Really, who - apart from other critics - cares a dried spit about the opinion of critics. go to the bookshelf, read the blurb on the back, decide if the book appeals to you, then go and read what appeals to you.
If you feel like kicking the beggar in the street by the door, with an empty cup and a sign saying "overblown ego and inflated self-opinion to support," feel free. It's only a critic on it's way to extinction.
There must have been a LOT of very fast growing vegetation to support these huge herds of fast growing herbivores.
Somewhat shaky ground here. There are three main items of evidence for estimating the size of "herds" of herbivorous dinosaurs - the occasional mass footprint ichnofossil traces ; mass-death sites ; and mass nesting sites. Unless you know better, the largest group of multiple trails of sub-parallel morphospecies-similar footprint traces of which I'm aware is for a herd of about 30 conspecifics (obviously, for most ichnofossils we don't have exact knowledge of the trace-maker species, which is why we have to work with morphospecies). For mass-death sites, whether they're lahar, ashfall, or flood deposits, it is not proven that the trapped animals normally lived together. They may as well have been multiple separate "herds" which were driven together into a death trap trying to escape a more widespread event.
Performing population estimates where 99% of your population leaves no traces of it's existence is difficult.
Wouldn't "flocks" be a better description for hadrosaur or sauropod social groups? Since they're more closely related to flocks of birds than herds of sheep?
The buffer overflow gets as far as the dot-matrix A4 printer and bowfs because it was expecting an 8.5x11in printer. When the pages are fed into the scanner to get the data into the main system from the e-System, the formatting changes break the attack code, at which point the misalignment code for handling the scannner thows out those pages and the remainder of the record is processed correctly.
How else did you think it would work?
Incidentally, it's a near certainty that the actual answer in the report is wrong. There are almost certain to be machine-control computers somewhere which gets it's instructions on plastic tape (same specification as paper tape, but tougher) to churn out widgets and flange sprockets as it has since the 1950s. Probably in a MOD base somewhere.
Definitely a Wookie then. And yes, I know that Wookies are from a galaxy far far away and long ago, so it is impossible for them to be related to primates at all. Probably don't even have mitochondria.
If philosophy comes to a single settled conclusion (e.g., answer the question "what is good?") feel free to wake me up. It hasn't settled anything for millennia, and remains a complete waste of time and lung-power.
Thanks to global warming you won't have to worry about Icebergs anymore in 50 years.
Bullshit. As global warming increases in it's effects, the remaining ice will continue to slide downhill into the oceans, where even more icebergs will be calved. It's only when you've heated the Arctic and Antarctic to the extent that none of the glaciers actually reach the sea that you'l lose the hazard of icebergs. Considering that both land masses have considerable areas of steep coastal mountains, that's going to take considerable heating, and will be somewhat offset by the increased snowfall due to the greater capacity of the warmer atmosphere to collect and move water vapour, so there will be increased precipitation on the relatively cold sinks.
I agree with you on the likelihood of "photosnarks" "catching on", but Geoffrey.landis does have a good point that the definition of the word "meme", as given by it's inventor is far wider than it's popular usage which is almost entirely restricted to what "photosnarks" describes quite well.
Blame Dawkins for tying biology to philosophy - he's not the first one to do it.
Since you obviously didn't understand Dawkins writing (difficult - he is a very good, clear writer), you missed that he was tying together the biological mechanisms of information transmission and data fidelity to the computing science understanding of the same - genetics being a digital system, after all. Between all the Shannon information, transmission error rates, and energy costs of computation, it may have escaped you, but both computing and genetics are aspects of information science. And Dawkins made a useful contribution to clarifying those intimate links.
Philosophy may have been stuck to the pavement near the publisher's office, but as usual made no useful contribution.
Einstein's theory of relativity is what eventually led to the idea of moral relativism.
Again, I rather suspect that you've failed to understand Einstein's papers on relativity and need to go back to read them. It might stop you from propagating utter drivel.
From the Wikipedia page - which anyone with even a slight grounding (university, year 1, lecture about 2 - 3) in mineral optics would have known from minute one of the advertising campaign:
Crystal system Trigonal [...] Birefringence 0.008 Pleochroism Strong
So, the first line is an absolute killer unless you can ensure that the optical axis of the trigonal crystal is aligned with the optical axis of any lens system you're using (the trilobites learned that 500-odd million years ago when they developed the schizochroal eye to use the refractive power and biocompatibility of calcite but kept the viewing angle of the eye to around a degree. Because otherwise the distortions were unacceptable for their purposes). But for a flat sheet over a screen, that's something you could probably survive. The birefringence would introduce slight distortions if you were viewing the screen through polarising sunglasses, but that wouldn't be much of an issue, no more than having to tickle the cat's whisker to get the radio to work, as I believe is recommended for using Apple phones. As a thin screen over the front of the lens, you could get away with it as long as you cut your slices perpendicular to the trigonal axis of the crystal. And kept the divergence angle of rays passing through different parts of the screen down to a few degrees. (So to get a 3m field of view out of the lens, your subject would need to be something more than 150m away.)
Pleochroism - I'd hardly consider that a problem, as long as you didn't give a shit about the colours of what you were rendering and displaying. But since Apple don't market their devices to people "into" design and appearence and shit like that, that's not worth wasting time on. I have to do colour-matching as part of my job, which is why I carry certified colour standards with me for my technical work, but obviously that's not Apple's target audience.
Or maybe, just maybe, the whole "sapphire" thing ins a marketing scam. In which case, it's marketed at people who value form and advertising over function.
Just like how air transport can quickly become cheaper than road maintenance depending on sparseness and usage,
And the other corollary is that your equipment budget is going to be constrained by the size and weight limits of an Antonov's hold. If it doesn't fit into that, you're not going to get it in. If it does fit, you've then got to look at your runway infrastructure - will it take an Antonov?
Nothing in particular against other heavy-lift aircraft. But the Antonov is the biggest readily available. The military or Airbus might be able to make you a one-off plane that's bigger, but for that time and budget you'd be able to chop whatever it is up into Antonov-size loads and rebuild it long before negotiations for the new plane are finished.
Being mostly coastal is a big help, you can run undersea cables much easier than land cables in desolate areas.
Hmmm, someone speaking there with the confidence that comes with never having had to deal with any of (1) the sea, (2) annual growth of coastal ice, or (3) the gouging of passing icebergs.
Remember the Peterman's iceberg of about 5 years ago? 40 by 80km in dimension, 10-50m above sea-level, and so up to several hundred metres below sea level. That last was really good news to us - it meant that the berg would ground well before it reached our oil field. Of course, it would have gouged trenches tens of metres into the seabed as it did so, which was why oil pipelines and control lines were trenched tens of metres into the seabed.
I'm so glad to be informed that it is "much easier" to put the cables into the ea instead of on land. I'd never have believed it if it hadn't come from a credible source.
Having spent years living with a choice of high-latency internet access through geostationary satellites, or no internet connection at all, I fail to see what the great benefit of "low latency" connections are. Unless you're doing high-frequency stock trading (in which case you're a parasite who should be given a shovel and a productive job in a sewage farm) or perhaps some types of gaming (I don't know - I don't play online games), what is the big deal about waiting a few seconds for a web page to start loading. It's not as if you're often going to be transferring gigabytes of data across such an expensive connection, are you?
I know I've not given anyone permission to send me messags like that. And if they did start sending them, they'd pretty soon start getting some rude messages back.
This week, ten members of Congress sent a four-page letter to several government agencies about the SpaceX explosion, raising the question as to whether or not SpaceX should be leading the investigation.
Sorry, but the protocols for this were established back in the 1950s for investigating aircraft crashes - the investigation is lead by the civilian agency from the country where the plane was registered ; plane manufacturer, airline, engine manufacturer, agency where the debris landed, agencies for the countries with people killed and some others (e.g. ATC) have listening and often speaking rights. It's a well-established procedure. Why did anyone even waste a minute considering setting up a different system?
Oh, let me guess - spooks didn't want non-spooks to see what spooks do?
And a ULA employee *should* be able to know when to shoot,
Why should a ULA employee be more likely to know how to shoot than - say - a tank-cleaner at the local sperm bank?
Even though there are approximately as many guns in America as there are people, it's still over two-thirds of the population of America who don't own a gun of any sort (and 50% of the weapons owned by something less than 5% of the population.
Or are all ULA employees required to pass sniping proficiency tests? Got a reference for that?
Please stop bringing data and rationality to a discussion that should work on visceral fears. If people go around being rational and paying attention to data then politicians might have to pay attention to peoples needs, and not to the politician's desires. And then where would the USA be?
"I require to buy new cabling, and rip the building apart then re-decorate?"
"Security! Take this idiot out to the second floor, kick him a few times, then throw him out of a window to teach him about the importance of dealing with the already-built infrastructure. If he lands head-first through his car's roof, you get a bonus for good aim."
Nope. When I wired my house, I installed CAT5, which was the highest spec at the time. It has almost reached the point that the wireless can beat the wired, what with the brick walls and the power and lighting cables for me and the apartments above and below.
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood - for you the only people who count live in new buildings and are willing to rip them apart every couple of decades. Join the real world, child!
Didn't bother going on once I realised that the submitter (and/or editor) didn't even bother to tell readers which country this took place in, and therefore whose laws applied.
Probably America ; probably someone else's problem.
Slashdot Mirror
If you feel like kicking the beggar in the street by the door, with an empty cup and a sign saying "overblown ego and inflated self-opinion to support," feel free. It's only a critic on it's way to extinction.
It took a whole 4 comments before someone brought this one up?
Slashdot, I'm ashamed of you!
Somewhat shaky ground here. There are three main items of evidence for estimating the size of "herds" of herbivorous dinosaurs - the occasional mass footprint ichnofossil traces ; mass-death sites ; and mass nesting sites. Unless you know better, the largest group of multiple trails of sub-parallel morphospecies-similar footprint traces of which I'm aware is for a herd of about 30 conspecifics (obviously, for most ichnofossils we don't have exact knowledge of the trace-maker species, which is why we have to work with morphospecies). For mass-death sites, whether they're lahar, ashfall, or flood deposits, it is not proven that the trapped animals normally lived together. They may as well have been multiple separate "herds" which were driven together into a death trap trying to escape a more widespread event.
Performing population estimates where 99% of your population leaves no traces of it's existence is difficult.
Wouldn't "flocks" be a better description for hadrosaur or sauropod social groups? Since they're more closely related to flocks of birds than herds of sheep?
How else did you think it would work?
Incidentally, it's a near certainty that the actual answer in the report is wrong. There are almost certain to be machine-control computers somewhere which gets it's instructions on plastic tape (same specification as paper tape, but tougher) to churn out widgets and flange sprockets as it has since the 1950s. Probably in a MOD base somewhere.
Definitely a Wookie then. And yes, I know that Wookies are from a galaxy far far away and long ago, so it is impossible for them to be related to primates at all. Probably don't even have mitochondria.
If philosophy comes to a single settled conclusion (e.g., answer the question "what is good?") feel free to wake me up. It hasn't settled anything for millennia, and remains a complete waste of time and lung-power.
Bullshit. As global warming increases in it's effects, the remaining ice will continue to slide downhill into the oceans, where even more icebergs will be calved. It's only when you've heated the Arctic and Antarctic to the extent that none of the glaciers actually reach the sea that you'l lose the hazard of icebergs. Considering that both land masses have considerable areas of steep coastal mountains, that's going to take considerable heating, and will be somewhat offset by the increased snowfall due to the greater capacity of the warmer atmosphere to collect and move water vapour, so there will be increased precipitation on the relatively cold sinks.
Since you obviously didn't understand Dawkins writing (difficult - he is a very good, clear writer), you missed that he was tying together the biological mechanisms of information transmission and data fidelity to the computing science understanding of the same - genetics being a digital system, after all. Between all the Shannon information, transmission error rates, and energy costs of computation, it may have escaped you, but both computing and genetics are aspects of information science. And Dawkins made a useful contribution to clarifying those intimate links.
Philosophy may have been stuck to the pavement near the publisher's office, but as usual made no useful contribution.
Again, I rather suspect that you've failed to understand Einstein's papers on relativity and need to go back to read them. It might stop you from propagating utter drivel.
So, the first line is an absolute killer unless you can ensure that the optical axis of the trigonal crystal is aligned with the optical axis of any lens system you're using (the trilobites learned that 500-odd million years ago when they developed the schizochroal eye to use the refractive power and biocompatibility of calcite but kept the viewing angle of the eye to around a degree. Because otherwise the distortions were unacceptable for their purposes). But for a flat sheet over a screen, that's something you could probably survive. The birefringence would introduce slight distortions if you were viewing the screen through polarising sunglasses, but that wouldn't be much of an issue, no more than having to tickle the cat's whisker to get the radio to work, as I believe is recommended for using Apple phones. As a thin screen over the front of the lens, you could get away with it as long as you cut your slices perpendicular to the trigonal axis of the crystal. And kept the divergence angle of rays passing through different parts of the screen down to a few degrees. (So to get a 3m field of view out of the lens, your subject would need to be something more than 150m away.)
Pleochroism - I'd hardly consider that a problem, as long as you didn't give a shit about the colours of what you were rendering and displaying. But since Apple don't market their devices to people "into" design and appearence and shit like that, that's not worth wasting time on. I have to do colour-matching as part of my job, which is why I carry certified colour standards with me for my technical work, but obviously that's not Apple's target audience.
Or maybe, just maybe, the whole "sapphire" thing ins a marketing scam. In which case, it's marketed at people who value form and advertising over function.
I believe they still DO OWN Flickr. Certainly, I need to be signed into Yahoo to get onto my Flickr account.
Did they try making it into a social network? I didn't notice. Why would I want to do that?
And the other corollary is that your equipment budget is going to be constrained by the size and weight limits of an Antonov's hold. If it doesn't fit into that, you're not going to get it in. If it does fit, you've then got to look at your runway infrastructure - will it take an Antonov?
Nothing in particular against other heavy-lift aircraft. But the Antonov is the biggest readily available. The military or Airbus might be able to make you a one-off plane that's bigger, but for that time and budget you'd be able to chop whatever it is up into Antonov-size loads and rebuild it long before negotiations for the new plane are finished.
Hmmm, someone speaking there with the confidence that comes with never having had to deal with any of (1) the sea, (2) annual growth of coastal ice, or (3) the gouging of passing icebergs.
Remember the Peterman's iceberg of about 5 years ago? 40 by 80km in dimension, 10-50m above sea-level, and so up to several hundred metres below sea level. That last was really good news to us - it meant that the berg would ground well before it reached our oil field. Of course, it would have gouged trenches tens of metres into the seabed as it did so, which was why oil pipelines and control lines were trenched tens of metres into the seabed.
I'm so glad to be informed that it is "much easier" to put the cables into the ea instead of on land. I'd never have believed it if it hadn't come from a credible source.
Having spent years living with a choice of high-latency internet access through geostationary satellites, or no internet connection at all, I fail to see what the great benefit of "low latency" connections are. Unless you're doing high-frequency stock trading (in which case you're a parasite who should be given a shovel and a productive job in a sewage farm) or perhaps some types of gaming (I don't know - I don't play online games), what is the big deal about waiting a few seconds for a web page to start loading. It's not as if you're often going to be transferring gigabytes of data across such an expensive connection, are you?
Errr, isn't that precisely what politicians in a representative system are meant to do?
You personally may not like it - in which case you're free to leave. If anywhere else would accept you and people like you (not very likely).
Not ALL of them. Just the first 3 to 5 billion you come across.
[EXIT STAGE LEFT, not having read Freefall for several weeks.] What are Flo and Co up to?
"Security" rates as highly as that? What an optimist you are.
I know I've not given anyone permission to send me messags like that. And if they did start sending them, they'd pretty soon start getting some rude messages back.
Sorry, but the protocols for this were established back in the 1950s for investigating aircraft crashes - the investigation is lead by the civilian agency from the country where the plane was registered ; plane manufacturer, airline, engine manufacturer, agency where the debris landed, agencies for the countries with people killed and some others (e.g. ATC) have listening and often speaking rights. It's a well-established procedure. Why did anyone even waste a minute considering setting up a different system?
Oh, let me guess - spooks didn't want non-spooks to see what spooks do?
Why should a ULA employee be more likely to know how to shoot than - say - a tank-cleaner at the local sperm bank?
Even though there are approximately as many guns in America as there are people, it's still over two-thirds of the population of America who don't own a gun of any sort (and 50% of the weapons owned by something less than 5% of the population.
Or are all ULA employees required to pass sniping proficiency tests? Got a reference for that?
No, not a bromance. That brings entirely unwarranted (if slight) hints of masculinity to the relations between Putin and Trump's haircut.
Please stop bringing data and rationality to a discussion that should work on visceral fears. If people go around being rational and paying attention to data then politicians might have to pay attention to peoples needs, and not to the politician's desires. And then where would the USA be?
"Security! Take this idiot out to the second floor, kick him a few times, then throw him out of a window to teach him about the importance of dealing with the already-built infrastructure. If he lands head-first through his car's roof, you get a bonus for good aim."
Nope. When I wired my house, I installed CAT5, which was the highest spec at the time. It has almost reached the point that the wireless can beat the wired, what with the brick walls and the power and lighting cables for me and the apartments above and below.
Oh, sorry, I misunderstood - for you the only people who count live in new buildings and are willing to rip them apart every couple of decades. Join the real world, child!
Probably America ; probably someone else's problem.