The theory that the Universe started everywhere (the revised Hoyle Steady State Theory) has problems with some of the more exotic phenomena (such as extreme gamma ray bursts, which are non-uniform with respect to either space or time) and some of the early structures.
Now, this is not to say that cosologists believe in the point theory either - Professor Hawking has issued a refutation of that by arguing that space/time curves heavily under the conditions of the early universe and that therefore the early shape should be more parabolic than conic. If this is correct, then there is no "time zero", no singularity and no initial point. However, this would be for a very different reason than the one Sie Hoyle proposed.
However, there is yet another alternative that also eliminates the point problem - foam universes. This theory proposes that a Universe is simply one bubble amongst many, that these bubbles can (and do) divide, that under the right conditions (such as forming a Black Hole) any one bubble can also spawn off another bubble, and that although each bubble is entirely self-contained, there is nothing special about it or its formation.
Add those to your list and we get a lot of speculation.
...it's important that such a list, if you make one, lists what you want the system to do WELL, not just do. 64-bit systems will do certain tasks far far better than 32-bit ones. If such tasks are likely, then the ability for a 32-bit processor to perform the task may simply not be good enough. Part of this is to look at return on investment - if you get an improvement in performance of X for a cost multiplier (for the whole system) of Y, what's the ratio? Perhaps you'd do better with two lower-grade systems acting as a cluster, or a single system with more CPUs or cores per CPU.
There is, in theory, nothing that a 64-bit system can do that a 32-bit system (if programmed well enough) cannot do at all. To examine what is possible, then, is a little pointless. The difference is solely performance per unit of something (space, time, money, power) and so that is the only difference worth measuring. Anything else you can navigate around - it may take a little more effort, but it can always be done.
AJAX, SOAP and so on are all based on the premise that there are ways of abstracting out a lot of the complexity of service/user and service/service interactions. That assumption, I believe, is essentially correct. From that premise, these standards go on to assume that vendors are the right people to make such abstractions. Here is where the error lies. Vendors are notorious for producing crippled standards (such as SQL) that require vendor extensions to be usable. At a recent PCI-SIG conference, I was amazed at both the obviously stupid limitations of the standards and the gratuitous "vendor extension" options that very obviously existed so that vendors could provide proprietary solutions to those limitations. If a standard cannot stand, it ceases to be a standard and becomes little more than a cub scout badge.
(Another case: I cannot name a single well-designed W3C spec that was consortium-driven, and cannot name a single consortium-driven W3C spec that was well-designed.)
Web service standards cannot be driven by the very people who profit most from non-standard solutions. Even when they are designed well, they will STILL carry unacceptable flaws precisely because they are not driven by a collective itch but by a desire to stop someone else's scratch being the one that's used. The day a truly open federation of user-developers (you need a group of people where each person is both user AND developer) who have no ulterior motive beyond solving the service issue is formed will be the day that you see a protocol that requires no "perfect case study", proprietary extensions, overweight IDEs, etc. It will just work and be just used. Same as every other system developed that way has always just worked and just been used.
Ok, correction noted. There isn't even agreement that a shape exists at all! Aaaargh! (Why, given my post, am I amazingly unsurprised?) I'd still love to see the references, so if you could post them (or e-mail them to me) that would be great. Nonetheless, I do still feel we should round up all the quantum cosmologists and give them electro-shock therapy until they're prepared to do better than one theory of the structure of the Universe per unit of data per observation per experiment - or, at least, agree not to devise experiments that will "prove" everyone asking for a grant check that year correct.
I cut my teeth on those and have the fillings to prove it.:) Seriously, I've mucked with.spec files and written a few. The documentation isn't so much poor as virtually non-existant and you'll get far more information from grabbing good, working pre-existing ones. If you want anything compiled with the -march=pentium4 flag (may or may not be a Good Thing, depending on program) or to use optional libraries that need to be compiled in if present, then this is the way to do it. It's slower and more tedious to pick through than a simple./configure script, but you can do it.
Slower? Yeah - you don't know if any of those patches touch the configure options, so you've got to get part-way into an RPM build, break out, find the source directory, find the options, go back to the SPEC directory, find the.spec file, find the call to configure, rebuild, realize that that fixed the wrong architecture, go back, fix the right architecture's call, rebuild, realize your new dependencies aren't correctly reflected, go back, fix the dependency list for the options you are wanting, rebuild, discover that the compiler doesn't include something that is needed, repeat all of the above for the GCC compiler, then rebuild the package for real.
Sure, I went through dependency hell with tarballs. The "golden era" was more brass-plated than gold. The number of problems was probably comparable, the only package I ever recall swearing at to this degree was X11R4. (Do you know how long that takes to build on a 386SX-16? Do you know what it is like to build the entire distribution tree, only to discover that due to some obscene/obscure bug when on the Linux architecture that random portions will mis-configure, mis-compile, barf on GCC or implode except when run on a non-existant resolution that causes the monitor to give a high-pitched scream and run down the street?)
Nonetheless, with the exception of X, most problems were quick to discover and quick to fix. (In fact, I have yet to get X to compile correctly with any serious platform-specific optimizations. I won't forgive the Berlin/Fresco group for abandoning their alternative GUI.) The same cannot be said of exactly the same programs managed through.spec files and SRPMs, as there is way too much detail in too many different locations within the.spec file, within the patches, within the build system itself and within interactions with any quirks thrown up by already-installed RPMs. Too many unknown variables and no clean way of finding out what they are.
Packages are often way behind the software releases - by months or sometimes years. The SPEC files aren't always validated carefully - I've had to do all kinds of manipulations to get RPMs from the official trees to installed due to typos in the dependencies. At the moment, I'm having huge problems with some packages using one Python API and other packages using another, somehow resulting in X barfing and the kernel not being installed correctly, neither of which depends on Python to install.
Fedora Core is great, but the current package management scheme sucks. Either the builds should not be this fragile or the package scheme needs to auto-exclude invalid permutations (so you can update the updateable without killing the install) or there should be a secondary branch of auto-built RPMs that fix the dependency screw-ups where people can live with the risks that involves. But you really need something. How it stands just doesn't cut it. Back in the days of the SLS and MCC distributions, this wasn't as much of a problem. If things broke, I could recompile from source. But now?
The state of the art is that the Universe is a shape. That's about as much agreement as we're likely to see for some time. Current theories range from soccer-ball shape (which would explain the extreme uniformity of the microwave background radiation without needing Inflation Theory) to a strange 12-dimensional ultra-sausage (3 dimensions are circular, time is flatish, the other 8 are curled up to almost zero size - this gives us String Theory, one of the better bets for a Grand Unified Theory but difficult to prove and in definite violation of the Keep It Simple philosophy) to a perfectly normal sphere that expands indefinitely (currently the best explanation for the calculated value for the Hubble Constant) to a dimple that will expand into a flat plane (which is the best explanation for why none of the constants seem to be, well, constant).
The current belief is that more than one of the theories is likely to be wrong, although it is entirely possible that they are all correct depending on the observer and/or universe. (In the Many Worlds theory, there is one instance of the Universe for every possible permutation of valid events that could ever occur. If this theory is correct and the shape of the Universe is dictated by events, then the shape of the Universe is determined by which branch you happen to be on at the time you do the observation. If branches can interact, this may vary between observations.)
No doubt we'll see plenty of confusion, given that CSS2 is barely recognized. Hmmm - maybe Slashdot should claim CSS10 compliance, as the site lists it.:)
As for CSS 2 being 8.5 years old, that's 3,192.5 days. If we assume a programmer can spend 8 hours a day, that gives us 24,820 workable programming hours since the spec came out, per programmer. Sure, outside of F/OSS (and Electronic Arts) no programmer is going to work 365 days a year, but then very few companies are going to allocate just one programmer to this. You can easily imagine some teams being in the tens of developers for CSS - maybe hundreds in the Open Source world.
You can't directly use man-hours, because there is interaction between attributes and you can't parallelize beyond a certain level. It's hard to predict just how long it would take to write, component-test and integrated-test each function that you'd need, but a competent team should be able to do a decent level of parallelization and minimize management to where it belongs. (The coffee room - someone has to make the coffee for the engineers!) In 8.5 years, you should be able to implement and formally prove any meaningful permutation of a few hundred attributes, or implement and do very adequate testing on a few thousand, within the closed-source community and ten times that in Open Source.
By now, we should not be talking about what functions have not been implemented or how many thousand bugs there are per line of code. By now, we should be talking about how CSS 2 is so rock-solid stable and universal that nobody can remember a time before it, and bugs should be measured per thousand browsers.
My guess would be that scent travels so slowly that stereo is not obtained from time displacement but from concentration difference, and that concentration differences are better calculated by having the nostrils directional than physically displaced. Physical displacement requires much more wiring and piping, and the payoff probably isn't worth the extra cost for a sense of smell.
I'm curious if the researchers produced CFD models of different types of nose to compare the mechanics of different nose structures against the ability of those same nose structures to give stereo information, etc. I somehow doubt it - I'm begininning to be rather skeptical over the ability of researchers to actually study something as opposed to merely report on it - but this is the sort of information that would allow the results to be understood and interpreted in context. It would also be good if modern brain activity imaging could be used to see what the brain actually does TO interpret scent in stereo. How is the information correlated, and what with? Obviously, imaging is too expensive to do on a first-round study that sounds like it was more a recreational piece of research than something anyone expected to get real results from.
As it stands, we know that a result occurs without knowing actually knowing a whole lot about what happens, why, how or even when. (There's a huge time lag between when the data is collected and when the person acts on it.) A result is good, but when that's all you have, it's no more science than alchemy or spell-casting, and without quantifiable data, is not really any more repeatable. We've moved on past the stone circles and ritual magic - at least, I hope so. It would seriously make a mess of the server room if they started ripping out guts there in Druid rituals.
Problem is, Microsoft knows this. Let's say Microsoft has poached a whole bunch of GPLed code from SuSE, and the contract agrees to indemnify Microsoft for all prior GPL infractions and to grant them exemption. In secret. Novell's the license holders and can do this. Or, maybe there's a clause that says that Novell accepts full legal responsibility under the GPL for any GPL violations resulting from a joint project. If Microsoft violated the GPL under that kind of contract, Novell would be liable and banned from using or distributing GPL code, killing the whole SuSE effort. It wouldn't touch Microsoft at all.
(To use the analogy, this would be like the gorilla shooting first and selling the dead bodies from the poaching outfit to organ transplant companies.)
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2 didn't require an OS - it did all the hardware and memory management it needed internally. IBM's early disk diagnostics were the same way. If you write your code to the L4 kit, then you can even get Java to run without an OS. OS' came about decades after the first stored-program all-digital computer and if you're not wanting protected environments are largely a waste of resources. An OS is just a glorified wrapper over the electronics, if you're handling any threading and memory pools yourself.
For similarish reasons. One threat I see is that if Microsoft violates the GPL on a Novell product, there may be something in the contract Microsoft can use to void the GPL as a whole even if they lose. They know how to work the system and we should assume that they have not entered this contract with any more respect for the spirit of it than they did with the Windows 95 non-integration deal, the Spyglass IE deal, or any other deal they've ever entered.
For all we know, Microsoft entered this deal to secure indemnity against actions they have performed that threaten Novell's very existence, but which Novell know nothing about. It's not like they've never been prosecuted for unethical business practices before, or been found guilty of them, so one must wonder why they were so keen on this agreement BEFORE Novell learned the full facts. It is possible that the full facts will prove fatal only because the deal was entered - again, that has happened before and we cannot ignore that as a possibility.
Paranoid? No, you're not paranoid when they really ARE out to get you. Seriously, I'm not saying that Microsoft is doing anything shady here. All I can say is that the "Get The Facts" campaign, the EU lawsuits, prior actions by Microsoft involving agreements with other companies (such as spyware/anti-virus vendors) and prior comments by Microsoft indicating extreme hostility and antipathy towards Linux and its vendors, are all indicative of motives that are somewhat less than snow white, pure and radiant. They are not stupid and did not enter this for Novell's benefit, any more than their deal with anti-virus vendors ending with crippling those same vendors was in the interests of those other parties.
If a banana plantation enters an agreement with an 800 lb. gorilla armed with a machine-gun, it is safe to assume that the gorilla will be extremely happy with the outcome - no matter what.
I would tend to agree with you on that. Some words tend to be emotively interpreted, rather than understood for what they actually mean, which tends to be a problem with these sorts of discussions. For myself, I am not interested in literal interpretations of any specific Biblical text or a fight over which Bible the interpretation should be from - those are not useful discussions, as best as I can tell. No two individuals are going to agree on matters of faith, even if they are nominally of the same faith, and science is wholly orthogonal to faith EXCEPT when faith is used to bias or taint science.
Science is a regimen of basing theories on data, then testing those theories by obtaining data that is wholly independent of that used to derive the theory. When we talk of someone abusing science, falsifying data, or whatever, that is not a case of science tainting faith, but rather of the prejudices - and therefore faith - of the person doing the work tainting the science. Science is incapable of creating prejudice, even when it is subject to it.
When people talk of science and religion as not necessarily being in conflict, this is entirely correct. In fact, faith can be extremely valuable in science as it allows you to let go of the distractions, the imponderables and the unknowables. Early civilizations did well in science because they could put everything outside of their ability to measure, control or quantify in the realms of Somebody Else's Problem, and you often see the same happening in modern science. We can only model complex phenomena at an abstract level because we know that the details - even those we don't yet have the science to know - are taken care of "somehow". We don't have to know the "somehow" so long as we know that it's not our problem to know. Who really cares, ultimately, what the "somehow" is? Who really cares, ultimately, what any individual uses as a "somehow" for themselves, so long as there really is no harm and there really is a benefit?
If you want to believe in zero, one, many God(s), or (as the Buddhists do) that the Universe and all that exists inside and outside of it is merely a delusion, and it is beneficial to you and all around you for you to do so, then your belief is not my problem. By definition, it's so much not my problem that I'm gaining from you believing it and would cause far more harm than good to all concerned to persuade you otherwise.
...but the power-on self-test for the Commodore PET 3032 was at location 65520, as I recall. What always seemed odd to me was that a machine that had an OS entirely in ROM and a software reboot would actually crash more than a third of the time when running the reboot.
About the biggest differences are that I don't own their stock and that I've seen an astonishing number of illegal practices from Microsoft, given the number of product lines and the quality of their legal staff. In terms of percent of totally above-board activities in relation to all activities a company ever performs, very few companies ever achieve 100% integrity - there are just too many rules, regulations, software patents, untraceable origins of code, etc, yadda yadda yadda. Nobody expects or asks for perfection. Not even on Slashdot.
I fully agree about using the right tool for the right job. Screwdrivers make lousy hammers, as I have said more than once. You've got to have a good grasp on what it is you want to do and what will produce the best results for that task. So far, I can honestly say that whilst Windows has been the best tool for certain problems, that has almost always been because of political or legal considerations (by the suppliers, by the company I worked for, whatever) and not for technical reasons. Once - and only once - have I met a situation in which Windows outclassed Linux on a technical consideration, and even that was merely a political consideration by the maintainers of the Open Source project I would have needed to use under Linux.
The short answer is no. The longer answer is that the current architectures are designed to solve the more common simple cases at a reasonable speed. They are not designed for complex common operations (which is why we use libraries like ATLAS and FFTW, rather than a simple opcode, for so many fundamental operations). They are totally incapable of rarer complex operations, which is why research facilities pour literally millions of dollars into developing high-performance maths toolkits, and hundreds of millions into the truly heavy-duty stuff (3D FFTs, Navier-Stokes, gas prices...)
There is no theoretical reason why you could not build special-purpose processor units for different types of special-interest operations. There are so many that real-estate becomes an issue, but if you're willing to put up with Yet Another Socket Type, you could easily see AMD replace a sizable chunk of the maths libraries in Linux or Windows with hard-coded implementations hundreds of times faster than software is capable of.
The more interesting subspecies of dogs, cats, etc, are generally endangered or extinct. Carrier pigeons were shot to extinction, with the US Government encouraging the hunters every step of the way. There are dogs and cats recorded by early civilizations and preserved in museums that you will never see, and others that are dangerously close to that point. Pigs - England has plenty of wild bores, even if it did run out of wild boars some time back.
You are right that virtually all non-domesticated plants and animals are either threatened, endangered or critically endangered, and almost entirely at the hands of humans. Usually for no particular reason or for an entirely human-manufactured reason. (Ethiopia has suffered massive deforestation by people trying to obtain firewood. The rest of the planet has how many alternative fuel sources? Fast-growing trees specifically selected for firewood? Fuel-efficient techniques for generating heat or light, or for cooking with? If those with a solution knowingly - and that's an important word - do not apply it to a problem, is that the fault of the problem, the solution, or the person who didn't apply it?)
Yes, I blame quite a number of people. For a start, responsibility is frequently a collective thing and rarely an individual thing. If one of those responsible truly merits being called on it, then ALL who are responsible truly merit being called on it. Not all responsibility is equal, so not all blame is equal, but it is only unjust to hold someone accountable if you do so selectively. Society as a whole is to blame for holding in esteem the very qualities that make humans capable of the most inhuman and despicable acts. I should point out that blame, as I'm using it here, is not the same as shame and definitely not the same as punish. Blame, as I'm using it here, is to refuse to accept or tolerate any individual fault or failure ANYWHERE along the line, with special emphasis on those faults and failures that actually required greater effort than to do the next right thing.
There's also a hidden cost to all this. Biological systems are only stable because they are also extremely interrelated and interdependent systems. Extinction is not just a name off a list, you might as well pluck out bits of a Swiss watch and expect it to keep running. Sometimes you might pluck out a bit that didn't actually matter, but if you keep at it, the odds don't get better.
I'm more lifeform-ist. I like lifeforms. I like the fact they form. I like the fact they live. I have no problem with lifeforms. Some of my best friends are lifeforms, although I have to admit that the toaster is a better conversationalist at times. My problem is with the sedimentary types (no, that is spelled correctly).
I'd believe that if it weren't for the extremely large number of pirates operating in Chinese waters. Assuming said pirates aren't operating with the full knowledge of the Government, of course. However, this gets back to the point I was making - the Government is unlikely to have made any serious effort to stop a group that saved said Government from political embarrassment or expense, particularly if said Government could claim credit for any success, deny responsibility for any failure, and collect bribes along the way. It's not in the interests of politicians to deny themselves free publicity and free money.
Doubt it. The ones left in a hundred years time will have beaks designed to rip steel doors off their hinges and have adapted their wings to be able to carry rugby balls.
The birds in New Zealand are curious creatures. From the extinct Moa and Haast Eagle (both absolute giants) to the Kea, Kakapo and Kiwi, the birds in New Zealand have no characteristics that indicate ground-based predators. Your car is far more likely to be ripped to shreds by a psychotic flightless parrot than it is to be damaged in an accident with another vehicle. Fear? Those creatures show no fear! (In fact, their total reckless abandon probably drove the poor mouse out of its mind - I think it went extinct from the cost of psychiatric treatment.)
The Haast Eagle (the largest eagle that ever lived, the largest bird capable of flight and the largest an animal could physically get and still lift itself on wings) might well have had a range of 2,000 Km. If reports of giant eagles of similar size in other countries are to be believed, then it must have had the range as they certainly never evolved anywhere else.
The dolphin was officially down to 6 or less a decade ago.
It was featured in Douglas Adams' "Last Chance To See" as critically endangered sometime before that.
The two that the Chinese had in captivity died due to neglect and the use of exactly the kind of netting that have been killing them along the river for containment.
The problem with fishing was not limited to overfishing - there are plenty of fish upriver of the dam. The problem was that the Chinese saw no point in allowing the dolphins and the fish to be in the same stretch of river.
The Chinese could - very easily - have moved the dolphins upriver of the dam, getting them out of the way of boats, pollution, etc. The decision not to do so had nothing to do with capability, money, resources, fish, pollution, or any other such problem. The decision not to was based on apathy.
The environmentalists were equally capable of moving the dolphins. The politicians could hardly have stopped them - even if they wanted to. And why would they have wanted to? It would have gotten rid of the problem, would have allowed them to claim credit if the solution worked, and would have cost them nothing if it had failed.
Environmentalists were equally capable of relocating the dolphins. There's so much boat traffic and so much illegal fishing, who would have noticed the Rainbow Warrior flooding a compartment and stuffing a few dolphins in it? The dolphins need a fresh water river and there's not exactly a world shortage of those.
And the marine parks around the world? They could have charged a small fortune to exhibit a river dolphin, run a captive breeding program and got their name in lights for saving an entire species. So what do they do? Uh.... Nothing?
Gene banks and cloning groups? Silent. No efforts on saving the genetic data for later generations, no efforts by geneticists to produce a clone, not even an effort to map the genes to see what made them what they were. (Wheat you can find next year. Humans will be around for a loong time. But the plants and animals that you get one chance at and that's it?)
I have to give credit where credit is due, though. The stupidity of all the organizations - from Greenpeace to the Chinese Government - that could have made a difference but chose not to make a difference that mattered is not the mundane stupidity we see in everyday life. This is a highly trained, highly refined breed of stupidity that only the truly gifted hand-wringer could develop.
Slashdot Mirror
The theory that the Universe started everywhere (the revised Hoyle Steady State Theory) has problems with some of the more exotic phenomena (such as extreme gamma ray bursts, which are non-uniform with respect to either space or time) and some of the early structures.
Now, this is not to say that cosologists believe in the point theory either - Professor Hawking has issued a refutation of that by arguing that space/time curves heavily under the conditions of the early universe and that therefore the early shape should be more parabolic than conic. If this is correct, then there is no "time zero", no singularity and no initial point. However, this would be for a very different reason than the one Sie Hoyle proposed.
However, there is yet another alternative that also eliminates the point problem - foam universes. This theory proposes that a Universe is simply one bubble amongst many, that these bubbles can (and do) divide, that under the right conditions (such as forming a Black Hole) any one bubble can also spawn off another bubble, and that although each bubble is entirely self-contained, there is nothing special about it or its formation.
Add those to your list and we get a lot of speculation.
There is, in theory, nothing that a 64-bit system can do that a 32-bit system (if programmed well enough) cannot do at all. To examine what is possible, then, is a little pointless. The difference is solely performance per unit of something (space, time, money, power) and so that is the only difference worth measuring. Anything else you can navigate around - it may take a little more effort, but it can always be done.
(Another case: I cannot name a single well-designed W3C spec that was consortium-driven, and cannot name a single consortium-driven W3C spec that was well-designed.)
Web service standards cannot be driven by the very people who profit most from non-standard solutions. Even when they are designed well, they will STILL carry unacceptable flaws precisely because they are not driven by a collective itch but by a desire to stop someone else's scratch being the one that's used. The day a truly open federation of user-developers (you need a group of people where each person is both user AND developer) who have no ulterior motive beyond solving the service issue is formed will be the day that you see a protocol that requires no "perfect case study", proprietary extensions, overweight IDEs, etc. It will just work and be just used. Same as every other system developed that way has always just worked and just been used.
Ok, correction noted. There isn't even agreement that a shape exists at all! Aaaargh! (Why, given my post, am I amazingly unsurprised?) I'd still love to see the references, so if you could post them (or e-mail them to me) that would be great. Nonetheless, I do still feel we should round up all the quantum cosmologists and give them electro-shock therapy until they're prepared to do better than one theory of the structure of the Universe per unit of data per observation per experiment - or, at least, agree not to devise experiments that will "prove" everyone asking for a grant check that year correct.
Slower? Yeah - you don't know if any of those patches touch the configure options, so you've got to get part-way into an RPM build, break out, find the source directory, find the options, go back to the SPEC directory, find the
Sure, I went through dependency hell with tarballs. The "golden era" was more brass-plated than gold. The number of problems was probably comparable, the only package I ever recall swearing at to this degree was X11R4. (Do you know how long that takes to build on a 386SX-16? Do you know what it is like to build the entire distribution tree, only to discover that due to some obscene/obscure bug when on the Linux architecture that random portions will mis-configure, mis-compile, barf on GCC or implode except when run on a non-existant resolution that causes the monitor to give a high-pitched scream and run down the street?)
Nonetheless, with the exception of X, most problems were quick to discover and quick to fix. (In fact, I have yet to get X to compile correctly with any serious platform-specific optimizations. I won't forgive the Berlin/Fresco group for abandoning their alternative GUI.) The same cannot be said of exactly the same programs managed through
Fedora Core is great, but the current package management scheme sucks. Either the builds should not be this fragile or the package scheme needs to auto-exclude invalid permutations (so you can update the updateable without killing the install) or there should be a secondary branch of auto-built RPMs that fix the dependency screw-ups where people can live with the risks that involves. But you really need something. How it stands just doesn't cut it. Back in the days of the SLS and MCC distributions, this wasn't as much of a problem. If things broke, I could recompile from source. But now?
The current belief is that more than one of the theories is likely to be wrong, although it is entirely possible that they are all correct depending on the observer and/or universe. (In the Many Worlds theory, there is one instance of the Universe for every possible permutation of valid events that could ever occur. If this theory is correct and the shape of the Universe is dictated by events, then the shape of the Universe is determined by which branch you happen to be on at the time you do the observation. If branches can interact, this may vary between observations.)
As for CSS 2 being 8.5 years old, that's 3,192.5 days. If we assume a programmer can spend 8 hours a day, that gives us 24,820 workable programming hours since the spec came out, per programmer. Sure, outside of F/OSS (and Electronic Arts) no programmer is going to work 365 days a year, but then very few companies are going to allocate just one programmer to this. You can easily imagine some teams being in the tens of developers for CSS - maybe hundreds in the Open Source world.
You can't directly use man-hours, because there is interaction between attributes and you can't parallelize beyond a certain level. It's hard to predict just how long it would take to write, component-test and integrated-test each function that you'd need, but a competent team should be able to do a decent level of parallelization and minimize management to where it belongs. (The coffee room - someone has to make the coffee for the engineers!) In 8.5 years, you should be able to implement and formally prove any meaningful permutation of a few hundred attributes, or implement and do very adequate testing on a few thousand, within the closed-source community and ten times that in Open Source.
By now, we should not be talking about what functions have not been implemented or how many thousand bugs there are per line of code. By now, we should be talking about how CSS 2 is so rock-solid stable and universal that nobody can remember a time before it, and bugs should be measured per thousand browsers.
I'm curious if the researchers produced CFD models of different types of nose to compare the mechanics of different nose structures against the ability of those same nose structures to give stereo information, etc. I somehow doubt it - I'm begininning to be rather skeptical over the ability of researchers to actually study something as opposed to merely report on it - but this is the sort of information that would allow the results to be understood and interpreted in context. It would also be good if modern brain activity imaging could be used to see what the brain actually does TO interpret scent in stereo. How is the information correlated, and what with? Obviously, imaging is too expensive to do on a first-round study that sounds like it was more a recreational piece of research than something anyone expected to get real results from.
As it stands, we know that a result occurs without knowing actually knowing a whole lot about what happens, why, how or even when. (There's a huge time lag between when the data is collected and when the person acts on it.) A result is good, but when that's all you have, it's no more science than alchemy or spell-casting, and without quantifiable data, is not really any more repeatable. We've moved on past the stone circles and ritual magic - at least, I hope so. It would seriously make a mess of the server room if they started ripping out guts there in Druid rituals.
(To use the analogy, this would be like the gorilla shooting first and selling the dead bodies from the poaching outfit to organ transplant companies.)
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2 didn't require an OS - it did all the hardware and memory management it needed internally. IBM's early disk diagnostics were the same way. If you write your code to the L4 kit, then you can even get Java to run without an OS. OS' came about decades after the first stored-program all-digital computer and if you're not wanting protected environments are largely a waste of resources. An OS is just a glorified wrapper over the electronics, if you're handling any threading and memory pools yourself.
For all we know, Microsoft entered this deal to secure indemnity against actions they have performed that threaten Novell's very existence, but which Novell know nothing about. It's not like they've never been prosecuted for unethical business practices before, or been found guilty of them, so one must wonder why they were so keen on this agreement BEFORE Novell learned the full facts. It is possible that the full facts will prove fatal only because the deal was entered - again, that has happened before and we cannot ignore that as a possibility.
Paranoid? No, you're not paranoid when they really ARE out to get you. Seriously, I'm not saying that Microsoft is doing anything shady here. All I can say is that the "Get The Facts" campaign, the EU lawsuits, prior actions by Microsoft involving agreements with other companies (such as spyware/anti-virus vendors) and prior comments by Microsoft indicating extreme hostility and antipathy towards Linux and its vendors, are all indicative of motives that are somewhat less than snow white, pure and radiant. They are not stupid and did not enter this for Novell's benefit, any more than their deal with anti-virus vendors ending with crippling those same vendors was in the interests of those other parties.
If a banana plantation enters an agreement with an 800 lb. gorilla armed with a machine-gun, it is safe to assume that the gorilla will be extremely happy with the outcome - no matter what.
It would mean the joke was evolving, rather than being intelligently designed.
Science is a regimen of basing theories on data, then testing those theories by obtaining data that is wholly independent of that used to derive the theory. When we talk of someone abusing science, falsifying data, or whatever, that is not a case of science tainting faith, but rather of the prejudices - and therefore faith - of the person doing the work tainting the science. Science is incapable of creating prejudice, even when it is subject to it.
When people talk of science and religion as not necessarily being in conflict, this is entirely correct. In fact, faith can be extremely valuable in science as it allows you to let go of the distractions, the imponderables and the unknowables. Early civilizations did well in science because they could put everything outside of their ability to measure, control or quantify in the realms of Somebody Else's Problem, and you often see the same happening in modern science. We can only model complex phenomena at an abstract level because we know that the details - even those we don't yet have the science to know - are taken care of "somehow". We don't have to know the "somehow" so long as we know that it's not our problem to know. Who really cares, ultimately, what the "somehow" is? Who really cares, ultimately, what any individual uses as a "somehow" for themselves, so long as there really is no harm and there really is a benefit?
If you want to believe in zero, one, many God(s), or (as the Buddhists do) that the Universe and all that exists inside and outside of it is merely a delusion, and it is beneficial to you and all around you for you to do so, then your belief is not my problem. By definition, it's so much not my problem that I'm gaining from you believing it and would cause far more harm than good to all concerned to persuade you otherwise.
...but the power-on self-test for the Commodore PET 3032 was at location 65520, as I recall. What always seemed odd to me was that a machine that had an OS entirely in ROM and a software reboot would actually crash more than a third of the time when running the reboot.
I fully agree about using the right tool for the right job. Screwdrivers make lousy hammers, as I have said more than once. You've got to have a good grasp on what it is you want to do and what will produce the best results for that task. So far, I can honestly say that whilst Windows has been the best tool for certain problems, that has almost always been because of political or legal considerations (by the suppliers, by the company I worked for, whatever) and not for technical reasons. Once - and only once - have I met a situation in which Windows outclassed Linux on a technical consideration, and even that was merely a political consideration by the maintainers of the Open Source project I would have needed to use under Linux.
There is no theoretical reason why you could not build special-purpose processor units for different types of special-interest operations. There are so many that real-estate becomes an issue, but if you're willing to put up with Yet Another Socket Type, you could easily see AMD replace a sizable chunk of the maths libraries in Linux or Windows with hard-coded implementations hundreds of times faster than software is capable of.
Wouldn't this be bigger?
You are right that virtually all non-domesticated plants and animals are either threatened, endangered or critically endangered, and almost entirely at the hands of humans. Usually for no particular reason or for an entirely human-manufactured reason. (Ethiopia has suffered massive deforestation by people trying to obtain firewood. The rest of the planet has how many alternative fuel sources? Fast-growing trees specifically selected for firewood? Fuel-efficient techniques for generating heat or light, or for cooking with? If those with a solution knowingly - and that's an important word - do not apply it to a problem, is that the fault of the problem, the solution, or the person who didn't apply it?)
Yes, I blame quite a number of people. For a start, responsibility is frequently a collective thing and rarely an individual thing. If one of those responsible truly merits being called on it, then ALL who are responsible truly merit being called on it. Not all responsibility is equal, so not all blame is equal, but it is only unjust to hold someone accountable if you do so selectively. Society as a whole is to blame for holding in esteem the very qualities that make humans capable of the most inhuman and despicable acts. I should point out that blame, as I'm using it here, is not the same as shame and definitely not the same as punish. Blame, as I'm using it here, is to refuse to accept or tolerate any individual fault or failure ANYWHERE along the line, with special emphasis on those faults and failures that actually required greater effort than to do the next right thing.
There's also a hidden cost to all this. Biological systems are only stable because they are also extremely interrelated and interdependent systems. Extinction is not just a name off a list, you might as well pluck out bits of a Swiss watch and expect it to keep running. Sometimes you might pluck out a bit that didn't actually matter, but if you keep at it, the odds don't get better.
I'm more lifeform-ist. I like lifeforms. I like the fact they form. I like the fact they live. I have no problem with lifeforms. Some of my best friends are lifeforms, although I have to admit that the toaster is a better conversationalist at times. My problem is with the sedimentary types (no, that is spelled correctly).
I'd believe that if it weren't for the extremely large number of pirates operating in Chinese waters. Assuming said pirates aren't operating with the full knowledge of the Government, of course. However, this gets back to the point I was making - the Government is unlikely to have made any serious effort to stop a group that saved said Government from political embarrassment or expense, particularly if said Government could claim credit for any success, deny responsibility for any failure, and collect bribes along the way. It's not in the interests of politicians to deny themselves free publicity and free money.
Doubt it. The ones left in a hundred years time will have beaks designed to rip steel doors off their hinges and have adapted their wings to be able to carry rugby balls.
The birds in New Zealand are curious creatures. From the extinct Moa and Haast Eagle (both absolute giants) to the Kea, Kakapo and Kiwi, the birds in New Zealand have no characteristics that indicate ground-based predators. Your car is far more likely to be ripped to shreds by a psychotic flightless parrot than it is to be damaged in an accident with another vehicle. Fear? Those creatures show no fear! (In fact, their total reckless abandon probably drove the poor mouse out of its mind - I think it went extinct from the cost of psychiatric treatment.)
The Haast Eagle (the largest eagle that ever lived, the largest bird capable of flight and the largest an animal could physically get and still lift itself on wings) might well have had a range of 2,000 Km. If reports of giant eagles of similar size in other countries are to be believed, then it must have had the range as they certainly never evolved anywhere else.
I have to give credit where credit is due, though. The stupidity of all the organizations - from Greenpeace to the Chinese Government - that could have made a difference but chose not to make a difference that mattered is not the mundane stupidity we see in everyday life. This is a highly trained, highly refined breed of stupidity that only the truly gifted hand-wringer could develop.