As real as the neutrino. The neutrino was a prediction based on a model of physics at the time and remained theoretical for thirty years until an experiment confirmed their existence. Like the Higgs, it was thought to be nearly impossible to experimentally verify for a very long time. And when it was observed, it was not observed directly, but through the behavior of particles it interacted with. The interacting particles, in order to behave as they did, must have interacted with something that had the precise qualities ascribed to the neutrino. Therefore, a neutrino must have interacted with them. Therefore, neutrinos exist.
Now we have hot and cold running neutrinos and can use them to probe all sorts of interesting things. But we have still not directly observed them in a detector, because, by their nature, they don't show up. But we know that when we see particles behaving as if they interacted with a near massless, half spin object interacting weakly, we call it a neutrino and move on.
In those circumstances, cables, protocols and cable tenders would even work. Imagine you're in the suit, you are restricted to this area around the airframe, your cable is on an automatic spool and you do a set series of movements worked out ahead of time to minimize crossing your own path. Cables may be a pain, but that means your lifting capacity is fully devoted to ordinance and fuel, rather than ordinance, fuel and your batteries.
Yep. Plus, the caterpillar loaders can be near external power, meaning the wearer doesn't have to worry about the added weight imposed by the power source. A 2-3 day patrol is going to need some pretty serious power storage and generation. These systems are great for hauling 100 lbs worth of equipment, but how good are they at 100 lbs of equipment plus that in generators and fuel?
Remember, the breakthrough that made Iron Man possible even in the movie was not a breakthrough in robotics, armor or servomotors, but the development of the perfect power source: small, light, massive output and requiring no bulky fuel. Without the arc reactor, Tony's suit was just so much dead weight.
Currently, things weigh more than they should. The mass of a particle is a function of the kinetic energy of the particle and it's component parts, if any. If we run the numbers, we get good masses for some particles, not good masses for others. A proposed solution to this problem is the Higgs field, a nonzero field that permeates space. Anything coupling with this field gains additional mass through interaction with the field.
Picture a person at a party. Normally, they are free to move through the party fairly easily. Now make that person famous. Admirers flock around, and the celebrity has trouble moving. Nonfamous people are particles that do not couple with the HIggs field. Celebrities are particles that do couple with the field, surrounded by a paparazzi of virtual Higgs particles.
Nice theory. It fills a gap in the standard model and now the math all works. So now we have to find the particle. You need the mass of a particle to find it in an accelerator. Roughly (very roughly), you need to create collisions where the sum energy of the little explosion is about that of the particle in question, then watch a statistically large number of those to see if something matching your particle appears. If it does, it's off to Stockholm for dinner with the king. If not, it's back to the drawing boards.
The problem is, the theory doesn't predict the mass of the particle. It doesn't even say if it is one particle, a family of similar particles or a family of different particles. So there's a wide spread of masses to examine. And all the masses are really high, far higher than any other existing accelerator could reach. So we have the new CERN experiment, slowly scanning the possible masses, looking for the particle.
If we don't find that particle, then we're back to square one, why are some particles heavier than predicted? For decades, we've assumed it was some sort of variant of the Higgs boson. But if that's not the case, it's back to the blackboard for more theories.
In general, this is a problem for particle physics. Finding or not finding the particle will affect chemistry, biology and general astronomy not at all. It might or might not have an affect on cosmology, but that's hard to say without a particle to talk about. More interesting for cosmology is that while searching for the Higgs, the experiment might come across more esoteric things, such as evidence for supersymmetry. Evidence for supersymmetry would automatically generate the prime number one candidate for dark matter. And nailing down the properties of dark matter would give us another probe of the Big Bang.
More information than you wanted probably, but I hope it helps.
Yeah, that happens. My present job is helping make lightning detectors. When I applied for the job, I was heartbroken to learn there was not a cage somewhere in the building with a giant tesla coil set up for testing.
I've had a number of disappointments like that. The dye laser I worked with in college looked like a fuel injector hooked to a paint bucket. The pump laser was an anemic old argon ion device that maybe put out 0.75 W on a good day. My senior project carbon 60 experiments used tiny glass ampules that only changed color from orange to darker orange. Even the massive magnet we used to check for superconductivity was only impressive for the sheer amount of iron. All in all, physics labs were disappointing.
Especially compared to those jerks over in Nuclear Engineering, shooting the control rods out of the student reactor and flooding the room with Chernikov radiation and firing up the beta gun to capture lightning bolts in lucite because it was Thursday and there was nothing better to do. And don't get me started on how once they hit grad school, they could climb the walls like spiders or shoot frikkin' laser beams from their eyes.
And then some people, unwilling to give Plato credit for an imagination, insist he must be retelling some local legend or relating some half remembered folk history.
Er, they do realize that Kepler's laws do not apply to galaxies. They cannot, in fact, use Kepler's laws because they know quite well that the gravitational contribution of the stuff orbiting the center of mass is significant. That's why they use Newtonian physics in this situation. Our modern understanding of the evolution of spiral arms comes from this sort of analysis. They do not use Special or General relativity in this situation for two reasons. First is that the math is real hairy. Second, at these speeds and distances, it reduces down to good old Newtonian motion anyway.
As for Dark Matter, yes, there was a flash in the pan article a few years back about someone using General Relativity to analyze rotation curves and coming up with enough extra contribution to invalidate dark matter. The paper was up on ARXIV for about four hours before the first math errors were spotted and brought the whole thing crashing down. And even if that paper held, it wouldn't have explained results like the Bullet Cluster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster), where maps of particulate dark matter have been made. No modified gravity theory or assertions that dark matter goes away under SR or GR can explain those findings. Dark matter is real and we now have tools with which we can spot it. The trick is now to figure out what it is.
You seem to have a real misunderstanding of how physics, and all science, makes progress. Once we have theoretical models, they are, generally, perfect. A good theoretical model explains ALL available data, or it isn't a good model. Once we have a good model, the only way to improve it is to go actively looking for where it diverges from reality. Only with this new input, divergence from theoretical predictions, can models be refined, improved or even replaced.
That's why we're hunting the Higgs particle. Fact is, the Standard Model is slightly broken. Without a Higgs mechanism, predicted lepton mass does not conform with experiment. We have a gap right now, a discrepancy. We think we have a solution in the Higgs field. We could, I suppose, assume there's a Higgs field, pick one of the several variants and go with it. Or we could, you know, do some actual science and go looking for the thing and nail down its properties. Along the way, if we see some of the other things we're half expecting, super symmetry, discrepancies in gravity at the millimeter range, broken symmetries, energy leakage at high energies or anything else, so much the better.
The problem with science is not a lack of fundamentals. The problem is the theories are too damned good. Reality simply does not diverge from the theories unless we get into some really exotic conditions. Why do we need a superconducting particle collider with a diameter measured in kilometers? Because our models are frikkin' perfect for everything up to that. We know they're wrong. We know we can't reconcile GR with the Standard Model. But we won't know how to proceed until we can break either GR or the Standard Model. We don't know what piece of the puzzle is missing until we actually go and look at things.
It's also a difficulty with language. In physics, mass and weight are two separate concepts. We have comparison words for weight: heavier and lighter. But we do not necessarily have the same comparison words for mass. So we're stuck with the English default construct of more massive and less massive. Sure, we could use lighter in this context and hope everyone understands we really are discussing the concept of mass, not gravitational attractive force to the local big rock, but most physicists dislike that imprecision.
A MAPI message consists (loosely) of a number of key/value pairs in addition to the standard internet email format. When a MAPI message is sent from one Exchange server to another, these key/value pairs are preserved. When it bounces through any non-Exchange server, this nonstandard information is stripped off (why they didn't hide it in an attachment I don't recall). If a recall fails to operate successfully and there are Exchange servers at both ends, you know the messages are being routed through a non-Exchange server at some point. You should also see problems with meeting requests, notes, contacts or any other nonstandard email type Outlook uses.
Years ago, I wrote the bulk of this feature. It is not an Exchange feature, but an Outlook feature. It works by sending a custom MAPI message that Outlook recognizes and processes. Of course, this only works if all recipients are using Outlook. It also, after we did some usability testing, only deletes unread email, or email that has not been moved to a subfolder (the original version was quite determined and would hunt down and kill the message even if it had been moved to a subfolder, renamed or entered the email protection program). In this way, it did not violate the UI dictum that the computer move things around when you haven't given it instructions to do so.
So yes, it is Outlook only. If sent to a non-Microsoft mail system, it degrades to a simple notification that the message is being recalled. And it does not a good choice for getting rid of flames you shouldn't have been sending. But within its expected use as a feature - correcting mistakes in email that should have been caught before pressing send, it works fairly well.
But because it is client based, rather than an Exchange feature, it does cause a new mail message to be sent to each original recipient and, combined with a send-all storm, could greatly exacerbate things.
And, preemptively, for those who have philosophical objections to me having written the code in the first place, I'll just have to live with your disapproval and hope my steady paycheck somehow sooths my guilty conscience.
Incidentally, dark matter was observed last year. Or rather, we've seen its effects via gravitational lensing with enough resolution to map its distribution in relation to some other objects. This in turn helps us say what it might be and what it definitely isn't. For example, the bullet cluster image demonstrates pretty clearly that it is stuff, as it has been stripped away from a couple of galaxy clusters in collision. This best fits the WIMP (weakly interacting massive particles) theory of dark matter and is a big blow to the modified relativity camp.
See here and here for some pretty pictures and explanations.
Are you really that surprised? We worked out how most of the world around us works over three hundred years ago. We put electromagnetism to bed over a hundred years ago. We've known enough about atoms to make them go *boom* real good for over eighty years. Everything left to work on is far, far outside our day to day experience. Our common sense is calibrated for temperatures between about zero and one hundred C in a thick nitrogen/oxygen environment with a 1 g gravitational field. Of course it fails miserably when confronted by absolute zero vacuums or temperatures and pressures extreme enough to fuse matter or places with gravitational fields strong enough to capture light.
Hell, I'd be more surprised if someone announced "Black Holes: Just Like Detroit" or some such.
And as for that eternal life and women throwing themselves at you, we've already given you healthy diets and pheromones. Why not try meeting us half-way?
This is a really poor move on marketing's part, as many of the user made mods already created and being distributed are far, far more useful or attractive than the barding. For example, the BT mod, which revamps the interface to display more information, provides a far bigger impact on gameplay than a reskinned horse.
Bethesda gave the PC users the same tool they used to make the game. What happens when the modders hit their stride and start putting out content that really puts Bethesda to shame? Who's going to go buy a new house add on for mages when one can grab a new set of textures far better than Oblivion's absolutely free?
Perhaps it is because they are attempting to replace evolution, a well established branch of biology, with ID, a religious argument and very poor proof of God?
From your post, it appears you are not arguing against evolution, but abiogenesis - the process by which life arose to the point evolution could operate. While we do not have a good scientific theory of what happened, there has been a good deal of progress and the science is far from "it just magically happened". Processes by which amino acid and cell wall precursors arise naturally have been discovered. From there, our understanding is hazy, but there still is nothing that precludes natural explanations.
Scientists do not accept "it just magically happened" as an argument, as magic falls outside of natural explanations. Nor should scientists be forced to discard promising lines of research into abiogenesis to satisfy the religious needs of a particular subset of some religion. Nor should a group of religiously insecure Biblical literalists be allowed to force there way into the science classroom.
This is not being elitist, it is insisting that everything in the science classroom adhere to the rules of science. ID is not science. Were we to lower the bar enough to allow ID in, we'd also be forced to allow astrology, numerology and divination via the entrails of slaughtered sheep. And personally, I think bio class is messy enough without the latter.
me: Ripples in 11 dimesional hyperspace. Idist: But what are ripples in 11 dimesional hyperspace made of? me: Geometry. Idist: But what is geometry made of? me: Riemann's work in multidimensional geometry. Idist: But what is Riemann's work in multidimensional geometry made of? me: Riemann's head. Idist: But what is Reynman head made of? me: Cells.
And, of course, there's the story of the wise ass who visited Piaget at home and decided to perform the experiment with his children. He asked the six year old if the two glasses had the same amount of water and the child said, "No, I think the taller one does. But you should ask my older brother, he's got concrete operational skills."
And yet, in intragalactic space, you'd be lucky to find more than five hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter. Yes, it's a common element, but it is really spread out. Worse, hydrogen alone does not make water, one needs oxygen, a substancially less common substance.
Which means that in order to sustain oneself, one needs an efficient closed recycling system for the water. The Galactica had that, as it was designed for extended duration missions.
But what about the President's ship? As I recall, it was a planet hopper, designed for a few days in space at best. It is unlikely to have a recycling system sophisticated enough to handle an indefinite mission. The same goes for the rest of the 'rag tag fugative fleet'. That means they are dependant on Galactica to do the recycling. Which means potable water and waste water must be hauled back and forth between ships. But they weren't designed for this. So water transport must be improvised. Which may not be efficient. So water is spilled, water is leaked. Water sublimates from leaky tanks. Water is simply lost on those inefficient civilian transports that were never designed for this sort of long haul travel to begin with.
Hence the crisis. Really, just because one can build a 747 doesn't mean one uses it for every travel route.
Space: Above and Beyond? From what I remember, it wasn't that good. Honestly, pilots are far too precious a commodity to allow them on ground missions. And yet, every other week, the pilots were doing grunt patrols.
I suppose it was a resource issue. BSG has a cast at least twice the size of S:AB. With so few actors, having a command crew, a fighter crew and a ground crew is just a bit too difficult.
No, it is not that the acting pre-seventies was universally piss-poor, but the style of acting was different. Dramatical tastes differ for different periods.
In the thirties and forties, acting styles seem to have been more heavily influenced by stage acting and being able to project emotions and actions broadly enough for those in the back rows to relate. The epics of the fifties seemed to require a larger than life stance to live up to the broad material. In the sixties and seventies, the cultural revolutions playing out in society as a whole seem to have seeped into both scripts and acting. Scripts ceased to focus on epics and refocused on individual struggles and personal drama ("I *am* big. It's the *pictures* that got small." - a perfect lament for the death of epics.). Such scripts required a more natural acting style. The eighties brought us action heroes, with their odd mix of broad and natural styles capped with one liners. The nineties brought us blue screen acting, trying to combine any of the above styles whilst playing to nothing.
To return to our topic, Battlestar Galactica is trying very hard to stay with the modern, naturalistic style while incorporating a notion of naturalistic production. The idea for the look of the show is a war documentary. The acting style is as natural as possible and the camera movements are, by and large, an attempt to replicate the feel of a handheld or shoulder mounted camera. Effects shots seek to replicate Gulf War footage and acting tries to replicate human emotional response under massive pressure. For some, this succeeds admirably, feeding the show's atmosphere. For others, it just looks like bad camera work to hide the lack of a budget and mopey, neurotic characters portrayed by actors who run the gamut of emotions from A to B, as Miss Parker would say.
Currently, our understanding can only approach within a Planck time of the Big Bang. That is, we can more or less understand everything from 10e-43 seconds after the moment, but can go back no further. Beyond that point, we need a theory of quantum gravitation.
Some of this is known. The matter came from the energy. Put enough energy in a region and it condenses into particles. This happened on a massive scale as protons and electrons condensed from the original fireball. But the energy? That's something quantum electrodynamics and general relativity cannot directly answer.
However, should string theory bear out, it can probe past the Planck time, as well as before the Big Bang itself. Under one hypothesis, our Universe is embedded in a larger multidimensional space. Surfaces in this space at one point collided. When they hit, the energy of collision created our Universe expanding on the multidimensional surface of one of these membranes.
Strange, I know, but string theory is barely able to make accurate predictions, so take this with a grain of salt. But it does show something fundamental about science: not all answers are known. This is a very hot topic in physics right now, with physicists in working hard on a unification theory for gravity and the other four forces. With luck, they'll find the answer in our lifetimes, and we may have an answer. Or perhaps it will take another century or two of work out.
It is perfectly correct to teach the fact of evolution, for it is a fact. It is an observed phenomenon, or fact, if you like. The Theory of Evolution is the theoretical construct explaining how evolution operates, the mechanism involved and the consequences of these mechanisms. So far, it has survived every challenge thrown at it by the fossil record, genetics, comparative biology, chemistry, physics and even computer science. And it has grown more powerful for it. The current incarnation of the theory bears as much resemblance to Darwin's original proposal as modern quantum electrodynamics bears to Ben Franklin's work with electricity.
The phenomenon of evolution is well established and as solid a fact as gravity, electromagnetism or heat transfer. The theory describing it is, in some ways, better off than the theory of gravity or electromagnetism. We know those two are inconsistent and at least one is due for a revision. There are no such open questions on the theory of evolution.
Evolution does not require faith. That's the thing about science, it works even if you don't believe in it. Disbelieving in the quantum nature of electrons won't make a lick of difference in how your computer operates. Likewise, disbelieving in evolution does not mean that advanced antibiotics suddenly stop having any effect. (Now, current diary practices, that's another story.)
Given your statements, it is clear you have not bothered even the most cursory attempt at understanding science. You seem so enmeshed in your dogma, you refuse to understand anyone else's position, casting well reasoned positions as mere articles of faith. Science is not a religion, no matter how much you wish it to be so.
Really, just because you insist on wielding a hammer, do not treat us screws and bolts as nails.
Slashdot Mirror
As real as the neutrino. The neutrino was a prediction based on a model of physics at the time and remained theoretical for thirty years until an experiment confirmed their existence. Like the Higgs, it was thought to be nearly impossible to experimentally verify for a very long time. And when it was observed, it was not observed directly, but through the behavior of particles it interacted with. The interacting particles, in order to behave as they did, must have interacted with something that had the precise qualities ascribed to the neutrino. Therefore, a neutrino must have interacted with them. Therefore, neutrinos exist.
Now we have hot and cold running neutrinos and can use them to probe all sorts of interesting things. But we have still not directly observed them in a detector, because, by their nature, they don't show up. But we know that when we see particles behaving as if they interacted with a near massless, half spin object interacting weakly, we call it a neutrino and move on.
In those circumstances, cables, protocols and cable tenders would even work. Imagine you're in the suit, you are restricted to this area around the airframe, your cable is on an automatic spool and you do a set series of movements worked out ahead of time to minimize crossing your own path. Cables may be a pain, but that means your lifting capacity is fully devoted to ordinance and fuel, rather than ordinance, fuel and your batteries.
Yep. Plus, the caterpillar loaders can be near external power, meaning the wearer doesn't have to worry about the added weight imposed by the power source. A 2-3 day patrol is going to need some pretty serious power storage and generation. These systems are great for hauling 100 lbs worth of equipment, but how good are they at 100 lbs of equipment plus that in generators and fuel?
Remember, the breakthrough that made Iron Man possible even in the movie was not a breakthrough in robotics, armor or servomotors, but the development of the perfect power source: small, light, massive output and requiring no bulky fuel. Without the arc reactor, Tony's suit was just so much dead weight.
Currently, things weigh more than they should. The mass of a particle is a function of the kinetic energy of the particle and it's component parts, if any. If we run the numbers, we get good masses for some particles, not good masses for others. A proposed solution to this problem is the Higgs field, a nonzero field that permeates space. Anything coupling with this field gains additional mass through interaction with the field.
Picture a person at a party. Normally, they are free to move through the party fairly easily. Now make that person famous. Admirers flock around, and the celebrity has trouble moving. Nonfamous people are particles that do not couple with the HIggs field. Celebrities are particles that do couple with the field, surrounded by a paparazzi of virtual Higgs particles.
Nice theory. It fills a gap in the standard model and now the math all works. So now we have to find the particle. You need the mass of a particle to find it in an accelerator. Roughly (very roughly), you need to create collisions where the sum energy of the little explosion is about that of the particle in question, then watch a statistically large number of those to see if something matching your particle appears. If it does, it's off to Stockholm for dinner with the king. If not, it's back to the drawing boards.
The problem is, the theory doesn't predict the mass of the particle. It doesn't even say if it is one particle, a family of similar particles or a family of different particles. So there's a wide spread of masses to examine. And all the masses are really high, far higher than any other existing accelerator could reach. So we have the new CERN experiment, slowly scanning the possible masses, looking for the particle.
If we don't find that particle, then we're back to square one, why are some particles heavier than predicted? For decades, we've assumed it was some sort of variant of the Higgs boson. But if that's not the case, it's back to the blackboard for more theories.
In general, this is a problem for particle physics. Finding or not finding the particle will affect chemistry, biology and general astronomy not at all. It might or might not have an affect on cosmology, but that's hard to say without a particle to talk about. More interesting for cosmology is that while searching for the Higgs, the experiment might come across more esoteric things, such as evidence for supersymmetry. Evidence for supersymmetry would automatically generate the prime number one candidate for dark matter. And nailing down the properties of dark matter would give us another probe of the Big Bang.
More information than you wanted probably, but I hope it helps.
Yeah, that happens. My present job is helping make lightning detectors. When I applied for the job, I was heartbroken to learn there was not a cage somewhere in the building with a giant tesla coil set up for testing.
I've had a number of disappointments like that. The dye laser I worked with in college looked like a fuel injector hooked to a paint bucket. The pump laser was an anemic old argon ion device that maybe put out 0.75 W on a good day. My senior project carbon 60 experiments used tiny glass ampules that only changed color from orange to darker orange. Even the massive magnet we used to check for superconductivity was only impressive for the sheer amount of iron. All in all, physics labs were disappointing.
Especially compared to those jerks over in Nuclear Engineering, shooting the control rods out of the student reactor and flooding the room with Chernikov radiation and firing up the beta gun to capture lightning bolts in lucite because it was Thursday and there was nothing better to do. And don't get me started on how once they hit grad school, they could climb the walls like spiders or shoot frikkin' laser beams from their eyes.
And then some people, unwilling to give Plato credit for an imagination, insist he must be retelling some local legend or relating some half remembered folk history.
Er, they do realize that Kepler's laws do not apply to galaxies. They cannot, in fact, use Kepler's laws because they know quite well that the gravitational contribution of the stuff orbiting the center of mass is significant. That's why they use Newtonian physics in this situation. Our modern understanding of the evolution of spiral arms comes from this sort of analysis. They do not use Special or General relativity in this situation for two reasons. First is that the math is real hairy. Second, at these speeds and distances, it reduces down to good old Newtonian motion anyway.
As for Dark Matter, yes, there was a flash in the pan article a few years back about someone using General Relativity to analyze rotation curves and coming up with enough extra contribution to invalidate dark matter. The paper was up on ARXIV for about four hours before the first math errors were spotted and brought the whole thing crashing down. And even if that paper held, it wouldn't have explained results like the Bullet Cluster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster), where maps of particulate dark matter have been made. No modified gravity theory or assertions that dark matter goes away under SR or GR can explain those findings. Dark matter is real and we now have tools with which we can spot it. The trick is now to figure out what it is.
You seem to have a real misunderstanding of how physics, and all science, makes progress. Once we have theoretical models, they are, generally, perfect. A good theoretical model explains ALL available data, or it isn't a good model. Once we have a good model, the only way to improve it is to go actively looking for where it diverges from reality. Only with this new input, divergence from theoretical predictions, can models be refined, improved or even replaced.
That's why we're hunting the Higgs particle. Fact is, the Standard Model is slightly broken. Without a Higgs mechanism, predicted lepton mass does not conform with experiment. We have a gap right now, a discrepancy. We think we have a solution in the Higgs field. We could, I suppose, assume there's a Higgs field, pick one of the several variants and go with it. Or we could, you know, do some actual science and go looking for the thing and nail down its properties. Along the way, if we see some of the other things we're half expecting, super symmetry, discrepancies in gravity at the millimeter range, broken symmetries, energy leakage at high energies or anything else, so much the better.
The problem with science is not a lack of fundamentals. The problem is the theories are too damned good. Reality simply does not diverge from the theories unless we get into some really exotic conditions. Why do we need a superconducting particle collider with a diameter measured in kilometers? Because our models are frikkin' perfect for everything up to that. We know they're wrong. We know we can't reconcile GR with the Standard Model. But we won't know how to proceed until we can break either GR or the Standard Model. We don't know what piece of the puzzle is missing until we actually go and look at things.
It's also a difficulty with language. In physics, mass and weight are two separate concepts. We have comparison words for weight: heavier and lighter. But we do not necessarily have the same comparison words for mass. So we're stuck with the English default construct of more massive and less massive. Sure, we could use lighter in this context and hope everyone understands we really are discussing the concept of mass, not gravitational attractive force to the local big rock, but most physicists dislike that imprecision.
Well, it's nice to know that something in the Universe now sucks less.
A MAPI message consists (loosely) of a number of key/value pairs in addition to the standard internet email format. When a MAPI message is sent from one Exchange server to another, these key/value pairs are preserved. When it bounces through any non-Exchange server, this nonstandard information is stripped off (why they didn't hide it in an attachment I don't recall). If a recall fails to operate successfully and there are Exchange servers at both ends, you know the messages are being routed through a non-Exchange server at some point. You should also see problems with meeting requests, notes, contacts or any other nonstandard email type Outlook uses.
Message recall. Oh dear.
Years ago, I wrote the bulk of this feature. It is not an Exchange feature, but an Outlook feature. It works by sending a custom MAPI message that Outlook recognizes and processes. Of course, this only works if all recipients are using Outlook. It also, after we did some usability testing, only deletes unread email, or email that has not been moved to a subfolder (the original version was quite determined and would hunt down and kill the message even if it had been moved to a subfolder, renamed or entered the email protection program). In this way, it did not violate the UI dictum that the computer move things around when you haven't given it instructions to do so.
So yes, it is Outlook only. If sent to a non-Microsoft mail system, it degrades to a simple notification that the message is being recalled. And it does not a good choice for getting rid of flames you shouldn't have been sending. But within its expected use as a feature - correcting mistakes in email that should have been caught before pressing send, it works fairly well.
But because it is client based, rather than an Exchange feature, it does cause a new mail message to be sent to each original recipient and, combined with a send-all storm, could greatly exacerbate things.
And, preemptively, for those who have philosophical objections to me having written the code in the first place, I'll just have to live with your disapproval and hope my steady paycheck somehow sooths my guilty conscience.
Interestingly, the new D&D 4 rules have added 'radiant' as a type of damage.
Incidentally, dark matter was observed last year. Or rather, we've seen its effects via gravitational lensing with enough resolution to map its distribution in relation to some other objects. This in turn helps us say what it might be and what it definitely isn't. For example, the bullet cluster image demonstrates pretty clearly that it is stuff, as it has been stripped away from a couple of galaxy clusters in collision. This best fits the WIMP (weakly interacting massive particles) theory of dark matter and is a big blow to the modified relativity camp. See here and here for some pretty pictures and explanations.
Are you really that surprised? We worked out how most of the world around us works over three hundred years ago. We put electromagnetism to bed over a hundred years ago. We've known enough about atoms to make them go *boom* real good for over eighty years. Everything left to work on is far, far outside our day to day experience. Our common sense is calibrated for temperatures between about zero and one hundred C in a thick nitrogen/oxygen environment with a 1 g gravitational field. Of course it fails miserably when confronted by absolute zero vacuums or temperatures and pressures extreme enough to fuse matter or places with gravitational fields strong enough to capture light.
Hell, I'd be more surprised if someone announced "Black Holes: Just Like Detroit" or some such.
And as for that eternal life and women throwing themselves at you, we've already given you healthy diets and pheromones. Why not try meeting us half-way?
This is a really poor move on marketing's part, as many of the user made mods already created and being distributed are far, far more useful or attractive than the barding. For example, the BT mod, which revamps the interface to display more information, provides a far bigger impact on gameplay than a reskinned horse.
Bethesda gave the PC users the same tool they used to make the game. What happens when the modders hit their stride and start putting out content that really puts Bethesda to shame? Who's going to go buy a new house add on for mages when one can grab a new set of textures far better than Oblivion's absolutely free?
Thus supporting the 'zombie' view of an afterlife.
Perhaps it is because they are attempting to replace evolution, a well established branch of biology, with ID, a religious argument and very poor proof of God?
From your post, it appears you are not arguing against evolution, but abiogenesis - the process by which life arose to the point evolution could operate. While we do not have a good scientific theory of what happened, there has been a good deal of progress and the science is far from "it just magically happened". Processes by which amino acid and cell wall precursors arise naturally have been discovered. From there, our understanding is hazy, but there still is nothing that precludes natural explanations.
Scientists do not accept "it just magically happened" as an argument, as magic falls outside of natural explanations. Nor should scientists be forced to discard promising lines of research into abiogenesis to satisfy the religious needs of a particular subset of some religion. Nor should a group of religiously insecure Biblical literalists be allowed to force there way into the science classroom.
This is not being elitist, it is insisting that everything in the science classroom adhere to the rules of science. ID is not science. Were we to lower the bar enough to allow ID in, we'd also be forced to allow astrology, numerology and divination via the entrails of slaughtered sheep. And personally, I think bio class is messy enough without the latter.
Idist: And what are Superstrings made of?
etc.
But you're so close!!
me: Ripples in 11 dimesional hyperspace.
Idist: But what are ripples in 11 dimesional hyperspace made of?
me: Geometry.
Idist: But what is geometry made of?
me: Riemann's work in multidimensional geometry.
Idist: But what is Riemann's work in multidimensional geometry made of?
me: Riemann's head.
Idist: But what is Reynman head made of?
me: Cells.
Ha! Looped!
And, of course, there's the story of the wise ass who visited Piaget at home and decided to perform the experiment with his children. He asked the six year old if the two glasses had the same amount of water and the child said, "No, I think the taller one does. But you should ask my older brother, he's got concrete operational skills."
And yet, in intragalactic space, you'd be lucky to find more than five hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter. Yes, it's a common element, but it is really spread out. Worse, hydrogen alone does not make water, one needs oxygen, a substancially less common substance.
Which means that in order to sustain oneself, one needs an efficient closed recycling system for the water. The Galactica had that, as it was designed for extended duration missions.
But what about the President's ship? As I recall, it was a planet hopper, designed for a few days in space at best. It is unlikely to have a recycling system sophisticated enough to handle an indefinite mission. The same goes for the rest of the 'rag tag fugative fleet'. That means they are dependant on Galactica to do the recycling. Which means potable water and waste water must be hauled back and forth between ships. But they weren't designed for this. So water transport must be improvised. Which may not be efficient. So water is spilled, water is leaked. Water sublimates from leaky tanks. Water is simply lost on those inefficient civilian transports that were never designed for this sort of long haul travel to begin with.
Hence the crisis. Really, just because one can build a 747 doesn't mean one uses it for every travel route.
Space: Above and Beyond? From what I remember, it wasn't that good. Honestly, pilots are far too precious a commodity to allow them on ground missions. And yet, every other week, the pilots were doing grunt patrols.
I suppose it was a resource issue. BSG has a cast at least twice the size of S:AB. With so few actors, having a command crew, a fighter crew and a ground crew is just a bit too difficult.
No, it is not that the acting pre-seventies was universally piss-poor, but the style of acting was different. Dramatical tastes differ for different periods.
In the thirties and forties, acting styles seem to have been more heavily influenced by stage acting and being able to project emotions and actions broadly enough for those in the back rows to relate. The epics of the fifties seemed to require a larger than life stance to live up to the broad material. In the sixties and seventies, the cultural revolutions playing out in society as a whole seem to have seeped into both scripts and acting. Scripts ceased to focus on epics and refocused on individual struggles and personal drama ("I *am* big. It's the *pictures* that got small." - a perfect lament for the death of epics.). Such scripts required a more natural acting style. The eighties brought us action heroes, with their odd mix of broad and natural styles capped with one liners. The nineties brought us blue screen acting, trying to combine any of the above styles whilst playing to nothing.
To return to our topic, Battlestar Galactica is trying very hard to stay with the modern, naturalistic style while incorporating a notion of naturalistic production. The idea for the look of the show is a war documentary. The acting style is as natural as possible and the camera movements are, by and large, an attempt to replicate the feel of a handheld or shoulder mounted camera. Effects shots seek to replicate Gulf War footage and acting tries to replicate human emotional response under massive pressure. For some, this succeeds admirably, feeding the show's atmosphere. For others, it just looks like bad camera work to hide the lack of a budget and mopey, neurotic characters portrayed by actors who run the gamut of emotions from A to B, as Miss Parker would say.
Currently, our understanding can only approach within a Planck time of the Big Bang. That is, we can more or less understand everything from 10e-43 seconds after the moment, but can go back no further. Beyond that point, we need a theory of quantum gravitation.
Some of this is known. The matter came from the energy. Put enough energy in a region and it condenses into particles. This happened on a massive scale as protons and electrons condensed from the original fireball. But the energy? That's something quantum electrodynamics and general relativity cannot directly answer.
However, should string theory bear out, it can probe past the Planck time, as well as before the Big Bang itself. Under one hypothesis, our Universe is embedded in a larger multidimensional space. Surfaces in this space at one point collided. When they hit, the energy of collision created our Universe expanding on the multidimensional surface of one of these membranes.
Strange, I know, but string theory is barely able to make accurate predictions, so take this with a grain of salt. But it does show something fundamental about science: not all answers are known. This is a very hot topic in physics right now, with physicists in working hard on a unification theory for gravity and the other four forces. With luck, they'll find the answer in our lifetimes, and we may have an answer. Or perhaps it will take another century or two of work out.
Have you considered the Holy Path of Pesto?
It is perfectly correct to teach the fact of evolution, for it is a fact. It is an observed phenomenon, or fact, if you like. The Theory of Evolution is the theoretical construct explaining how evolution operates, the mechanism involved and the consequences of these mechanisms. So far, it has survived every challenge thrown at it by the fossil record, genetics, comparative biology, chemistry, physics and even computer science. And it has grown more powerful for it. The current incarnation of the theory bears as much resemblance to Darwin's original proposal as modern quantum electrodynamics bears to Ben Franklin's work with electricity.
The phenomenon of evolution is well established and as solid a fact as gravity, electromagnetism or heat transfer. The theory describing it is, in some ways, better off than the theory of gravity or electromagnetism. We know those two are inconsistent and at least one is due for a revision. There are no such open questions on the theory of evolution.
Evolution does not require faith. That's the thing about science, it works even if you don't believe in it. Disbelieving in the quantum nature of electrons won't make a lick of difference in how your computer operates. Likewise, disbelieving in evolution does not mean that advanced antibiotics suddenly stop having any effect. (Now, current diary practices, that's another story.)
Given your statements, it is clear you have not bothered even the most cursory attempt at understanding science. You seem so enmeshed in your dogma, you refuse to understand anyone else's position, casting well reasoned positions as mere articles of faith. Science is not a religion, no matter how much you wish it to be so.
Really, just because you insist on wielding a hammer, do not treat us screws and bolts as nails.