There might not be good viable alternatives, on this planet. But on some other planet there might be a very different alternative. Keep in mind that even life on earth has undergone dramatic change since the begining of the planet. To the initial life forms on earth oxygen was highly toxic and as the atmosphere began containing more and more O2, the situation got really bad for those organizism. Those that could evolve to use O2 grew, while those that could not died. Also, many single celled organisms still alive require no O2 to live. Yeast is an example. Humans only really need O2 in order to power our bodies. We can make energy for ourselves w/o it, O2 just increases the ammount of energy we get dramatically.
My understanding was that nitrogen was pretty much ignored by our bodies. That we inhale and exhale the exact same ammount. Now it does keep us from getting pretty much pure oxygen into our lungs, which is a very bad thing when it happens for an extended period, but it could probally be replaced with just about any other gas that has no harmful effects on the human body. More likely our lungs would have just evolved to handle the elevated O2 levels and we wouldn't notice any difference.
Most likely any "space bacteria" wouldn't be able to function on earth. The conditions on this planet probally would not be comprable to whatever conditions the bacteria evolved under, so an andromeda strain is unlikely. Not to mention most bacteria are not harmful. Bacteria for the most part are parasites, and only a very poorly developed bacteria would kill it's host, because then it would have to find a new host. Besides, if there were bacteria on the rock, that could survive re-entry, and were viable in our atmosphere, and were deadly, and air born, I don't think it would matter much what nasa did, we'd all be s.o.l. anyway.
Interestingly NASA did have a plan to deal with possible space bacteria when they sent the first things into space that were brought back down to earth: hose them off into the ocean, sure the capsul would be clean, but they would have just infected the source of life on this planet w/ a possibly deadly bacteria. Fortunately this hasn't happened yet. Science is very dangerous, but if we expect to evolve mentally it's a risk we have to take. Also, keep in mind a true scientist will never say anything is impossible, there is always a non-zero chance something will happen, there just might be 1 billion zeros before the 1 though. It's possible that me picking my nose will result in a catastrophic chain reaction that will destroy the universe. What's more likely is that it will end up under my desk though.
Actually morals are by definition what is considered socially accptable in a specific area at a specific time. Throughout history the only things that have been almost always taboo was murder of your own kind and incest. Both of these prolly have some deep rooted biological preservation of the species thing going on. But morals ARE subjective, just because most people agree on a set of morals doesn't make them right. I personally think what the nazis did is awful, as does most of the world, but that doesn't make it objectively wrong.
Not necisarally(sp). Dark matter is a good example of something we can't observe. We know it exists because w/o it the universe would be expanding at such a rate that the formation of anything would be impossible, the universe would just be filled w/ random hydrogen and hellium atoms floating around having a grand olde time. We can't "see" it though. Ether might be another good example (assuming it exists, from what I understand current theory says it most likely does not). Until recently we couldn't detect radiation. Just because we can't detect it now in no way means that it can't exist. Besides matter could possibly be "out of phase" just not in the startrek sense (in startrek you could have people "out of phase" which would have killed them, A) how did they managed to not fall through the floor, B) if they could pass through matter, air would also pass through them, they'd suffocate in a matter of seconds).
The point I'm trying to make is that humans as a whole are so arrogant that we assume we are the only species of any intelligence on this planet and that any extra-terrestrial life must be similar in nature to terrestrial life. The truth is we just don't know. I'm not saying we should stop looking though, what we don't know today, could revolutionize the world (universe?) tomorrow.
Just because most forms of life that we know of require water, it doesn't mean that ALL forms of life do. Keep in mind that life on this planet most likely didn't evolve because of water, but because of water it evolved to use it. It's the same thing with oxygen. Pretty much every living thing on this plannet requires oxygen to exist, but in the early days of earth there was no oxygen, it wasn't until plants came around that oxygen started existing (at least in present day quantities). Oxygen managed to kill off a good deal of the life at the time because, to them, it was highly toxic. Life then evolved to use oxygen in order to stick around. When you think about it, water seems like it would be very unlikely to be usable by anyform of life, as it has some nasty corrosive properties. Because of the way the atoms are located, H on top w/ two Os hanging off of it, it ends up somewhat like a magnet, positive at one end, negative at the other. Because of this water is very good at breaking apart chemical bonds. That's why so many things disolve into water, it rips them apart into individual molecules.
Also, how do we know that we aren't surrounded by alien life forms right now, that exist in a state undetectable by us. They might not know we exist either. People always assume all life is somewhat earthlike in nature, which is probally not in the slightest bit true. Life evolving completely separate from earth would probally evolve along a very different path.
(btw, take all the chemistry here w/ a grain of blue radioactive space salt, it's been a while since I took chem, IOW i'm probally talking out of my ass)
In Vermont (I think it's vermont, it's one of the new england states) it's illegal to deny the existance of God. WooHoo, state sponsored religion. It's not just atheists, it's anyone who isn't a protestant, that includes catholics to a certain extent. Also, anarchists are ok to hate. Anyone else remember that anti-flag burning law that tried to force its way through congress a few years ago.
Actually homosexuality is natural and it does occur in species other than humans. I have a friend who had a gay dog. And my mom never dressed me up as a girl. It has been proven that homosexuality is caused by a hormonal difference (irregularity if that makes you more comfortable) in the brain. People have no more controll over their sexuality than they do over the color of their skin. Sure you can use make up to change the color of your skin, just as a homosexual could force him/herself to be straight, but it's not natural. Just because someone isn't the same as you doesn't mean that it's unnatural.
I almost pissed myself laughing at Big Gay Al in the south park movie. I don't regularly watch SP on tv so I was completely unaware of the character. Not to mention the thought of Saddam and Satan as gay lovers.
Ok, what if the original post had said "The guy who runs segfault is a nigger, so are his mates. Don't go there or people might think you are a nigger too." Or replace nigger with chink, gook, kyke, christian-supremisist, feminazi, or whatever you want. Hopefully you get the point. Parody is one thing, being outright prejudice is another.
It seems like queers and smokers are the only groups who can still be openly hated these days with no one thinking any worse of you. As a half-queer (read bisexual) smoker, i take a lot of shit, i give shit back in real life, and i give shit back on slasdot. And yes I can take a joke, when I know it's a joke and not someone being an ass.
Just a follow up to my little rant, the article to which I replied has been moderated down to -1 (w/ good cause IMHO) so if you are confused as to what I was screaming about change your threshold to -1 and it will all make sense (maybe).
Has slashdot come to this? I wish all of you homophobes would crawl back into your holes and die. Who cares if someone is gay or not (whether this is true about the segfault crew I do not know, nor do I care)? What difference does it honestly make? Are you that insecure about your own sexuality that you feel threated by homosexuals? Or are you just a close-minded moron who can't see that there is an entire world that exists outside of your tinny little brain?
Actually corporations have the exact same rights. Corporations are basically considered a person. Companies also need some degree of privacy. Let's say company X has delt with Microsoft exclusively for years, they are getting tired of being controlled by microsoft and see linux as a way out of that controll. Company X starts buying a lot of linux books from amazon.com, Microsoft, being the evil empire that it is, regularly checks up on what books it's "partners" (read slaves) are buying. Microsoft notices that company X is buying said linux books, microsoft knows that company x might be thinking of some sneaky way to get away from them. microsoft in some way manages to crush company x before they have a chance to impliment their "linux liberation plan." In short, companies need privacy too.
Head on over to www.mozilla.org and read the damned thing yourself. I remember a day when people actually actively searched for information rather than expecting to have it handed over to them on a silver platter.
Somewhere in the KFM settings there is an option for "change pointer over links" or something along those lines. I can't check exactly where it is right now because I'm at work in nt*blech*4 but the options aren't that extensive.
I have a cable modem and I find it's a big time saver. Nothing against/. but it can be disgustingly slow at times. I really love though, how in unix clicking w/ the middle mouse button is the same as right click->open in new window. God I miss that at work...
Merced is a funny creature. It supports two different instruction sets. One is the x86 (or now ia32) instruction set in use on most PCs today. The other is the ia64 instruction set. ia64 is 64bit, while ia32 is 32bit, but there are a whole slew of other differences. ia64 is also VLIW. I have no clue what this means but apparently it requires quite a bit of compiler voodoo and will result in extremely large binaries. IIRC there is a mode switch involved to go from ia32 to ia64, but I don't remember how long it takes. It's probally very similar to switching from real mode to protected mode on an x86 cpu, which IIRC is very expensive.
I don't know what the size difference is, but apparently it was enough that Linus figured that ia64 binaries would be slower than ia32 binaries(note: that ia64 and ia32 are completely different instruction sets, it's not just 64 vs 32 bits). We'll see when the chip is released. Also, I'm guessing here, but ia64 binaries will probally take a lot more time to compile because VLIW apparently requires a lot more compiler work.
Yes, on alpha it's been fully 64bit for a long time now. On UltraSPARC the kernel runs at 64bit but the apps still run at 32bit. So the support for 64bit has been there for a long time. I'm assuming the ia64 port is 64bit atleast for the kernel. I remeber reading something from Linus a while ago where he was saying that because the ia64 binaries are probally going to be so large it would be faster to run 32bit x86 binaries most of the time than to run ia64 binaries. The exception being binaries that need access to huge ammounts of memory, such as large databases.
I think most non-intel systems have power on passwords that are stored in PROM. These things don't need a battery to survive, and if you forget it you better hope you have a PROM programmer ready.
I do understand their reasoning for keeping it closed though. The way the current system is setup it's very open to people writing hacked clients to skew the results. Right now, it would require someone with some technical expertise to write said client. If they open sourced it, any idiot with a little C knowledge could write a hacked client. It's security through obscurity, but it's still some security. I think the real answer to this, however, is that they impliment some checking on the server end to verify the results so people can hack their client all they want.
I guess logging out is a bit too complicated for me then. Because everytime I log out the box blue screens, not that it bothers me much since i only log out when I head home for the day, and for all I care the box could burst into flames at 5pm, as long as by 8am the next day it's magically put itself out and works. My problem with NT is that such simple operations can cause a crash. I don't know if the fault lies in the win32 api, or the kernel, or what. I really don't care. I've NEVER seen a unix system go completely belly up when a user logged out of it. Come to think of it, I've never seen any system do it before mine. And before you go blaming faulty hardware, we have two other machines in my department alone that exhibit the same behavior, then again they are the exact same machines using the exact same software so it could be a defective driver.
BTW, I'd prefer not to reevaluate my NT related knowledge, I'd rather just stop using it, wonder if I can convince my boss that my machine should be a linux box...
I disagree. The way I see it, is that it's very simmilar to slashdot logging your IP address when you connect. Pretty much everything on the internet will log your IP address when you connnect to it. Also, rc5 is completely optional, it's not like windows logging your IP everytime you connect to the internet without your knowledge or concent.
I think they're about 4gigs for a standard movie. Since most discs are double sided, w/ widescreen on one and fullscreen on the other (cuz companies are too dumb to use the built in widescreen to pan&scan features of dvd) you have about 8gigs per disc.
Slashdot Mirror
There might not be good viable alternatives, on this planet. But on some other planet there might be a very different alternative. Keep in mind that even life on earth has undergone dramatic change since the begining of the planet. To the initial life forms on earth oxygen was highly toxic and as the atmosphere began containing more and more O2, the situation got really bad for those organizism. Those that could evolve to use O2 grew, while those that could not died. Also, many single celled organisms still alive require no O2 to live. Yeast is an example. Humans only really need O2 in order to power our bodies. We can make energy for ourselves w/o it, O2 just increases the ammount of energy we get dramatically.
My understanding was that nitrogen was pretty much ignored by our bodies. That we inhale and exhale the exact same ammount. Now it does keep us from getting pretty much pure oxygen into our lungs, which is a very bad thing when it happens for an extended period, but it could probally be replaced with just about any other gas that has no harmful effects on the human body. More likely our lungs would have just evolved to handle the elevated O2 levels and we wouldn't notice any difference.
Most likely any "space bacteria" wouldn't be able to function on earth. The conditions on this planet probally would not be comprable to whatever conditions the bacteria evolved under, so an andromeda strain is unlikely. Not to mention most bacteria are not harmful. Bacteria for the most part are parasites, and only a very poorly developed bacteria would kill it's host, because then it would have to find a new host. Besides, if there were bacteria on the rock, that could survive re-entry, and were viable in our atmosphere, and were deadly, and air born, I don't think it would matter much what nasa did, we'd all be s.o.l. anyway.
Interestingly NASA did have a plan to deal with possible space bacteria when they sent the first things into space that were brought back down to earth: hose them off into the ocean, sure the capsul would be clean, but they would have just infected the source of life on this planet w/ a possibly deadly bacteria. Fortunately this hasn't happened yet. Science is very dangerous, but if we expect to evolve mentally it's a risk we have to take. Also, keep in mind a true scientist will never say anything is impossible, there is always a non-zero chance something will happen, there just might be 1 billion zeros before the 1 though. It's possible that me picking my nose will result in a catastrophic chain reaction that will destroy the universe. What's more likely is that it will end up under my desk though.
Actually morals are by definition what is considered socially accptable in a specific area at a specific time. Throughout history the only things that have been almost always taboo was murder of your own kind and incest. Both of these prolly have some deep rooted biological preservation of the species thing going on. But morals ARE subjective, just because most people agree on a set of morals doesn't make them right. I personally think what the nazis did is awful, as does most of the world, but that doesn't make it objectively wrong.
Not necisarally(sp). Dark matter is a good example of something we can't observe. We know it exists because w/o it the universe would be expanding at such a rate that the formation of anything would be impossible, the universe would just be filled w/ random hydrogen and hellium atoms floating around having a grand olde time. We can't "see" it though. Ether might be another good example (assuming it exists, from what I understand current theory says it most likely does not). Until recently we couldn't detect radiation. Just because we can't detect it now in no way means that it can't exist. Besides matter could possibly be "out of phase" just not in the startrek sense (in startrek you could have people "out of phase" which would have killed them, A) how did they managed to not fall through the floor, B) if they could pass through matter, air would also pass through them, they'd suffocate in a matter of seconds).
The point I'm trying to make is that humans as a whole are so arrogant that we assume we are the only species of any intelligence on this planet and that any extra-terrestrial life must be similar in nature to terrestrial life. The truth is we just don't know. I'm not saying we should stop looking though, what we don't know today, could revolutionize the world (universe?) tomorrow.
Just because most forms of life that we know of require water, it doesn't mean that ALL forms of life do. Keep in mind that life on this planet most likely didn't evolve because of water, but because of water it evolved to use it. It's the same thing with oxygen. Pretty much every living thing on this plannet requires oxygen to exist, but in the early days of earth there was no oxygen, it wasn't until plants came around that oxygen started existing (at least in present day quantities). Oxygen managed to kill off a good deal of the life at the time because, to them, it was highly toxic. Life then evolved to use oxygen in order to stick around. When you think about it, water seems like it would be very unlikely to be usable by anyform of life, as it has some nasty corrosive properties. Because of the way the atoms are located, H on top w/ two Os hanging off of it, it ends up somewhat like a magnet, positive at one end, negative at the other. Because of this water is very good at breaking apart chemical bonds. That's why so many things disolve into water, it rips them apart into individual molecules.
Also, how do we know that we aren't surrounded by alien life forms right now, that exist in a state undetectable by us. They might not know we exist either. People always assume all life is somewhat earthlike in nature, which is probally not in the slightest bit true. Life evolving completely separate from earth would probally evolve along a very different path.
(btw, take all the chemistry here w/ a grain of blue radioactive space salt, it's been a while since I took chem, IOW i'm probally talking out of my ass)
In Vermont (I think it's vermont, it's one of the new england states) it's illegal to deny the existance of God. WooHoo, state sponsored religion. It's not just atheists, it's anyone who isn't a protestant, that includes catholics to a certain extent. Also, anarchists are ok to hate. Anyone else remember that anti-flag burning law that tried to force its way through congress a few years ago.
Actually homosexuality is natural and it does occur in species other than humans. I have a friend who had a gay dog. And my mom never dressed me up as a girl. It has been proven that homosexuality is caused by a hormonal difference (irregularity if that makes you more comfortable) in the brain. People have no more controll over their sexuality than they do over the color of their skin. Sure you can use make up to change the color of your skin, just as a homosexual could force him/herself to be straight, but it's not natural. Just because someone isn't the same as you doesn't mean that it's unnatural.
I almost pissed myself laughing at Big Gay Al in the south park movie. I don't regularly watch SP on tv so I was completely unaware of the character. Not to mention the thought of Saddam and Satan as gay lovers.
"Everything's super when you're gay!!!"
Ok, what if the original post had said "The guy who runs segfault is a nigger, so are his mates. Don't go there or people might think you are a nigger too." Or replace nigger with chink, gook, kyke, christian-supremisist, feminazi, or whatever you want. Hopefully you get the point. Parody is one thing, being outright prejudice is another.
It seems like queers and smokers are the only groups who can still be openly hated these days with no one thinking any worse of you. As a half-queer (read bisexual) smoker, i take a lot of shit, i give shit back in real life, and i give shit back on slasdot. And yes I can take a joke, when I know it's a joke and not someone being an ass.
Just a follow up to my little rant, the article to which I replied has been moderated down to -1 (w/ good cause IMHO) so if you are confused as to what I was screaming about change your threshold to -1 and it will all make sense (maybe).
Has slashdot come to this? I wish all of you homophobes would crawl back into your holes and die. Who cares if someone is gay or not (whether this is true about the segfault crew I do not know, nor do I care)? What difference does it honestly make? Are you that insecure about your own sexuality that you feel threated by homosexuals? Or are you just a close-minded moron who can't see that there is an entire world that exists outside of your tinny little brain?
Sheesh, growup.
Actually corporations have the exact same rights. Corporations are basically considered a person. Companies also need some degree of privacy. Let's say company X has delt with Microsoft exclusively for years, they are getting tired of being controlled by microsoft and see linux as a way out of that controll. Company X starts buying a lot of linux books from amazon.com, Microsoft, being the evil empire that it is, regularly checks up on what books it's "partners" (read slaves) are buying. Microsoft notices that company X is buying said linux books, microsoft knows that company x might be thinking of some sneaky way to get away from them. microsoft in some way manages to crush company x before they have a chance to impliment their "linux liberation plan." In short, companies need privacy too.
Head on over to www.mozilla.org and read the damned thing yourself. I remember a day when people actually actively searched for information rather than expecting to have it handed over to them on a silver platter.
Somewhere in the KFM settings there is an option for "change pointer over links" or something along those lines. I can't check exactly where it is right now because I'm at work in nt*blech*4 but the options aren't that extensive.
I have a cable modem and I find it's a big time saver. Nothing against /. but it can be disgustingly slow at times. I really love though, how in unix clicking w/ the middle mouse button is the same as right click->open in new window. God I miss that at work...
Don't forget I mother earth and len. If you like our lady peace you'll like i mother earth.
Merced is a funny creature. It supports two different instruction sets. One is the x86 (or now ia32) instruction set in use on most PCs today. The other is the ia64 instruction set. ia64 is 64bit, while ia32 is 32bit, but there are a whole slew of other differences. ia64 is also VLIW. I have no clue what this means but apparently it requires quite a bit of compiler voodoo and will result in extremely large binaries. IIRC there is a mode switch involved to go from ia32 to ia64, but I don't remember how long it takes. It's probally very similar to switching from real mode to protected mode on an x86 cpu, which IIRC is very expensive.
I don't know what the size difference is, but apparently it was enough that Linus figured that ia64 binaries would be slower than ia32 binaries(note: that ia64 and ia32 are completely different instruction sets, it's not just 64 vs 32 bits). We'll see when the chip is released. Also, I'm guessing here, but ia64 binaries will probally take a lot more time to compile because VLIW apparently requires a lot more compiler work.
Yes, on alpha it's been fully 64bit for a long time now. On UltraSPARC the kernel runs at 64bit but the apps still run at 32bit. So the support for 64bit has been there for a long time. I'm assuming the ia64 port is 64bit atleast for the kernel. I remeber reading something from Linus a while ago where he was saying that because the ia64 binaries are probally going to be so large it would be faster to run 32bit x86 binaries most of the time than to run ia64 binaries. The exception being binaries that need access to huge ammounts of memory, such as large databases.
I think most non-intel systems have power on passwords that are stored in PROM. These things don't need a battery to survive, and if you forget it you better hope you have a PROM programmer ready.
I do understand their reasoning for keeping it closed though. The way the current system is setup it's very open to people writing hacked clients to skew the results. Right now, it would require someone with some technical expertise to write said client. If they open sourced it, any idiot with a little C knowledge could write a hacked client. It's security through obscurity, but it's still some security. I think the real answer to this, however, is that they impliment some checking on the server end to verify the results so people can hack their client all they want.
I guess logging out is a bit too complicated for me then. Because everytime I log out the box blue screens, not that it bothers me much since i only log out when I head home for the day, and for all I care the box could burst into flames at 5pm, as long as by 8am the next day it's magically put itself out and works. My problem with NT is that such simple operations can cause a crash. I don't know if the fault lies in the win32 api, or the kernel, or what. I really don't care. I've NEVER seen a unix system go completely belly up when a user logged out of it. Come to think of it, I've never seen any system do it before mine. And before you go blaming faulty hardware, we have two other machines in my department alone that exhibit the same behavior, then again they are the exact same machines using the exact same software so it could be a defective driver.
BTW, I'd prefer not to reevaluate my NT related knowledge, I'd rather just stop using it, wonder if I can convince my boss that my machine should be a linux box...
I disagree. The way I see it, is that it's very simmilar to slashdot logging your IP address when you connect. Pretty much everything on the internet will log your IP address when you connnect to it. Also, rc5 is completely optional, it's not like windows logging your IP everytime you connect to the internet without your knowledge or concent.
I think they're about 4gigs for a standard movie. Since most discs are double sided, w/ widescreen on one and fullscreen on the other (cuz companies are too dumb to use the built in widescreen to pan&scan features of dvd) you have about 8gigs per disc.