Ham won't be convinced of anything. But the people who follow him might. Ham has convinced them that science and religion are at odds, and many people, unfortunately, would choose religion over science. If you can convince them there is no such war, they'll stop fighting it.
We don't need them to join our side - we just need them to stop fighting.
Nye did not win, because he was fighting the wrong war.
Nye argued like a scientist. He presented the evidence, gave logical explanations, and generally relied on demonstrable facts. He did a flawless job, but changed absolutely no-one's mind, because anyone who cares about science, reason and evidence already accepts evolution.
Ham didn't even really argue. He just riled people up for a crusade - it was the evil liberal commie atheists trying to teach satan's lies, and him and his book of JESUS that showed the big bad man up. He also did not convince anybody, but he can count it as a win because he got people who believed in the general idea of creationism to believe specifically in his branch of creationism.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when you argue about creationism, you are not arguing science. You're arguing theology. If it were me on the stage with Ken Ham, I wouldn't bring slides of radiocarbon dating and fossil evidence, I'd bring quotes from Augustine and Aquinas. I'd point out that some of the earliest work leading to evolution was done by Gregor Mendel, a friar in the Augustinian order. I'd use some choice words from Pope Francis, who, even if you aren't catholic, you have to admit he's probably read the bible at least a few times. I'd present a history of creation that matches both scientific evidence (literally) and scripture (figuratively). And then I'd attack his own character, not with the insults of the scientist, but with the insults of a religious man. I'd ask rhetorically how he thinks he can interpret scripture for the rest of us. I'd make him out to be a fraud and a cheat, hijacking religion for his own gain (which, to be fair, he kind of is).
That's how you argue with a crazy person - with more crazy. He, and his followers, don't give a single fuck about the truth. So take them down within their own framework, not from your own.
SpaceX has flown missions for the Canadian, Taiwanese and Turkmen space agencies, and is contracted for the new versions of both the Iridium and Orbcomm satellite networks, among numerous other commercial payloads. NASA is currently their biggest single customer, but they're rapidly losing that status (Iridium has seven launches contracted, NASA only four).
Soylent News runs on Slashcode (although a fork of an earlier version, I think). HTTPS works just fine, as does Unicode and probably a few other things broken on Slashdot. No IPv6 yet but I'm sure it's coming. It's all on Github so it would be fairly trivial to merge it in to Slashdot.
You basically described Orion on top of SLS. SLS takes the Shuttle launch system, scales it up a bit (adds another fuel "segment" to the boosters, and a fourth SSME), and puts it into a regular stack.
This would probably have saved the Challenger crew. The scariest thing about Challenger is that the crew actually did survive the explosion - they died when they hit the water, possibly unconscious from the lack of air pressure at altitude. The crew compartment also remained mostly-intact.
In a similar failure on SLS, it's likely the capsule would also have survived. Even if LES doesn't get them away from the explosion, they could probably survive the fireball (particularly since they're now above it, rather than beside it). The parachutes can then bring them down safely.
In an emergency like this, the LES might be triggered by computer. In that case, the LES would be able to safely pull them away from the explosion. If it relies on crew or ground-control to abort, it would need someone that can instantly tell the problem is dire enough to abort.
The failure modes for the Shuttle are unlike any other spacecraft's - even the near-clone of it, Buran. And any theoretical abort mode for it has to account for that weirdness.
First, the Shuttle has to remain intact. You can't just eject the "pilot area", because the whole thing is really monolithic. You might be able to get away with ejection seats, but that works only for a very small period of spaceflight (probably not Challenger - they'd have ejected into a fireball and coasted up to 60,000ft). They did, in fact, have some ejection seats on the early test flights, with partial crews, but they did away with them in use (letting some escape while leaving others to die was inhumane, and making all seats eject was far too heavy for the marginal benefit).
Second, the boosters cannot be shut off. That's the big safety drawback of solid rockets - you light them, and they aren't going out until they're out of fuel. This means detaching the boosters isn't going to work, because (without the drag and mass of the Shuttle holding them back) they'll just blow past the Shuttle, bathing it in hot exhaust. If my memory is correct, the Shuttle is the only manned rocket in history to use solid engines, in no small part because of this sort of problem. Even the Soviet shuttle clone, Buran, used all-liquid engines.
Third, the Main engines are nearly useless in-atmosphere. They're lit mainly because they sometimes fail to light, and having that failure occur halfway to orbit would suck. The "boosters" provide about 80% of the thrust, if memory serves. The SSMEs aren't even at full throttle for much of the flight - Challenger had just set them to full when the stack exploded. So any idea of "just floor the main engines to outrun the boosters" is ludicrous.
Fourth, these sorts of disasters happen with very little notice. Rocket fuels are generally extremely volatile - even the least exotic combo, LOX+RP1, is still liquid oxygen and high-grade kerosene. LH2 is safer than some things (ClF3 was, and still is, considered for rocket use), but it's still pretty dangerous, and when a tank of LH2 and LOX decides to explode, it's not going to give you even a second's warning. So the escape systems they did add after Challenger probably wouldn't have been usable, because it literally involved jumping out of the Shuttle.
Fifth, the Shuttle is HEAVY. Really goddamn heavy, especially since you're not going to be able to dump the payload during an abort. So you've got the crew, all their supplies, whatever they were carrying to orbit, and all the vehicle mass. Any rocket that could accelerate the Shuttle away from an exploding stack would be itself enormous, not something you could really justify launching into orbit every mission.
Because of these peculiarities, the Shuttle abort modes are along the lines of "pick where to crash" instead of "run away from the explosion". The four post-launch modes are "return to launch site", "trans-atlantic landing", "abort to once-around" and "abort to orbit" - all of which require a mostly-working Shuttle and must be used after the boosters are exhausted.
An LES like this could not have saved them, because you couldn't really use an LES such as this on the Shuttle. Modifying the Shuttle enough that an LES like this makes sense would basically require making it not a Shuttle - in fact, you'd basically end up with an Orion-like capsule on top of an SLS-like stack, because they're literally reusing that much of the technology.
Since DICE obviously isn't going to stop him from blogging here, can we at least make him an editor so he can post them himself and we can block him specifically?
How on earth do they find "pay someone a billion and a half to take this business" to be cheaper than just shutting the entire thing down? Even if the division is losing more money than that, I think you could do better by just firing everyone and burning any physical assets to the ground. The only way I think it could be otherwise is if it costs more than $1.5 billion just to shut down the division. Unless IBM is running a nuclear reactor somewhere and I just never heard of it, that just doesn't seem plausible.
Yes. That's why they haven't bothered implementing right joins, you can do every join using just inner joins, left outer joins and unions, like how any logical gate can be implemented with NAND gates.
I've never had need for a right join, and only rarely do I use a full outer join.
Several of their "animal shelters" were closed because the government was going to force them to call themselves "euthanasia clinics" because they killed so many animals. PETA closed them rather than accept the more accurate name.
It doesn't spread easily. The virus is basically content to sit in a corpse and multiply. It doesn't spread through air, or aerosol, or even a lot of fluids. Just blood and bile - which, granted, it does like to make you spew out, but it's not too hard to avoid unless you're trying to treat infected people or lugging corpses around.
On the other hand, just a small initial infection can be lethal. Most diseases don't spread from one particle of the virus or bacterium entering your body - most need quite a lot, otherwise they get smashed by your immune system before you even show symptoms. Ebola doesn't need much of an initial infection to turn into a full-blown case.
Given those two things, there's no surprise that Ebola so often infects the doctors who are treating it. But that's on outlier on its infectiousness - it's still not going to be a massive plague, because outside medical and funeral services, it just doesn't spread well.
The level of astroturfing for Uber is getting ridiculous. I was sympathetic at first, because I can see how the existing monopolies are bad, but: a) They aren't even trying to change the laws, they're just ignoring them. There are some laws that are so bad civil disobedience is a valid tactic. This is not one of those laws, and even then, when you do civil disobedience you're supposed to *accept* the legal punishment, because you *did* break the law. b) They're astroturfing like crazy to frame the debate as "the common man versus the big bad taxi monopolies" when it's really "big international web-based corporation versus big local corporations". I don't care how many times you make sockpuppet comments about it, nobody's getting arrested for driving their grandma to the grocery store. People are getting arrested for running unlicensed taxicabs.
Licensing taxis is a good thing. The current laws may be overly-restrictive to protect existing businesses, but the spirit of the law is good. Uber? You're not. Any sympathy I once had is gone, purely because of your PR tactics. I was already unlikely to be a customer (I *have* my own car), but now I'm definitely not going to.
Not as a main phone, hell no. But there are times when I might not want to carry my expensive, fragile phone - going to a metal show, or a bad neighborhood, or whatever.
For that, being able to pop my SIM out of my Nexus 5 into something literally a tenth the price would save a lot of hassle and cash if it gets broken or stolen, and as long as it can still make calls and texts, it will work for most purposes. There isn't a single app I rely on, even email, but I do rely on being able to make phone calls and send texts. I briefly looked into buying a second-hand phone to see if it was cheaper, and it still can't beat the price of $35.
That said, who the hell said "let's make a dirt-cheap phone OS so the entire planet can enjoy the web!" and then decided to do everything in HTML and Javascript? Even Android is better than that. That's one of the areas where you would really want the speed and efficiency of a low-level language.
Spray-and-pray is a gangster or rebel tactic. Actual soldiers use actual tactics.
Most infantry don't use automatic fire except as suppressing fire - making the enemy keep their heads down while your guys move in close enough for a kill-shot. For a while our main rifle didn't even have full-auto - late-era M16s were single or three-round-burst only. There's some exceptions for urban combat, but for the most part, if they're shooting full-auto, they don't expect to hit you, they're just making it unsafe for you to pop out of cover.
I work with several IT guys that are former military. I DM a D&D game including two of them, and one is also a massive Warhammer geek. They also had basically zero formal IT training (we all went to the same shitty night school, and taught ourselves the actual skills on our own) and yet are fully capable, so they're also big enough computer nerds to teach themselves programming at a professional level.
How many games does a platform have to have so it doesn't have "no games to play" ?
The PS3 was (and sometimes still is) widely ridiculed in gaming circles for having "no games", despite a launch lineup of 6-23 games (6JP/14US/23EU) and a current library of 796 retail games.
As no similar critiques were lobbed against the Xb360 (1,125) or Wii (1,222), we can conclude that the number of games necessary is somewhere in the range of 800-1100, most likely 1000.
However, your link only shows 702 games for me. Also, the above counts are of retail releases, which excludes a lot of the small indie stuff that makes up most of that list. And so we can conclude that Linux has "no games", and will continue to have "no games" for quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
In Soviet America, government ALSO sodomizes you!
It's not available on OpenBSD.
Ham won't be convinced of anything. But the people who follow him might. Ham has convinced them that science and religion are at odds, and many people, unfortunately, would choose religion over science. If you can convince them there is no such war, they'll stop fighting it.
We don't need them to join our side - we just need them to stop fighting.
According to Wikipedia, the refurb consists mainly of electronics and steering mechanisms.
Nye did not win, because he was fighting the wrong war.
Nye argued like a scientist. He presented the evidence, gave logical explanations, and generally relied on demonstrable facts. He did a flawless job, but changed absolutely no-one's mind, because anyone who cares about science, reason and evidence already accepts evolution.
Ham didn't even really argue. He just riled people up for a crusade - it was the evil liberal commie atheists trying to teach satan's lies, and him and his book of JESUS that showed the big bad man up. He also did not convince anybody, but he can count it as a win because he got people who believed in the general idea of creationism to believe specifically in his branch of creationism.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when you argue about creationism, you are not arguing science. You're arguing theology. If it were me on the stage with Ken Ham, I wouldn't bring slides of radiocarbon dating and fossil evidence, I'd bring quotes from Augustine and Aquinas. I'd point out that some of the earliest work leading to evolution was done by Gregor Mendel, a friar in the Augustinian order. I'd use some choice words from Pope Francis, who, even if you aren't catholic, you have to admit he's probably read the bible at least a few times. I'd present a history of creation that matches both scientific evidence (literally) and scripture (figuratively). And then I'd attack his own character, not with the insults of the scientist, but with the insults of a religious man. I'd ask rhetorically how he thinks he can interpret scripture for the rest of us. I'd make him out to be a fraud and a cheat, hijacking religion for his own gain (which, to be fair, he kind of is).
That's how you argue with a crazy person - with more crazy. He, and his followers, don't give a single fuck about the truth. So take them down within their own framework, not from your own.
SpaceX has flown missions for the Canadian, Taiwanese and Turkmen space agencies, and is contracted for the new versions of both the Iridium and Orbcomm satellite networks, among numerous other commercial payloads. NASA is currently their biggest single customer, but they're rapidly losing that status (Iridium has seven launches contracted, NASA only four).
Soylent News runs on Slashcode (although a fork of an earlier version, I think). HTTPS works just fine, as does Unicode and probably a few other things broken on Slashdot. No IPv6 yet but I'm sure it's coming. It's all on Github so it would be fairly trivial to merge it in to Slashdot.
Sorry.
-- Canada
You basically described Orion on top of SLS. SLS takes the Shuttle launch system, scales it up a bit (adds another fuel "segment" to the boosters, and a fourth SSME), and puts it into a regular stack.
This would probably have saved the Challenger crew. The scariest thing about Challenger is that the crew actually did survive the explosion - they died when they hit the water, possibly unconscious from the lack of air pressure at altitude. The crew compartment also remained mostly-intact.
In a similar failure on SLS, it's likely the capsule would also have survived. Even if LES doesn't get them away from the explosion, they could probably survive the fireball (particularly since they're now above it, rather than beside it). The parachutes can then bring them down safely.
In an emergency like this, the LES might be triggered by computer. In that case, the LES would be able to safely pull them away from the explosion. If it relies on crew or ground-control to abort, it would need someone that can instantly tell the problem is dire enough to abort.
I am now better informed, and I thank you for it.
Possibly. Probably not.
The failure modes for the Shuttle are unlike any other spacecraft's - even the near-clone of it, Buran. And any theoretical abort mode for it has to account for that weirdness.
First, the Shuttle has to remain intact. You can't just eject the "pilot area", because the whole thing is really monolithic. You might be able to get away with ejection seats, but that works only for a very small period of spaceflight (probably not Challenger - they'd have ejected into a fireball and coasted up to 60,000ft). They did, in fact, have some ejection seats on the early test flights, with partial crews, but they did away with them in use (letting some escape while leaving others to die was inhumane, and making all seats eject was far too heavy for the marginal benefit).
Second, the boosters cannot be shut off. That's the big safety drawback of solid rockets - you light them, and they aren't going out until they're out of fuel. This means detaching the boosters isn't going to work, because (without the drag and mass of the Shuttle holding them back) they'll just blow past the Shuttle, bathing it in hot exhaust. If my memory is correct, the Shuttle is the only manned rocket in history to use solid engines, in no small part because of this sort of problem. Even the Soviet shuttle clone, Buran, used all-liquid engines.
Third, the Main engines are nearly useless in-atmosphere. They're lit mainly because they sometimes fail to light, and having that failure occur halfway to orbit would suck. The "boosters" provide about 80% of the thrust, if memory serves. The SSMEs aren't even at full throttle for much of the flight - Challenger had just set them to full when the stack exploded. So any idea of "just floor the main engines to outrun the boosters" is ludicrous.
Fourth, these sorts of disasters happen with very little notice. Rocket fuels are generally extremely volatile - even the least exotic combo, LOX+RP1, is still liquid oxygen and high-grade kerosene. LH2 is safer than some things (ClF3 was, and still is, considered for rocket use), but it's still pretty dangerous, and when a tank of LH2 and LOX decides to explode, it's not going to give you even a second's warning. So the escape systems they did add after Challenger probably wouldn't have been usable, because it literally involved jumping out of the Shuttle.
Fifth, the Shuttle is HEAVY. Really goddamn heavy, especially since you're not going to be able to dump the payload during an abort. So you've got the crew, all their supplies, whatever they were carrying to orbit, and all the vehicle mass. Any rocket that could accelerate the Shuttle away from an exploding stack would be itself enormous, not something you could really justify launching into orbit every mission.
Because of these peculiarities, the Shuttle abort modes are along the lines of "pick where to crash" instead of "run away from the explosion". The four post-launch modes are "return to launch site", "trans-atlantic landing", "abort to once-around" and "abort to orbit" - all of which require a mostly-working Shuttle and must be used after the boosters are exhausted.
An LES like this could not have saved them, because you couldn't really use an LES such as this on the Shuttle. Modifying the Shuttle enough that an LES like this makes sense would basically require making it not a Shuttle - in fact, you'd basically end up with an Orion-like capsule on top of an SLS-like stack, because they're literally reusing that much of the technology.
Since DICE obviously isn't going to stop him from blogging here, can we at least make him an editor so he can post them himself and we can block him specifically?
How on earth do they find "pay someone a billion and a half to take this business" to be cheaper than just shutting the entire thing down? Even if the division is losing more money than that, I think you could do better by just firing everyone and burning any physical assets to the ground. The only way I think it could be otherwise is if it costs more than $1.5 billion just to shut down the division. Unless IBM is running a nuclear reactor somewhere and I just never heard of it, that just doesn't seem plausible.
Yes. That's why they haven't bothered implementing right joins, you can do every join using just inner joins, left outer joins and unions, like how any logical gate can be implemented with NAND gates.
I've never had need for a right join, and only rarely do I use a full outer join.
Left joins only, no right joins.
Don't panic.
Several of their "animal shelters" were closed because the government was going to force them to call themselves "euthanasia clinics" because they killed so many animals. PETA closed them rather than accept the more accurate name.
Ebola is weird.
It doesn't spread easily. The virus is basically content to sit in a corpse and multiply. It doesn't spread through air, or aerosol, or even a lot of fluids. Just blood and bile - which, granted, it does like to make you spew out, but it's not too hard to avoid unless you're trying to treat infected people or lugging corpses around.
On the other hand, just a small initial infection can be lethal. Most diseases don't spread from one particle of the virus or bacterium entering your body - most need quite a lot, otherwise they get smashed by your immune system before you even show symptoms. Ebola doesn't need much of an initial infection to turn into a full-blown case.
Given those two things, there's no surprise that Ebola so often infects the doctors who are treating it. But that's on outlier on its infectiousness - it's still not going to be a massive plague, because outside medical and funeral services, it just doesn't spread well.
The line is when the payment goes from "covering expenses" to "generating profit".
The level of astroturfing for Uber is getting ridiculous. I was sympathetic at first, because I can see how the existing monopolies are bad, but:
a) They aren't even trying to change the laws, they're just ignoring them. There are some laws that are so bad civil disobedience is a valid tactic. This is not one of those laws, and even then, when you do civil disobedience you're supposed to *accept* the legal punishment, because you *did* break the law.
b) They're astroturfing like crazy to frame the debate as "the common man versus the big bad taxi monopolies" when it's really "big international web-based corporation versus big local corporations". I don't care how many times you make sockpuppet comments about it, nobody's getting arrested for driving their grandma to the grocery store. People are getting arrested for running unlicensed taxicabs.
Licensing taxis is a good thing. The current laws may be overly-restrictive to protect existing businesses, but the spirit of the law is good. Uber? You're not. Any sympathy I once had is gone, purely because of your PR tactics. I was already unlikely to be a customer (I *have* my own car), but now I'm definitely not going to.
The SPARC processors are still doing some interesting things, and there's been some shakeups in the GPU architecture space.
Not as a main phone, hell no. But there are times when I might not want to carry my expensive, fragile phone - going to a metal show, or a bad neighborhood, or whatever.
For that, being able to pop my SIM out of my Nexus 5 into something literally a tenth the price would save a lot of hassle and cash if it gets broken or stolen, and as long as it can still make calls and texts, it will work for most purposes. There isn't a single app I rely on, even email, but I do rely on being able to make phone calls and send texts. I briefly looked into buying a second-hand phone to see if it was cheaper, and it still can't beat the price of $35.
That said, who the hell said "let's make a dirt-cheap phone OS so the entire planet can enjoy the web!" and then decided to do everything in HTML and Javascript? Even Android is better than that. That's one of the areas where you would really want the speed and efficiency of a low-level language.
Spray-and-pray is a gangster or rebel tactic. Actual soldiers use actual tactics.
Most infantry don't use automatic fire except as suppressing fire - making the enemy keep their heads down while your guys move in close enough for a kill-shot. For a while our main rifle didn't even have full-auto - late-era M16s were single or three-round-burst only. There's some exceptions for urban combat, but for the most part, if they're shooting full-auto, they don't expect to hit you, they're just making it unsafe for you to pop out of cover.
I work with several IT guys that are former military. I DM a D&D game including two of them, and one is also a massive Warhammer geek. They also had basically zero formal IT training (we all went to the same shitty night school, and taught ourselves the actual skills on our own) and yet are fully capable, so they're also big enough computer nerds to teach themselves programming at a professional level.
How many games does a platform have to have so it doesn't have "no games to play" ?
The PS3 was (and sometimes still is) widely ridiculed in gaming circles for having "no games", despite a launch lineup of 6-23 games (6JP/14US/23EU) and a current library of 796 retail games.
As no similar critiques were lobbed against the Xb360 (1,125) or Wii (1,222), we can conclude that the number of games necessary is somewhere in the range of 800-1100, most likely 1000.
However, your link only shows 702 games for me. Also, the above counts are of retail releases, which excludes a lot of the small indie stuff that makes up most of that list. And so we can conclude that Linux has "no games", and will continue to have "no games" for quite some time.