it's actually only a Finite State Machine, like a pocket calculator, not a general-purpose device
Yes, and your desktop computer is also another example of a finite state machine. Granted, all those little silicon switches have an enomorous number of possible states, but rest assured, the total number is indeed finite.
I think this is, in general, also a big problem in the real world. The fact that there are idiots, who often hold strong, but incorrect opinions and viewpoints, isn't unique to Wikipedia.
The minute any company complains about the ads returned when their company name is used as a search term, Google removes all search results for that particular term. "Louis Vuitton" - zero results found - no ads.
They can honestly claim they are doing their best to avoid any possibility of trademark infringement, while at the same time punishing those who attempt overzealous IP enforcement.
This solution though is perhaps a tad too 'evil' for Google.
It took me 2 hours to compile my first simple Fortran program, because I didn't realize that the first 5 columns were off limits. That's where the line numbers used to be on the punch cards.
Why this limitation persisted into a verion of Fortran that no longer even required line numbers - no idea.
How about we all change our user agent to something strange and go poking around the BT web site.
A face mask.
That's because it renders only about 20% of the pages you load properly.
-josh
What does the other 99% of the planet that doesn't have easy access to geothermal energy do? What works for Iceland won't work just about anywhere else on the planet.
I used to see lower tech versions of this scheme when I worked as a cashier in college. The simple price tag switchero. Most often people would try this with items of clothing, as the tags were attached with that little plastic whatchamawhosis, which made switching easier. Even so it was pretty obvious when a tag had been switched. And generally they were so stupid they'd put ridiculously low prices on the items. For any cashier that was half awake, it was easy to spot.
Usually I would just call the clothing department for a price check, at which point the nervous shopper would claim that they didn't want the item afterall.
Given those odds, and the fact that until about 1000 years ago there weren't very many of us humans around, I find it amazing we got this far. Our hominid ancestors have survived and thrived for many millions of years in this perilous environment.
Obviously the many thousands of events this 1/450 statistic predicts over the span of our evolutionary past weren't enough to wipe our ancestors out, I doubt such events will wipe us out.
-josh
What's more, usually you cannot download one second of movie in one second of time, unless you have a crazy tricked out connection.
1.5 Mbps DSL here. Downloading compressed movies from Starz online movie service I regular have download times that are 2/3rds to 1/2 the playing time of the movie. Granted, these are heavily compressed, but they are better than VHS quality, and I would not call my connection "tricked out"
-josh
I recently bought a Canon 20D. Although I am very happy with the purchase, I have to admit that in most situations my old Canon G3 produces photos that look just as good. Granted the 20D's shots will always have twice as many pixel, but 95% of the time they are not needed.
The one place where the 20D and other DSLRs excel is that their much larger sensor allow for very low noise, even at very high ISO settings. But again, 95% of the time you are never going to notice the difference, and programs like Neat Image and Grain Surgery do an amazing job in situations where there noise is noticable.
Another problem with DSLRs is that good lenses are very very expensive. Even in DSLR bundles, the lens that comes with the camera is not likely to be as versatile as the built-in lens of a good 'pro-sumer' camera like the G3. Granted, DSLR lenses are probably much higher quality than the built-ins, but again, it's quality that you don't notice most of the time. So you will end up spending extra money for a wide-angle and a zoom lens, and these things are not cheap.
I guess the moral to the story is, that unless you really know what you are doing, and know you want to explore that 5% of photography where the DSLR excels, you are better off with a good pro-sumer model.
This is the sort of thing NASA should have been working on decades ago. Instead we have the shuttle debacle, and a NASA that is still trying to pretend that the shuttle program is viable.
Hell, all they have to do is provide a torrent for the content with Ads, and a high quality seed server and most people won't bother trying to track down the ad-stripped version.