>Out of the entire article, it never mentioned what method they used to determine the age of the >findings. One could assumed that they are using carbon-dating technology, which has in recent >years been proven to be EXTREMELY flawed. This just goes to show that its easier to believe what >someone tells you, then it is to do the work yourself. The media just eats this crap up, spews >it out, and moves on. Sad. Very sad...
One could be VERY wrong if they though Carbon-14 dating was used for samples on the order of e*10^9 years old. Carbon dating is useless beyond about 10^5 years. Determining the age of rocks is a well-established part of geology, which generally does not rely on C-14 dating, since most rocks are way too old for C-14 dating to be useful. There are multiple ways in geology to date rocks other than radioactive decay dating, so the statement of age is really a statement that the rocks were 2.7 thousand million years old.
Besides, it's a "popular press" article, not a scientific journal.
>This is good because MP3 quality sucks anyway. I was really worried about seeing MP3 potentially >kill off CD sales as I personally can't stand the bad quality of tracks which have been MP3 encoded.
That depends on the encoders. I've encoded a bunch of CDs of celtic music using Blade Encoder at 192 kbps, and the quality is as good as I'm going to get with my cheap little computer speakers. Some of the tracks _really_ sucked encoded at 128 kbps. The hammered dulcimer stuff, especially.
>Ok so repeating an effort to find the various purported etymology of the word "strawberry" I >searched with +etymology +strawberry +origin on both yahoo (my standard) and alltheweb. >Yahoo found 60 while alltheweb found 117, but a number of allthewebs' finds were xxx sites!? >How many xxx sites actually use the word etymology and if this is more do we really want more?
I tried "CalTrans Bridge Design Manual" in Google!, Inference Find, and All The Web. Google gave me many links to CalTrans sites and some associated ones. Inference Find found the CalTrans sites and a bunch of tangentially related sites. All the Web found a bunch of CalTrans sites and related sites, but numbers 19 and 21 were porn sites, and putting CalTrans at the end of the string got me more porn sites.
>Ok so repeating an effort to find the various purported etymology of the word "strawberry" I >searched with +etymology +strawberry +origin on both yahoo (my standard) and alltheweb. >Yahoo found 60 while alltheweb found 117, but a number of allthewebs' finds were xxx sites!? >How many xxx sites actually use the word etymology and if this is more do we really want more?
I tried "CalTrans Bridge Design Manual" in Google!, Inference Find, and All The Web. Google gave me many links to CalTrans sites and some associated ones. Inference Find found the CalTrans sites and a bunch of tangentially related sites. All the Web found a bunch of CalTrans sites and related sites, but numbers 19 and 21 were porn sites, and putting CalTrans at the end of the string got me more porn sites.
>Percent of US households using the Internet, by race/origin and income. White Americans earning >less than $75K/year are about twice as likely to be using the Net as black Americans in the same >income bracket. Why...?
Looking at that chart, I would bet that much of the answer is that the income distribution curve for blacks and hispanics is skewed lower than for whites, so within the $30k - $45k bracket, proportionally more whites are near $45k, and more blacks are near $30k. I wonder what those charts would look like if they broke down the income more finely. Also - the non-white population is less suburban. $30k doesn't go as far in a city, even in low-income neighborhoods, and rural poor are probably _much_ less likely to have net access, even if they have a computer.
There are probably also some cultural differences - most web content is in English, which will lower use among Hispanics, and there are aspects of black (lower-class) culture which will depress net use.
>There are a number of sites, or at least there WERE a number of hosted pages for GPL'ed projects >on Geocities in the past. I'd advise anyone with a project in such a situation to move to another >provider. >Keeping your open-source/GPL stuff hosted on Geocities could very well violate the GPL.
doubtful, because Yahoo is claiming the non-exclusive right to redistribute and modify the material posted. This is largely what the GPL allows. There are plenty of subtleties which make life interesting, but these have broader application than the GPL. For example, if I have permission from a copyright owner to post her work on my Yahoo webpage, but no rights to modify, etc., can I grant the rights that Yahoo is claiming?
>My guess is that AT&T and the other long-distance >carriers are going to provide some of financial >backing required to upgrade the local cable >network infrastructure.
Sure - AT&T bought TCI. That counts as financial backing for a _lot_ of the cable industry.
>>Learn an obscure foreign lanaguage - I doubt that the scanning program knows Aramaic or Esperanto
>The NSA hires Linguists. They can read it.
The US has some very interesting resources along these lines. One unbreakable system used during World War 2 was to have Navajo speakers at both ends. Messages were sent approximately in the clear, in Navajo. Any Navajo speaker listening to the transmission could decipher it - but there weren't any Navajo speakers in Japan.
I'm actually glad to know that the US government is doing this sort of thing - it is the potential for commercial abuse that bothers me.
I'm a California licensed Civil Engineer. California licenses a variety of different branches of engineering, but only requires a licensed engineer for construction projects. The reasoning behind not requiring, say, a licensed mechanical engineer to design a car, is that the manufacturer takes on the liability. The same is true for software - if it causes harm, the vendor is liable, not the original designer.
Additionally, each construction project is unique, while manfactured products are identical copies which can be tested before releasing for sale - a failure affecting a few units is more likely a material or manufacturing defect than a design flaw. With a building, you don't get much opportunity to test it before selling it.
At some level, this may be an artificial distinction, since some software projects resemble construction projects in their diffuse contract structure, and the impossibility of testing all potential failure modes.
Finally, who would benefit from State-issued licenses for programmers? A programmer who got his license from programming PDP-8 assembler isn't necessarily more qualified than a high-school dropout who never bothered to get a license. State boards will have to be set up, and these will likely be dominated by programmers from the large software houses. One could imagine a Washington State Programmers' License exam which required working knowledge of Microsoft variants of various languages, or a Utah one which required knowledge of creating programs for a NetWare environment.
I help some friends put on a couple of fireworks shows each year. This is a small, but professionally produced show. Several of the folks who work there are California licenced pyrotechnicians. The fireworks come from a variety of sources, mostly China. One year, the Canadian-made shells had a warning label which read:
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>Out of the entire article, it never mentioned what method they used to determine the age of the
>findings. One could assumed that they are using carbon-dating technology, which has in recent
>years been proven to be EXTREMELY flawed. This just goes to show that its easier to believe what
>someone tells you, then it is to do the work yourself. The media just eats this crap up, spews
>it out, and moves on. Sad. Very sad...
One could be VERY wrong if they though Carbon-14 dating was used for samples on the order of e*10^9 years old. Carbon dating is useless beyond about 10^5 years. Determining the age of rocks is a well-established part of geology, which generally does not rely on C-14 dating, since most rocks are way too old for C-14 dating to be useful. There are multiple ways in geology to date rocks other than radioactive decay dating, so the statement of age is really a statement that the rocks were 2.7 thousand million years old.
Besides, it's a "popular press" article, not a scientific journal.
>This is good because MP3 quality sucks anyway. I was really worried about seeing MP3 potentially
>kill off CD sales as I personally can't stand the bad quality of tracks which have been MP3 encoded.
That depends on the encoders. I've encoded a bunch of CDs of celtic music using Blade Encoder at 192 kbps, and the quality is as good as I'm going to get with my cheap little computer speakers. Some of the tracks _really_ sucked encoded at 128 kbps. The hammered dulcimer stuff, especially.
>searched with +etymology +strawberry +origin on both yahoo (my standard) and alltheweb.
>Yahoo found 60 while alltheweb found 117, but a number of allthewebs' finds were xxx sites!?
>How many xxx sites actually use the word etymology and if this is more do we really want more?
I tried "CalTrans Bridge Design Manual" in Google!, Inference Find, and All The Web. Google gave me many links to CalTrans sites and some associated ones. Inference Find found the CalTrans sites and a bunch of tangentially related sites. All the Web found a bunch of CalTrans sites and related sites, but numbers 19 and 21 were porn sites, and putting CalTrans at the end of the string got me more porn sites.
Not a terribly useful site, IMO.
>Ok so repeating an effort to find the various purported etymology of the word "strawberry" I
>searched with +etymology +strawberry +origin on both yahoo (my standard) and alltheweb.
>Yahoo found 60 while alltheweb found 117, but a number of allthewebs' finds were xxx sites!?
>How many xxx sites actually use the word etymology and if this is more do we really want more?
I tried "CalTrans Bridge Design Manual" in Google!, Inference Find, and All The Web. Google gave me many links to CalTrans sites and some associated ones. Inference Find found the CalTrans sites and a bunch of tangentially related sites. All the Web found a bunch of CalTrans sites and related sites, but numbers 19 and 21 were porn sites, and putting CalTrans at the end of the string got me more porn sites.
Not a terribly useful site, IMO.
When the government has over-regulated the computer industry as badly as medicine, _then_ it will be time for computer professionals to unionize.
>Percent of US households using the Internet, by race/origin and income. White Americans earning
>less than $75K/year are about twice as likely to be using the Net as black Americans in the same
>income bracket. Why...?
Looking at that chart, I would bet that much of the answer is that the income distribution curve for blacks and hispanics is skewed lower than for whites, so within the $30k - $45k bracket, proportionally more whites are near $45k, and more blacks are near $30k. I wonder what those charts would look like if they broke down the income more finely. Also - the non-white population is less suburban. $30k doesn't go as far in a city, even in low-income neighborhoods, and rural poor are probably _much_ less likely to have net access, even if they have a computer.
There are probably also some cultural differences - most web content is in English, which will lower use among Hispanics, and there are aspects of black (lower-class) culture which will depress net use.
>There are a number of sites, or at least there WERE a number of hosted pages for GPL'ed projects
>on Geocities in the past. I'd advise anyone with a project in such a situation to move to another
>provider.
>Keeping your open-source/GPL stuff hosted on Geocities could very well violate the GPL.
doubtful, because Yahoo is claiming the non-exclusive right to redistribute and modify the material posted. This is largely what the GPL allows. There are plenty of subtleties which make life interesting, but these have broader application than the GPL. For example, if I have permission from a copyright owner to post her work on my Yahoo webpage, but no rights to modify, etc., can I grant the rights that Yahoo is claiming?
>My guess is that AT&T and the other long-distance
>carriers are going to provide some of financial
>backing required to upgrade the local cable
>network infrastructure.
Sure - AT&T bought TCI. That counts as financial backing for a _lot_ of the cable industry.
I'm just waiting for the penguin-shaped VARstation.
>>Learn an obscure foreign lanaguage - I doubt that the scanning program knows Aramaic or Esperanto
>The NSA hires Linguists. They can read it.
The US has some very interesting resources along these lines. One unbreakable system used during World War 2 was to have Navajo speakers at both ends. Messages were sent approximately in the clear, in Navajo. Any Navajo speaker listening to the transmission could decipher it - but there weren't any Navajo speakers in Japan.
I'm actually glad to know that the US government is doing this sort of thing - it is the potential for commercial abuse that bothers me.
I'm a California licensed Civil Engineer. California licenses a variety of different branches of engineering, but only requires a licensed engineer for construction projects. The reasoning behind not requiring, say, a licensed mechanical engineer to design a car, is that the manufacturer takes on the liability. The same is true for software - if it causes harm, the vendor is liable, not the original designer.
Additionally, each construction project is unique, while manfactured products are identical copies which can be tested before releasing for sale - a failure affecting a few units is more likely a material or manufacturing defect than a design flaw. With a building, you don't get much opportunity to test it before selling it.
At some level, this may be an artificial distinction, since some software projects resemble construction projects in their diffuse contract structure, and the impossibility of testing all potential failure modes.
Finally, who would benefit from State-issued licenses for programmers? A programmer who got his license from programming PDP-8 assembler isn't necessarily more qualified than a high-school dropout who never bothered to get a license. State boards will have to be set up, and these will likely be dominated by programmers from the large software houses. One could imagine a Washington State Programmers' License exam which required working knowledge of Microsoft variants of various languages, or a Utah one which required knowledge of creating programs for a NetWare environment.
Along the fireworks theme -
I help some friends put on a couple of fireworks shows each year. This is a small, but professionally produced show. Several of the folks who work there are California licenced pyrotechnicians. The fireworks come from a variety of sources, mostly China. One year, the Canadian-made shells had a warning label which read:
"Danger. Explosive. Do not light."