Actually Tolkien addresses this in one of his letters.
What would have happened if Gollum had taken the Ring and not fallen? He could not leave the Cracks of Doom - the Nazgul would be there. And Sauron would soon be coming to claim the Ring.
Tolkien concluded that what would have happened is that Gollum would have voluntarily leapt into the fire: to 1) keep the Ring for himself 2) do a last service for "master" 3) spite Sauron.
Britain has a higher rate of violent crime (rape, muggings and assaults of all kinds) than the US. Though crime in total is pretty stable, violent crime and gun crime are increasing rapidly.
I don't see Britain falling into anarchy soon. I see it heading that way, though it has a long way to go.
BTW it's unfair to use "anarchy" in this sense. No, I am not an anarchist. Yes, I know I just did it myself.
Therefore if you take any population anywhere on the planet and trace it's mtDNA back
The number of women who are ancestors by direct unbroken female to female descent will fall as you go back generation on generation.
Eventually it must fall as low as seven
Eventually it must fall as low as one.
These "seven mothers" were not the only female ancestors of modern Europeans: rather, they were the only ones whose descent can be traced in unbroken female to female line to modern Europeans.
Most other women alive in Europe at that time contributed their genes - but not through unbroken female-to-female descent. We get nuclear DNA from them, but not mtDNA.
It's the same for the "African Eve". She wasn't the only female ancestor of humanity: most other women alive at that time were our ancestors. She just happens to be the one (and there has to be one) who is our ancestor along the direct female-to-female line.
mtDNA studies can indeed tell us a lot about human history. For example, it shows that the natives of Europe and Asia come from one immensely succesful "branch" of an African "tree", - a smallish group that left Africa to take over the rest of the world - and are more closely related to each other than they are to modern Africans, or than one group of modern Africans is to other groups.
This sort of knowledge must be distinguished from the pseudoscience this bunch are peddling.
Peddling with, I believe, financial reward in mind.
40K+ is far too high even for a S390 to push real work through them. 40K is where the servers get to the limit where they can just tick over. Getting the number that high was a geet thing
However, a few thousand would probably be practical, on a big S390 system. Depends on the hit rate on each server.
The point I would make is - run thousands of copies of Linux if it's to your benefit. If not, don't.
It's cheaper. IBM charge you for software on the basis of the machine power the software runs on. This is calculated on a LPAR basis if you partition a machine. So if you split a machine in half and run OS/390 on just one half, you pay less.
It's probably faster. Less overhead with Linux than OS/390
I agree that Websphere or Lotus under USS is the way to go if you have a small volume of data to handle.
From the perspective of a mainframe system programmer, I have to say that the 40,000 linux VM machines never really seemed that useful. 40,000 systems is 40,000 things to maintain and configure, never mind whether they are on separate PCs or in virtual machines
What that original article was really going gaga over was VM. I can understand that - VM is really sweet - but I doubt the configuration would be that useful.
However, I think Linux could be useful to mainframe sites like us. Here's why:
IBM run something called Unix System Services under OS/390. This allows you to have a Unix filesystem on OS/390, TCPIP, and all the open sysem stuff.
IBM have ported Apache (=Websphere), Lotus domino, and a bunch of other stuff to this environment
And we are using them
This is nice for us, but now the drain on our system is forcing us to partition it (well, we anticipated that)
So we are going to have a partitioned system with one slice basically running OS/390 to support Unix System Services, Websphere and Domino.
Very straightforward - except that the overhead of running OS/390 just to support Unix System Services is high.
Therefore I'd say that a probable - no, make that possible - future configuration for us is a partitioned S390 box with one slice running OS/390 and hosting the database and the other running Linux/390 and doing the web serving. Much lower overhead, I'd guess.
(why not do the web serving from a RS/6000? Because our databases and so on are on the OS/390 system and the S390 will allow very fast datasharing, much faster than anything across a network).
I'd love to install it and try it out
BUT there is no way places like ours will make a commitment to Linux/390 without substantial IBM support.
Fly, neither Dawkins nor Ridley say that Selfish Genes force our behaviour to be selfish: The difference is that whearas Dawkins was left vainly hoping that we could "defy our selfish genes", Ridley shows how selfish genes (can) work together to produce altruistic behaviour at the level of the organism.
Dawkins' comment is recorded on the flyleaf of Ridley's "The Origins of Virtue" as follows.
"If my The Selfish Gene were to have a volume two devoted to humans, I think The Origins of Virtue is pretty much what it ought to look like".
Re:The Morality Of These Questions . . .
on
Genome
·
· Score: 1
China has decided to that its children are going to be male. About 113 men are born for every 100 women. The method being used to bring this about is good old-fashioned infanticide.
Making a choice about what your kids are like by technology is no more immoral than making that choice by selecting a mate. The important difference is that it can be many times less painful and many times more effective.
Check out Boethius' The Consolations Of Philosophy. He had freewill and determinism worked out in the fifth century AD. Better than you lamebrains, anyway.
For cripes' sake. You are rehashing cliches 1500 years old.
Check out Ridley's earlier books
on
Genome
·
· Score: 2
You want to know why the Internet is so great? Read Ridley's earlier book, The Origins Of Virtue.
Ridley is one of the best popularisers of "Evolutionary Psychology" around, along with Stephen Pinker and, of course, Dawkins. And what we are learning from EP about human behaviour is making all our psychology, and most of our politics, as obsolete as the flat earth.
JAVA can be compiled to native machine code on a number of platforms, including OS/390 (which is where I'm coming from). If and only if you do that, it can be very fast.
Speed and cross-platform compatibility are necessarily opposed.
IMHO JAVA is rather a poor language, with many niggling and unnecessarily clumsy constructs. It is too similar to C/C++.
However, I think the universal bytecode it supplies may be its real future. There are a number of compilers which take source code in other OO languages and generate JAVA bytecode: for example, AppletMagic (for ADA), IBM's NetRexx, and a version of Python.
I've used NetRexx, though I've no expertise in the others. I found it far easier to write simple stuff, and no harder to write complex stuff, in NetRexx.
I agree that "run everywhere" has failed. But "one universal bytecode" may be the language's future. Five years from now we may see JAVA largely a server-side language. Classes in JAVA bytecode will be created using compilers that take JAVA, ADA, PYTHON, RUBY, LISP . . . you name it. If these classes are applets, they will be served out to browsers in JAVA bytecode form. The majority of these classes, however, will run as servlets or JSP's. They will be recompiled to the server's native code (the native code compiler takes the JAVA bytecode as input) and will run at high speed.
Qualifier: I have on;lytheoretical knowledge of PYTHON or LISP - it may be that the internal logic of these languages forbids or handicaps translation to JAVA in the ways I have sketched out.... Enlighten me.....
Cell growth IS data processing anyway
on
RNA Computer
·
· Score: 2
The DNA->RNA->protein chain that builds our cells needs to transfer 6 bits of binary information per amino acid used. Our bodies do about 10-to-the-power-21 simple computational operations per day just growing and repairing damage.
All this is very delicately self-regulated. It's digital data processing, though not quite as we know it.
I think the best way of understanding the genome is as a computer program that has been continuously maintained and enhanced for 4,000,000,000 years. Each baby is a new beta.
You can do something like this with fermion quasiparticles in Helium-3, theoretically. It doesn't simply follow that you can do it with photons in an atomic condensate, just because both the Helium-3 and the condensate are Bose-Einstein condensations (sort of). For one thing, photons are bosons, not fermions . . .
The original article asserts that there is a mathematical symmetry between the two systems. I'd appreciate something to back that up.
This is going to be extremely difficult to test experimentally. Atomic condensates like this have to be suspended in a magnetic trap: how would you "swirl" it, particularly in the complex and exact pattern the article specifies?
Leaving the theory to one side, I thought the article was crammed with unfounded extrapolations and suspiciously lacking in numbers.
"Minorities obviously come from poorer areas" - True. But most poor people (at all levels of income) are white. Nobody would object to preferences or extra help based on income. The injustice arises when it is based in race.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Tolkien addresses this in one of his letters.
What would have happened if Gollum had taken the Ring and not fallen? He could not leave the Cracks of Doom - the Nazgul would be there. And Sauron would soon be coming to claim the Ring.
Tolkien concluded that what would have happened is that Gollum would have voluntarily leapt into the fire: to 1) keep the Ring for himself 2) do a last service for "master" 3) spite Sauron.
here
You are a cretin
Peole who have treated it in Science Fiction include J. D. Bernal and Cordwainer Smith
I hope NASA make it work. The real problem is keeping the sail from tearing while it unfolds. This seems trivial, but it's not.
For a list of relevant web sites, see here
Look at this site.
But let's clarify the facts about who is doing the killing, shall we?
- the "general populace" commits less than half of all murders in America
- Murders of "the general populace" by "unpopular racial, religious or ethnic groups" are about two and a half times as frequent as the other way round.
Of course, what you mean by "General Populace" is "White".Just to clear your fuzzy biased little mind, check out the US government stats in interracial murder
I don't see Britain falling into anarchy soon. I see it heading that way, though it has a long way to go.
BTW it's unfair to use "anarchy" in this sense. No, I am not an anarchist. Yes, I know I just did it myself.
Basic points
These "seven mothers" were not the only female ancestors of modern Europeans: rather, they were the only ones whose descent can be traced in unbroken female to female line to modern Europeans.
Most other women alive in Europe at that time contributed their genes - but not through unbroken female-to-female descent. We get nuclear DNA from them, but not mtDNA.
It's the same for the "African Eve". She wasn't the only female ancestor of humanity: most other women alive at that time were our ancestors. She just happens to be the one (and there has to be one) who is our ancestor along the direct female-to-female line.
mtDNA studies can indeed tell us a lot about human history. For example, it shows that the natives of Europe and Asia come from one immensely succesful "branch" of an African "tree", - a smallish group that left Africa to take over the rest of the world - and are more closely related to each other than they are to modern Africans, or than one group of modern Africans is to other groups.
This sort of knowledge must be distinguished from the pseudoscience this bunch are peddling.
Peddling with, I believe, financial reward in mind.
A touch! A veritable sting! But actually it was finger trouble and I think it's GEATS.
However, a few thousand would probably be practical, on a big S390 system. Depends on the hit rate on each server.
The point I would make is - run thousands of copies of Linux if it's to your benefit. If not, don't.
- It's cheaper. IBM charge you for software on the basis of the machine power the software runs on. This is calculated on a LPAR basis if you partition a machine. So if you split a machine in half and run OS/390 on just one half, you pay less.
- It's probably faster. Less overhead with Linux than OS/390
I agree that Websphere or Lotus under USS is the way to go if you have a small volume of data to handle.What that original article was really going gaga over was VM. I can understand that - VM is really sweet - but I doubt the configuration would be that useful.
However, I think Linux could be useful to mainframe sites like us. Here's why:
Very straightforward - except that the overhead of running OS/390 just to support Unix System Services is high.
Therefore I'd say that a probable - no, make that possible - future configuration for us is a partitioned S390 box with one slice running OS/390 and hosting the database and the other running Linux/390 and doing the web serving. Much lower overhead, I'd guess.
BUT there is no way places like ours will make a commitment to Linux/390 without substantial IBM support.Import some real knowledge & cut the geek cool.
Dawkins' comment is recorded on the flyleaf of Ridley's "The Origins of Virtue" as follows.
"If my The Selfish Gene were to have a volume two devoted to humans, I think The Origins of Virtue is pretty much what it ought to look like".
Making a choice about what your kids are like by technology is no more immoral than making that choice by selecting a mate. The important difference is that it can be many times less painful and many times more effective.
For cripes' sake. You are rehashing cliches 1500 years old.
Ridley is one of the best popularisers of "Evolutionary Psychology" around, along with Stephen Pinker and, of course, Dawkins. And what we are learning from EP about human behaviour is making all our psychology, and most of our politics, as obsolete as the flat earth.
"This instrument contains 0.9 microCuries of Americum -241"
That's a transuranic.
It came out of a Nuclear reactor.
Why don't we let the Greens know about this and see what they do? The idiots would probably set up a campaign to ban smoke alarms.
Anything that makes them more ridiculous weakens them.
Speed and cross-platform compatibility are necessarily opposed.
IMHO JAVA is rather a poor language, with many niggling and unnecessarily clumsy constructs. It is too similar to C/C++.
However, I think the universal bytecode it supplies may be its real future. There are a number of compilers which take source code in other OO languages and generate JAVA bytecode: for example, AppletMagic (for ADA), IBM's NetRexx, and a version of Python.
I've used NetRexx, though I've no expertise in the others. I found it far easier to write simple stuff, and no harder to write complex stuff, in NetRexx.
I agree that "run everywhere" has failed. But "one universal bytecode" may be the language's future. Five years from now we may see JAVA largely a server-side language. Classes in JAVA bytecode will be created using compilers that take JAVA, ADA, PYTHON, RUBY, LISP . . . you name it. If these classes are applets, they will be served out to browsers in JAVA bytecode form. The majority of these classes, however, will run as servlets or JSP's. They will be recompiled to the server's native code (the native code compiler takes the JAVA bytecode as input) and will run at high speed.
Qualifier: I have on;lytheoretical knowledge of PYTHON or LISP - it may be that the internal logic of these languages forbids or handicaps translation to JAVA in the ways I have sketched out.... Enlighten me .....
All this is very delicately self-regulated. It's digital data processing, though not quite as we know it.
I think the best way of understanding the genome is as a computer program that has been continuously maintained and enhanced for 4,000,000,000 years. Each baby is a new beta.
The original article asserts that there is a mathematical symmetry between the two systems. I'd appreciate something to back that up.
Leaving the theory to one side, I thought the article was crammed with unfounded extrapolations and suspiciously lacking in numbers.
"Minorities obviously come from poorer areas" - True. But most poor people (at all levels of income) are white. Nobody would object to preferences or extra help based on income. The injustice arises when it is based in race.