I don't know, but I think that it's a time that would be more easily expressed in microseconds than in gigayears. Oh, hang on. Microsoft stay TRUE to [anything FLOSS]. The time was 0 seconds (that's a mathematical zero, not a representational approximation to zero) ; before they'd got far enough into understanding the problem to finish reading it, they'd already decided to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
This is a knee-jerk response to the actions of a lot of jerks knees.
When I was still at school and doing exams which had been designed by professional exam-setters [footnote], the "boiler-plate" on the front of most exam papers included a phrase like "you are advised to read the paper fully before commencing any answers", and we were taught that this was a Good Thing. Not because of contrived examples such as you describe, but because a lot of papers were of the form "answer question 1, two from questions 2 to 5, and three from questions 6 through 9." Which meant that 5 minute work at the start of a 5 hour exam could easily mean that you could boost your marks by 10 to 15% simply by READING THE FRIENDLY MANUAL. The latter is not a bad habit, which I think even the more fucktarded reader of SlashDot should recognise. RTFM!
[footnote]: by the time you get to university or industry, you're likely to be getting exams that have been set by flange-sprocket designers and widget-amplification specialists, not exam-setters. Ha ha, but serious. [Footnote 2] : by "boiler-plate" I am (probably) literally referring to the hot-lead version, not the DTP version. I'm old and crumbly and my back is giving me gyp.
And it has been the symbol of world Boy Scouts for over 100 years. Will the NFL go after them too?
Big hunky athletic types who like to dress up in armour plate and romp around nekked in rooms with 47 other like-minded (for typically small values of "mind") males, and now they're going after Boy Scouts...
Why do I find myself less than surprised.
Bunch of closeted poofs, the lot of them. (No disrespect intended to proper un-closeted poofs intended.)
Starck has become a household name for his product designs,
Starck? Who that? Someone in the editorial team (!?) of SlashDot has either a particularly weird (single-person) household, or did an Art-School course in "Design" and only came away with one name in his lecture notes.
I wonder when the first artist's "installation" will appear with one of these that drives a pump to blow air in to further over-inflate the artist's ego. Now, where does that hose go? Smile, because this is going to hurt you rather more than it will hurt me!
There's a creationist (or at least "evolution skeptic") MD on one of the car forums I hang out on.
[SHUDDER]. Not the "car forums", it's the idea of you hanging out that makes me shudder. I've heard what that doctor diagnoses you with, and it's not going to be a pretty death. Or a quick one.
One of these days, I'm going to find a new health-food store and buy some homeopathic remedies - purely so I can engage their time uselessly in explaining to them what their bottle-cleaning difficulties are. (You have a "drug" in a bottle, of activity "Y" international units of flange-widgetery ; you finish the course and wash the bottle out prior to going back for more. Now, what do you do with your washings, which have activity 2Y units? You can't throw them down the sink, because they'd just get stronger...)
Most merchants refuse to deploy it anyhow unless forced. It causes a 5-8% immediate drop in throughput. I wouldn't use a site that used it either.
Sounds like an underestimate to me - I've already shit-canned one credit card because their implementation of VbV was so god-fuckingly horrible that it was impossible to use their card online. I now have disposed of fragments of the card over two continents and reduced the balance to them owing me about the price of a cigarette - which imposes a cost on them of maintaining the account. The other card I have which uses VbV allows me to violate a basic security principle to make the system usable, so I still use it. But I know that I'm breaking a security rule, so I probably use it less than I used to.
VbV can be an absolute nightmare for a user. Big foot-shot!
I think that the concept extends to the fact that personalized news is news that I agree with.
If you're a thinking person (which as a SlashDot contributor is more likely than average, but a long way short of 100% probability), then this should scare you, quite a lot. I agree that the tendency is to pay attention to stuff that you agree with, but as a thinking person you should realise the dangers of deliberately ignoring stuff that you don't agree with and don't like, but is nonetheless important.
That is in fact the basis after all of the CNN=Left, Fox=Right.
Come to Tennessee, I have neighbors who think the world is 6000 years old and made in 6, 24 hour days. Concepts like science are too complicated for people that closed minded.
If he (or a 'he' of the group) works as a safety consultant in the oil industry... I think I've met him.
Seriously - that was scary : a "safety consultant" who can't handle ideas like "evidence" and "statistics". Weird country.
... than either the summary or the original article presents them. To be fair, they're not ideas that boil down easily into a soundbite suitable for a fast-working journalist. Brief background : Conway-Morris was one of the PhD students who worked on the famous re-examination and re-interpretation of the Burgess Shale fauna. It seems that he took some umbrage at being attributed (obliquely) the line "Oh fuck, another new phylum!" by Steven Jay Gould in his "Wonderful Life" book of 1987 (IIRC). He also has more substantive grounds for disagreement with Gould, as where Gould sees a metaphor of "replaying the tape of evolution" not necessarily leading to anything noticeably like our present selection of fauna, Conway-Morris sees "convergent evolution" as highly prevalent and likely to bring about broadly similar structures over time, even if they're implemented by different methods. Where Gould asks "what is it about Pikaia that would cause us to mark it as a early member of a phylum that would become dominant on the planet?", Conway-Morris is more likely to assert that an organism that is capable of developing an internal skeleton is more likely to develop large size than one that has to go through periodic ecdycis, and that such organisms are likely to achieve similar external forms by convergent evolution, regardless of the details of their internal structure. One of the classic examples of convergent evolution would be the similarity of form of dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs, all of whose external forms are very similar, but whose internal structures differ greatly as a result of their differing evolutionary histories.
Conway-Morris does have a genuine point to make, and despite the attentions of the God-squaddies who try to portray his views as showing some sort of fundamental dispute at the heart of evolutionary theories (and practice - remember that SCM is a working palaeontologist ; he's been a significant force in the discovery and study of other Early Cambrian faunas of excellent preservation, including the Sirius Passet and Chenjiang faunas), he is an important voice in the field, and is likely to remain so for decades if not centuries. Personally, I'd stand him a pint if I bumped into him in a pub in Cambridge, because he's got a lot to say that's worth listening to, even if I'm by no means sure that I agree with him. I wonder how he'd deal with the arrival of a spaceship full of centaurs with a biochemistry based on PNA? Would he consider himself supported by that evidence or refuted? (SCM, if you're reading - you name the pub and I'll get them in.)
You avoid standing with the Liberal Arts undegrads in the unemployment line, i.e. you get your own special Hell.
No, it's just the normal hell. What happens is that you, as an MBA, are tasked with putting the management of the Scorpion Pits into order. And you get your own special hell of trying to implement it. And as an MBA, you probably deserve it.
They get a surprisingly good picture through curtains. If your on a military base at night, you can often tell which barracks the women are in because the guards sight each of the windows through their scopes as they pass on patrol...
I think that you've just greatly increased the sales of certain frequencies of IR-emitting LEDs. Put it on an unreliable astable oscillator... and every so often your Peeping Tom soldier (OK, let's not mince words - your masturbating voyeur) gets his eyes fried by his night-sight. Won't cause any long term damage I'm sure , but it's going to do nothing for his night vision.
group A doesn't recognize that group B is even human. Group A proceeds to enslave, kidnap, kill, and steal the land and resources of group B.
If group B is not human, then it is not possible to enslave them, kidnap them (both of which concepts rely on some concept of "self" and of "ownership" of that self by yourself, and the ownership concept at least is denied to non-humans), or steal anything from them (same reason ; if you're not a "self" then ownership has no meaning). That leaves killing them as the only remaining habit to object to. Unless you're a strict vegetarian, then you're already regularly killing other sentient, thinking, self-aware, suffering beings purely for your own convenience. Which should give us all grounds for concern when the huge yellow space ships are hovering above the planet in almost exactly the way that bricks don't.
From the article: " I'm sure the 'content providers' will continue to sell content to the BBC, ITV, etc., if this is not implemented." My guess would be 'no' actually - they'll happily sell non-HD versions, but I doubt they will sell HD without the DRM.
And would this matter? What I'd like to know is when we're going to get a proper EPG and HD recording for Radio 4? In mono, of course. Why bother paying for bandwidth and electronics for an ear you don't use?
The infamous "away" place that you mention is actually called NIMBY. Look it up on Google Maps.
According to Google Maps there are lots of NIMBYs in America, a couple in Central Europe, and none at all in Britain. Which almost defies belief. Even amongst such notoriously humourless vampires as lawyers, I'd have expected there to be at least one practice specialising in planning disputes and glorying in being "NIMBYs". Of course, while we've got a grand total of one atmosphere for the planet, one hydrosphere and one biosphere, even if it's not in MY back yard, it will eventually come back there.
Industrial farming is to blame here, with farmer spreading manure over their fields and having it washed down by rains into rivers and the sea.
It's a bit more subtle than that. At a low level of manuring (etc), pasture and meadow are perfectly capable of retaining, absorbing and recycling the nitrates, OM, phosphates, etc. But at the levels that modern industrial agriculture units can produce, you'd probably need more land to spread the manure onto than you'd need to stock the same population of animals on at "traditional" stock densities. Which means that your industrialised farm needs to add industrial toxic waste management facilities as well. And many farmers can't afford (or choose not) to invest in the necessary facilities.
Unfortunately, no efficient way to transform these algae into biofuels has been found to this day...
Two points : (1) "algae" covers, if I recall correctly, something like 20 phyla and I don't know how many thousands of species of organism ; (2) whatever is done with them will probably still involve another set of biochemical processing tanks on each farm, and will simply change the details of the chemical engineering that new generations of farmers will have to invest money and learning into. Both significant costs. It would be a stretch to say that I sympathise with farmers, but I do understand that their job is changing rapidly, and I'm sure that many of them don't like it. "This too, shall pass."
The researchers suggest these problems can be overcome by situating algae production ponds behind wastewater treatment facilities to capture phosphorous and nitrogen -- essential algae nutrients that otherwise need to come from petroleum
Someone, somewhere, doesn't have a clue about basic chemistry. Most likely the reporter/ PR flack who wrote this story up and then failed to get his version checked by the original specialists for the science (not the English, nor the style, but the science).
Nitrogen and phosphorus are both essential elements in the diet of anything (including nitrogen-fixing bacteria and archaea ; they just happen to be able to take their N2 neat), but neither of them are found in petroleum, except in the most trivial of amounts.
What the reporter meant to say, I suspect, is that nitrogen and phosphorus are essential nutrients which are often produced or made into a metabolisable form using energy from petroleum (and in the case of nitrogen, also hydrogen from petroleum). And I'm sure that's what the researchers actually said. But the reporter fluffed it.
That said... using "waste" water to supply these nutrients kills several birds (OK, dinosaurs) with one stone (of unspecified type ; trust me, I'm a geologist : the type of stone doesn't matter in this case. I know it's not normal to hear a geologist say that, but this time, it doesn't matter!)
Where is this "away" place that such wastes were sent to before. I've looked on a map, and I've looked on Google Maps, and I've not found "away". It must be a popular place : "put it away", "throw it away", "just go away and never darken my doorstep again" ; but I can't find it on a map.
How do you destroy something that isn't owned by anybody?
I do wish that people would think before they type. Or after they type, before they post. You've not put any constraints on your claim, so I'm assuming a general claim here that being un-owned means that something is indestructable. To use a popular SlashDot meme, "freedom" is owned by no person (even though many people claim to possess at least some of it), and yet SlashDot is full of stories about the impending destruction of "freedom" in some parts of the world. OK, how about something that indisputably exists, into which you could drive a nail (or in my case, an oil well) : the environmental services that put oxygen into the atmosphere. mostly oceanic phytoplankton, a major role to the trees of the rainforests, and a significant role to the rest of the planet's photosynthesising flora. All hail Rubisco! Something that is definitely owned by no person, or country, or even species (it exists as much for tube worms at a mid-ocean ridge as it does for bipedal apes reading SlashDot). And yet something that we could, if we chose, destroy, and which we may well be (slowly) destroying as we type.
I don't know - this site is meant to be "News for Nerds", one of whose characteristics is an ability to actually understand logic and language and set theory etc. Some days it doesn't look like that.
Annoying? If the probe provided evidence that the landings were "faked", meaning we could no longer see the landers that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged only months ago [nasa.gov] that wouldn't be annoying. It'd be one of the most baffling mysteries in modern history!
The question wouldn't be "does this mean we never landed on the moon?", it'd be "who landed on the moon without telling anyone and stole the fucking landers?!"
Brennan. He does things like that. All he needs to have had done will be to will have had invented a time machine. The timing is right given the startup of the LHC a few months ago (even if I haven't got the grammar of time travel sufficiently deobfusticated).
Slashdot Mirror
It's perfectly safe for work - our Work's machines don't have Flash (I guess) on them, so the link doesn't show.
Was it interesting?
I don't know, but I think that it's a time that would be more easily expressed in microseconds than in gigayears.
Oh, hang on.
Microsoft stay TRUE to [anything FLOSS].
The time was 0 seconds (that's a mathematical zero, not a representational approximation to zero) ; before they'd got far enough into understanding the problem to finish reading it, they'd already decided to "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
This is a knee-jerk response to the actions of a lot of jerks knees.
Your loss ; dog's gain.
When I was still at school and doing exams which had been designed by professional exam-setters [footnote], the "boiler-plate" on the front of most exam papers included a phrase like "you are advised to read the paper fully before commencing any answers", and we were taught that this was a Good Thing. Not because of contrived examples such as you describe, but because a lot of papers were of the form "answer question 1, two from questions 2 to 5, and three from questions 6 through 9." Which meant that 5 minute work at the start of a 5 hour exam could easily mean that you could boost your marks by 10 to 15% simply by READING THE FRIENDLY MANUAL.
The latter is not a bad habit, which I think even the more fucktarded reader of SlashDot should recognise. RTFM!
[footnote]: by the time you get to university or industry, you're likely to be getting exams that have been set by flange-sprocket designers and widget-amplification specialists, not exam-setters. Ha ha, but serious.
[Footnote 2] : by "boiler-plate" I am (probably) literally referring to the hot-lead version, not the DTP version. I'm old and crumbly and my back is giving me gyp.
Big hunky athletic types who like to dress up in armour plate and romp around nekked in rooms with 47 other like-minded (for typically small values of "mind") males, and now they're going after Boy Scouts ...
Why do I find myself less than surprised.
Bunch of closeted poofs, the lot of them. (No disrespect intended to proper un-closeted poofs intended.)
Choices, choices ... to mod you up, or to comment?
SlashDot doesn't have a "most disturbing image I've had all day" moderation option, so I'll comment instead.
Um, comment above ^^^^
Starck? Who that?
Someone in the editorial team (!?) of SlashDot has either a particularly weird (single-person) household, or did an Art-School course in "Design" and only came away with one name in his lecture notes.
I wonder when the first artist's "installation" will appear with one of these that drives a pump to blow air in to further over-inflate the artist's ego. Now, where does that hose go? Smile, because this is going to hurt you rather more than it will hurt me!
[SHUDDER]. Not the "car forums", it's the idea of you hanging out that makes me shudder. I've heard what that doctor diagnoses you with, and it's not going to be a pretty death. Or a quick one.
One of these days, I'm going to find a new health-food store and buy some homeopathic remedies - purely so I can engage their time uselessly in explaining to them what their bottle-cleaning difficulties are. (You have a "drug" in a bottle, of activity "Y" international units of flange-widgetery ; you finish the course and wash the bottle out prior to going back for more. Now, what do you do with your washings, which have activity 2Y units? You can't throw them down the sink, because they'd just get stronger ...)
Sounds like an underestimate to me - I've already shit-canned one credit card because their implementation of VbV was so god-fuckingly horrible that it was impossible to use their card online. I now have disposed of fragments of the card over two continents and reduced the balance to them owing me about the price of a cigarette - which imposes a cost on them of maintaining the account. The other card I have which uses VbV allows me to violate a basic security principle to make the system usable, so I still use it. But I know that I'm breaking a security rule, so I probably use it less than I used to.
VbV can be an absolute nightmare for a user. Big foot-shot!
Or that your spouse is socially incompetent enough to not be able to catch anyone better than you.
If you're a thinking person (which as a SlashDot contributor is more likely than average, but a long way short of 100% probability), then this should scare you, quite a lot.
I agree that the tendency is to pay attention to stuff that you agree with, but as a thinking person you should realise the dangers of deliberately ignoring stuff that you don't agree with and don't like, but is nonetheless important.
s/Right/Ultra Extreme Right/ ; s/Left/Extreme Right/ ; FTFY.
If he (or a 'he' of the group) works as a safety consultant in the oil industry ... I think I've met him.
Seriously - that was scary : a "safety consultant" who can't handle ideas like "evidence" and "statistics". Weird country.
... than either the summary or the original article presents them. To be fair, they're not ideas that boil down easily into a soundbite suitable for a fast-working journalist.
Brief background : Conway-Morris was one of the PhD students who worked on the famous re-examination and re-interpretation of the Burgess Shale fauna. It seems that he took some umbrage at being attributed (obliquely) the line "Oh fuck, another new phylum!" by Steven Jay Gould in his "Wonderful Life" book of 1987 (IIRC). He also has more substantive grounds for disagreement with Gould, as where Gould sees a metaphor of "replaying the tape of evolution" not necessarily leading to anything noticeably like our present selection of fauna, Conway-Morris sees "convergent evolution" as highly prevalent and likely to bring about broadly similar structures over time, even if they're implemented by different methods.
Where Gould asks "what is it about Pikaia that would cause us to mark it as a early member of a phylum that would become dominant on the planet?", Conway-Morris is more likely to assert that an organism that is capable of developing an internal skeleton is more likely to develop large size than one that has to go through periodic ecdycis, and that such organisms are likely to achieve similar external forms by convergent evolution, regardless of the details of their internal structure.
One of the classic examples of convergent evolution would be the similarity of form of dolphins, sharks and ichthyosaurs, all of whose external forms are very similar, but whose internal structures differ greatly as a result of their differing evolutionary histories.
Conway-Morris does have a genuine point to make, and despite the attentions of the God-squaddies who try to portray his views as showing some sort of fundamental dispute at the heart of evolutionary theories (and practice - remember that SCM is a working palaeontologist ; he's been a significant force in the discovery and study of other Early Cambrian faunas of excellent preservation, including the Sirius Passet and Chenjiang faunas), he is an important voice in the field, and is likely to remain so for decades if not centuries.
Personally, I'd stand him a pint if I bumped into him in a pub in Cambridge, because he's got a lot to say that's worth listening to, even if I'm by no means sure that I agree with him.
I wonder how he'd deal with the arrival of a spaceship full of centaurs with a biochemistry based on PNA? Would he consider himself supported by that evidence or refuted? (SCM, if you're reading - you name the pub and I'll get them in.)
No, it's just the normal hell. What happens is that you, as an MBA, are tasked with putting the management of the Scorpion Pits into order. And you get your own special hell of trying to implement it.
And as an MBA, you probably deserve it.
I think that you've just greatly increased the sales of certain frequencies of IR-emitting LEDs. Put it on an unreliable astable oscillator ... and every so often your Peeping Tom soldier (OK, let's not mince words - your masturbating voyeur) gets his eyes fried by his night-sight. Won't cause any long term damage I'm sure , but it's going to do nothing for his night vision.
If group B is not human, then it is not possible to enslave them, kidnap them (both of which concepts rely on some concept of "self" and of "ownership" of that self by yourself, and the ownership concept at least is denied to non-humans), or steal anything from them (same reason ; if you're not a "self" then ownership has no meaning). That leaves killing them as the only remaining habit to object to.
Unless you're a strict vegetarian, then you're already regularly killing other sentient, thinking, self-aware, suffering beings purely for your own convenience. Which should give us all grounds for concern when the huge yellow space ships are hovering above the planet in almost exactly the way that bricks don't.
And would this matter?
What I'd like to know is when we're going to get a proper EPG and HD recording for Radio 4? In mono, of course. Why bother paying for bandwidth and electronics for an ear you don't use?
(Actually, Nero was probably innocent of this particular charge. Guilty of plenty of others, but innocent of this charge.)
Heretic!
Burn the heretic!
According to Google Maps there are lots of NIMBYs in America, a couple in Central Europe, and none at all in Britain. Which almost defies belief. Even amongst such notoriously humourless vampires as lawyers, I'd have expected there to be at least one practice specialising in planning disputes and glorying in being "NIMBYs".
Of course, while we've got a grand total of one atmosphere for the planet, one hydrosphere and one biosphere, even if it's not in MY back yard, it will eventually come back there.
It's a bit more subtle than that. At a low level of manuring (etc), pasture and meadow are perfectly capable of retaining, absorbing and recycling the nitrates, OM, phosphates, etc. But at the levels that modern industrial agriculture units can produce, you'd probably need more land to spread the manure onto than you'd need to stock the same population of animals on at "traditional" stock densities. Which means that your industrialised farm needs to add industrial toxic waste management facilities as well. And many farmers can't afford (or choose not) to invest in the necessary facilities.
Two points : (1) "algae" covers, if I recall correctly, something like 20 phyla and I don't know how many thousands of species of organism ; (2) whatever is done with them will probably still involve another set of biochemical processing tanks on each farm, and will simply change the details of the chemical engineering that new generations of farmers will have to invest money and learning into. Both significant costs.
It would be a stretch to say that I sympathise with farmers, but I do understand that their job is changing rapidly, and I'm sure that many of them don't like it. "This too, shall pass."
Someone, somewhere, doesn't have a clue about basic chemistry. Most likely the reporter/ PR flack who wrote this story up and then failed to get his version checked by the original specialists for the science (not the English, nor the style, but the science).
Nitrogen and phosphorus are both essential elements in the diet of anything (including nitrogen-fixing bacteria and archaea ; they just happen to be able to take their N2 neat), but neither of them are found in petroleum, except in the most trivial of amounts.
What the reporter meant to say, I suspect, is that nitrogen and phosphorus are essential nutrients which are often produced or made into a metabolisable form using energy from petroleum (and in the case of nitrogen, also hydrogen from petroleum). And I'm sure that's what the researchers actually said. But the reporter fluffed it.
That said ... using "waste" water to supply these nutrients kills several birds (OK, dinosaurs) with one stone (of unspecified type ; trust me, I'm a geologist : the type of stone doesn't matter in this case. I know it's not normal to hear a geologist say that, but this time, it doesn't matter!)
Where is this "away" place that such wastes were sent to before. I've looked on a map, and I've looked on Google Maps, and I've not found "away". It must be a popular place : "put it away", "throw it away", "just go away and never darken my doorstep again" ; but I can't find it on a map.
Oh, Bowdlerisation! Google maps have spoiled my joke.
However, even a modicum of (correctly-applied) punctuation can make things *much* harder for the attacker! And as for ASCII art!
I do wish that people would think before they type. Or after they type, before they post.
You've not put any constraints on your claim, so I'm assuming a general claim here that being un-owned means that something is indestructable.
To use a popular SlashDot meme, "freedom" is owned by no person (even though many people claim to possess at least some of it), and yet SlashDot is full of stories about the impending destruction of "freedom" in some parts of the world.
OK, how about something that indisputably exists, into which you could drive a nail (or in my case, an oil well) : the environmental services that put oxygen into the atmosphere. mostly oceanic phytoplankton, a major role to the trees of the rainforests, and a significant role to the rest of the planet's photosynthesising flora. All hail Rubisco! Something that is definitely owned by no person, or country, or even species (it exists as much for tube worms at a mid-ocean ridge as it does for bipedal apes reading SlashDot). And yet something that we could, if we chose, destroy, and which we may well be (slowly) destroying as we type.
I don't know - this site is meant to be "News for Nerds", one of whose characteristics is an ability to actually understand logic and language and set theory etc. Some days it doesn't look like that.
Now that the bovine blow-job artists of SlashDot are queueing up, on their knees, to give my member a taste. Do you plan to spit, or to swallow?
Brennan. He does things like that. All he needs to have had done will be to will have had invented a time machine. The timing is right given the startup of the LHC a few months ago (even if I haven't got the grammar of time travel sufficiently deobfusticated).