If evolution were true, how do you explain that some of the planets and moons are rotating backwards? How do you explain that some of the moons are going backwards around their planets?
Simple troll. Evolution is impacted by planetary motions, such as speed of rotation, distance from stars, etc. but does not grok the concept of 'backwards motion' - 'Backwards Motion' is an illusion based on conventions of human perception. Planets in motion around a star are seen as moving clockwise or counter clockwise depending purely on the direction that you use to approach the star system in the first place. Living things on the planetary surface do not care how you enter the star system, except, perhaps, as a matter of self defense.
5000 Fans Theory was first floated by Brian Austin Whitney, founder of Just Plain Folks, in one of his monthly newsletters. Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year -- be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever -- stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.
Now, 5000 is a big number, but not that big. That's like, what, one-eighth of an average baseball stadium? And you might not even need that many. Here's an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that's how many fans you'd need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you're making $30K yearly, you'd need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you're willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans. As Hobbit sez, there are a lot of people working for minimum wage doing stuff they hate.
Note that I say "paying fans." This is important, because depressingly enough, it's a numbers game. You could already have 5000 people on your mailing list, but only a percentage of them will actually invest some money in you. I have no idea what that percentage is, but it's small. If you're lucky, you'll have a few hardcore fans who offset those merely interested by contributing more dollars to your cause. At this point it (sadly) starts to smell a lot like Statistics 101.
And of course, it's not a steady paycheck. Remember also that tastes change, and sometimes people just stop being interested in what you do. So your quest for new friends and fans is never really over.
The attraction of 5000 Fans Theory is that the numbers, while still large, are very much attainable. You really don't need millions of fans across the globe to be a career artist, just a few thousand who actually care. And: the committment to find them.
I'm gonna try to tie this all together to make a point: if you really like a particular artist and want to support them without paying for yet another piece of plastic, the very best thing you can do is tell other people. Swap those MP3s, burn those CDRs, blog about them, play those tunes in your podcasts. Bring a friend, two friends, ten friends, to a show. Anything you can do to put the art in front of ten more potential fans. Get involved in the quest for fans and help make it happen. (Of course, the artist has to do his or her part, too. If all you're doing is pushing MP3s out to your website, you're gonna be waiting a long time for your 5000 fans to discover you.)
Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC.
This is, of course, the default result of how Microsoft has designed their software over the past ten or twenty years. You could argue that this is 20/20 hindsight (which is probably somewhat true), or the fault of those thousands of hardware and software vendors who wrote for Microsoft.
Of course, Microsoft could have gone the closed route that Apple used, but it seems that would have cost a whole bunch of money that they wanted for other purposes. So they decided to do it on the cheap, and brilliantly decided to let their vendor partners shoulder the cost of development of a lot of the incidental hardware and software widgets. This naturally leads to conflicts.
Now it has come back to bite them. They tried to cheat the piper, and now it is costing them extra. I'm sure that people have heard of the old adage "measure twice, cut once". Microsoft sometimes seems like a company that "measures twice, and cuts twice"
Admittedly, pursuing perfection in software development is an infinite money pit. But you can go too far the other way, as seen by the apparent evidence of their results. How many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC?
An example: If I were to go to a hardware store, and attempt to purchase a chainsaw, but had the store clerk decides that I don't 'look like I know what I'm doing' and refuses to sell it to me, the first action I would take is to loudly complain to management. If that didn't work, not only would I leave the store angry, I would never shop there again. I would also tell all my friends and family to not shop there, either. Finally, I would go to a competing store that *would* sell me the chainsaw.
Of course the appropriate response, to demonstrate your chani saw expertise, is to proclaim in a loud voice: "Of course I know how to use a chain saw! I've seen the Texas Chain Saw Massacre at least 47 times!"
except I find the article was by David Coursey. And of course, the original article is not available online these days, only various snippets and quotes.
[shrug]
Re:Witch Craft and Computers
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I remember coming across an actual online article for computer using witches that warned about the dangers of casting spells while in the proximity to your computer. There was also a section on spells to keep out computer viruses, etc. I sent the article off to someone once, but the email got lost in a purge onetime. I would love to have it back as it would make a great scene in a movie somplace.
Re:IDE drive order
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember certain hard drive brands from that era were not very compatible. Some drives were not not even compatible with other drives from the same company. Thus the odd configuration setups like you describe. Conners was one brand that was weird like that. Seagate was another, but it varied from year to year from venmdor to vendor.
Tapping the area near the connection from the LCD to the motherboard would sometimes make it worse or better... so I thought, okay, loose wire or board, I'll reseat and replug everything.
Be mindful that the cable from the Motherboard to the LCD display can often go flaky, especially if pinched. get it replaced.
This only happens when you have neglected all of the appropriate rites and rituals of the faith. This especially includes the sacrificial white chicken on the Altar of the Keyboard of the Server Almighty. Your input mast be acceptable and perfect in form and function, lest you be pointed out by the flying fickle finger of fate, and your errors are made known to all. Only the most arcane masters may substitute a rubeer chicken, and then only at great peril.
This is a covert government program to mutate the brains of kids. The hope is that brain capacity will double, and the kids will grow up to have over sized craniums like space aliens in 1950s B movies. Murphy says that it will decrease by half. Which may suite the aims of George "Prince of Dimness" Bush just fine. [Not to be confused with Phil, "Prince of Insufficient Light"]
To repeat an earlier point:
Group intelligence is multiplicative when idiots are involved - combining a half-wit with another half-wit does not result in a full-witted person, it results in a quarter-witted person (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4). Combining a full-witted individual with a half-wit still only yields a half-wit. The more of these "half-wits" you have involved in the process, the worse things get.
The only question is, how many dim-wits make a half-wit?
A recent conversation I had mentioned the following details:
They explained that the difference between experts and amateurs who
pour in thousands of hours but don't achieve the same results in
that experts were able to do incredibly concentrated "focused
effort" while the amateurs minds wandered.
"Isn't that another way of saying "talent"?"
...
Mmmmmm, I don't think so.... It's another way of saying, interest,
discipline, and an efficient learning path.
But there is such a thing as talent.
Of course there are many factors that go into this. Many of which
explain many elements of the issue, but ultimately do not explain
talent (the musical genius born of poor and definitely non musical
parents, etc)
Sometimes you get oddities, like that kid who navigates by echo
location. Obviously, no one taught him this. He figured it out, it
seems, while he was in preschool, maybe getting the original idea
from sesame street or something.
I am reminded of the story of Leonard Bernstein working out the
basics of music, such as chords, without lessons, while a young
child at his parents piano. Obviously, the obsessive interest of a
young child came in handy. [I have a young nephew who has been into
Monster trucks and dinosaurs for years, and who can tell you
everything about them.]
Factors in talent and ability include (off the top of my head):
One's own interest, proper educational gradient, accuracy/ applicability of education, bullshit detection, blindspot
detection, practical skill, willingness to follow through, observation skill, curiosity, and what can be called
"interconnection observation" (I.E.-how this thing goes with that thing)
The article seems to be more in the line discovering the value of a
correct/efficient education gradient.
For me, talent seems to tie in with this thing I quickly called
"interconnection observation", seeing how things go together. This
is very much tied into curiosity. The depth of familiarity of
subject matter that goes hand in hand with talent is greatly
underestimated. Constant curiosity in the subject matter helps alot.
It's the difference between mechanically using (in music) a flat II7 chord for a V7 chord going
to a I chord, and knowing why it works, and knowing which chord progression
works best for the emotion one is evoking, even if none of the above.
Of course there is also a certain sense of freedom and play that goes into it as well.
There are also other interesting speculations, alot along the line of what would happen if Einstein had been born an aboriginal? would he had made it? and what kind of a whacky relativistic boomarang would he have designed?
Subject change; This company is based in Clearwater, FL. Anybody else get a sneaking suspicion that this has something to do with scientology?
short answer= NO
the company website is a robopark.com - Needless to say, the site is down intermittently since the mention in wired. Research on the site seems to imply that the company has german roots.
Actually, Data CD's do employ error correction codes, it's far more robust than for audio CD's.
However, in audio, errors may produce distortion. If the distortion is mild and not particularly long lasting or extensive, then you can blow it off. Similar distortion in a document may leave a sentence or a paragraph, say, of scrambled text.
Such distortion in an executable is going to have far more tragic results. Binary data is much more fragile in this regard. What are the odds of the error occuring only in a section filled with comments? Never mind if it is compiled....
Will they auction off the contents? I've always wanted a stargate or *gasp* even better... a Puddle jumper!
Nope. They'll sell it off to somebody.
There are plenty of old missile silos that were purchased by folks. Can you imagine if this were purchased by any big company. say, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, SCO, or Google?
As seen here, there is a famed wrestling fan site which is well known for the vast quantities of spyware that it unleashes on an unsuspecting user. the guy writing the article decided to deliberately infect a virtual machine set up especially for the purpose:
By clicking "Yes" to the security warning, one spyware was installed. That first spyware downloaded and installed three other spywares. Those installed three new spywares each. Spyware was procreating on my computer at a geometric rate!
Six new toolbars showed up in Internet Explorer. Something deleted the Google Toolbar entirely. Three new icons appeared in the system tray. Three internet shortcuts appeared on the desktop and well over a hundred more showed up in my "Favorites" folder. Dozens of processes were loaded into memory. 200 new files appeared on the hard drive as well as over 400 new registry entries. And pop-ups were appearing at a rate of five per minute.
Within half an hour, my virtual computer was as infested with malware as anything I have ever seen at the message board.
I believe my favorite was the AdDestroyer program. That one sat in my system tray popping up ad windows, then declaring that "Your trial has expired. Click here to block pop-ups like that one.". It made a very obnoxious squealing noise every time it did it.
Verrry nice. I believe the Federal Trade Commission sued a company last year for doing that.
Once I had decided that all the spyware that was going to be installed was installed, I set about trying to remove it all.
Group intelligence is multiplicative when idiots are involved - combining a half-wit with another half-wit does not result in a full-witted person, it results in a quarter-witted person (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4). Combining a full-witted individual with a half-wit still only yields a half-wit. The more of these "half-wits" you have involved in the process, the worse things get.
So, in the case of SCO, the multiplication effect has been carried out to an awe-inspiring degree. Assess the number of people in SCO management, determine what portion are half-wits, then do the math.
I think we can safely assume that the majority of SCO management personnel are half-wits.
I've seen this where a tech "helped out" a home user by upgrading her dell to XP pro with a volume license key, charging her for the upgrade, and not giving her a copy of the disk.
Of course, I am trying to sort this out later, and find out that he also took her legitimate disks, because "she did not need them"
sounds like we need to have a talk with the local police detective.
that the discussion of priovacy and Microsoft in the paracgh, never mind the same sentce, strikes me as some sort of oxymoron?
It's not like we're going to see, any time soon, Steve Ballmer, or some other sedate Microsoft exec, dancing around the stage, shouting at the top of their lungs
In which they discuss the royal roots of Brooke Shields.
What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing -- at least genealogically.
Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
The huge number of proven descents of people from common European royal ancestry in historical times, when considered with the vastly greater number of descents that must exist but are not among the rare few that can be proven, suggest strongly that everyone, in the West at least, is descended from an MRCA in historical times. They suggest, for example, that everyone in the West is descended from Charlemagne, c. 800 AD.
It would seem possible that, even with a lot of geographical separation, the MRCA of the entire world is still within historical times, 3000 BC - 1000 AD. In fact, it is quite likely the entire world is descended from the Ancient Egyptian royal house, c. 1600 BC.
We pick them as an example because they left proven descents for centuries, so it seems likely their descents did not die out, and they are ancestors of some people alive today. Hence probably ancestors of all people alive today.
Quite likely almost everyone in the world descends from Confucius, c. 500 BC. We pick him as an example because he is the proven ancestor of some people alive today. Hence probably the ancestor of all people alive today.
The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne
Typically the schools purchased the films for the school system. Renting them from your local video store would not be on the menu. Typically a school also has a small fee that goes to ASCAP, or BMI so the composer's get their share. The RIAA might have other issues with the school dance, however.
Slashdot Mirror
If evolution were true, how do you explain that some of the planets and moons are rotating backwards? How do you explain that some of the moons are going backwards around their planets?
Simple troll. Evolution is impacted by planetary motions, such as speed of rotation, distance from stars, etc. but does not grok the concept of 'backwards motion' - 'Backwards Motion' is an illusion based on conventions of human perception. Planets in motion around a star are seen as moving clockwise or counter clockwise depending purely on the direction that you use to approach the star system in the first place. Living things on the planetary surface do not care how you enter the star system, except, perhaps, as a matter of self defense.
As seen here
5000 Fans Theory was first floated by Brian Austin Whitney, founder of Just Plain Folks, in one of his monthly newsletters. Brian pointed out that an artist who has 5000 hardcore fans to give him or her $20 each year -- be if from CDs, ticket sales, merchandise, donations, whatever -- stands to make $100K per year, more than enough to quit the day job and still have health insurance and a decent car.
Now, 5000 is a big number, but not that big. That's like, what, one-eighth of an average baseball stadium? And you might not even need that many. Here's an exercise: take your own salary, pre-taxes, and divide it by 20. If you were to quit your job right now and start living as a full-time musician, poet or author, that's how many fans you'd need, spending $20 each year to support your art. So, if you're making $30K yearly, you'd need 1500 paying fans each year to replace your salary. And it gets better if you're willing to take a pay cut. In Washington state, where I live, a person working for minimum wage would only need around 700 paying fans. As Hobbit sez, there are a lot of people working for minimum wage doing stuff they hate.
Note that I say "paying fans." This is important, because depressingly enough, it's a numbers game. You could already have 5000 people on your mailing list, but only a percentage of them will actually invest some money in you. I have no idea what that percentage is, but it's small. If you're lucky, you'll have a few hardcore fans who offset those merely interested by contributing more dollars to your cause. At this point it (sadly) starts to smell a lot like Statistics 101.
And of course, it's not a steady paycheck. Remember also that tastes change, and sometimes people just stop being interested in what you do. So your quest for new friends and fans is never really over.
The attraction of 5000 Fans Theory is that the numbers, while still large, are very much attainable. You really don't need millions of fans across the globe to be a career artist, just a few thousand who actually care. And: the committment to find them.
I'm gonna try to tie this all together to make a point: if you really like a particular artist and want to support them without paying for yet another piece of plastic, the very best thing you can do is tell other people. Swap those MP3s, burn those CDRs, blog about them, play those tunes in your podcasts. Bring a friend, two friends, ten friends, to a show. Anything you can do to put the art in front of ten more potential fans. Get involved in the quest for fans and help make it happen. (Of course, the artist has to do his or her part, too. If all you're doing is pushing MP3s out to your website, you're gonna be waiting a long time for your 5000 fans to discover you.)
Mind you, "expected" is relative given how many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC.
This is, of course, the default result of how Microsoft has designed their software over the past ten or twenty years. You could argue that this is 20/20 hindsight (which is probably somewhat true), or the fault of those thousands of hardware and software vendors who wrote for Microsoft.
Of course, Microsoft could have gone the closed route that Apple used, but it seems that would have cost a whole bunch of money that they wanted for other purposes. So they decided to do it on the cheap, and brilliantly decided to let their vendor partners shoulder the cost of development of a lot of the incidental hardware and software widgets. This naturally leads to conflicts.
Now it has come back to bite them. They tried to cheat the piper, and now it is costing them extra. I'm sure that people have heard of the old adage "measure twice, cut once". Microsoft sometimes seems like a company that "measures twice, and cuts twice"
Admittedly, pursuing perfection in software development is an infinite money pit. But you can go too far the other way, as seen by the apparent evidence of their results. How many users regard their frequent crashes as normal operation for a PC?
An example: If I were to go to a hardware store, and attempt to purchase a chainsaw, but had the store clerk decides that I don't 'look like I know what I'm doing' and refuses to sell it to me, the first action I would take is to loudly complain to management. If that didn't work, not only would I leave the store angry, I would never shop there again. I would also tell all my friends and family to not shop there, either. Finally, I would go to a competing store that *would* sell me the chainsaw.
Of course the appropriate response, to demonstrate your chani saw expertise, is to proclaim in a loud voice: "Of course I know how to use a chain saw! I've seen the Texas Chain Saw Massacre at least 47 times!"
[shrug]
Found a reference to it: John Dvorak had a funny discussion about the article here
I remember coming across an actual online article for computer using witches that warned about the dangers of casting spells while in the proximity to your computer. There was also a section on spells to keep out computer viruses, etc. I sent the article off to someone once, but the email got lost in a purge onetime. I would love to have it back as it would make a great scene in a movie somplace.
I remember certain hard drive brands from that era were not very compatible. Some drives were not not even compatible with other drives from the same company. Thus the odd configuration setups like you describe. Conners was one brand that was weird like that. Seagate was another, but it varied from year to year from venmdor to vendor.
Tapping the area near the connection from the LCD to the motherboard would sometimes make it worse or better... so I thought, okay, loose wire or board, I'll reseat and replug everything.
Be mindful that the cable from the Motherboard to the LCD display can often go flaky, especially if pinched. get it replaced.
You go to the scary devil monastery, and your spiral into hell starts when you go Down, not Across .
This only happens when you have neglected all of the appropriate rites and rituals of the faith. This especially includes the sacrificial white chicken on the Altar of the Keyboard of the Server Almighty. Your input mast be acceptable and perfect in form and function, lest you be pointed out by the flying fickle finger of fate, and your errors are made known to all. Only the most arcane masters may substitute a rubeer chicken, and then only at great peril.
This is a covert government program to mutate the brains of kids. The hope is that brain capacity will double, and the kids will grow up to have over sized craniums like space aliens in 1950s B movies. Murphy says that it will decrease by half. Which may suite the aims of George "Prince of Dimness" Bush just fine. [Not to be confused with Phil, "Prince of Insufficient Light"]
To repeat an earlier point:
Group intelligence is multiplicative when idiots are involved - combining a half-wit with another half-wit does not result in a full-witted person, it results in a quarter-witted person (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4). Combining a full-witted individual with a half-wit still only yields a half-wit. The more of these "half-wits" you have involved in the process, the worse things get.
The only question is, how many dim-wits make a half-wit?
Although I expected something a little bit more substantial in a web presence.
Maybe even a geocities webpage, for cryin out loud.
A recent conversation I had mentioned the following details:
...
They explained that the difference between experts and amateurs who pour in thousands of hours but don't achieve the same results in that experts were able to do incredibly concentrated "focused effort" while the amateurs minds wandered.
"Isn't that another way of saying "talent"?"
Mmmmmm, I don't think so.... It's another way of saying, interest, discipline, and an efficient learning path.
But there is such a thing as talent.
Of course there are many factors that go into this. Many of which explain many elements of the issue, but ultimately do not explain talent (the musical genius born of poor and definitely non musical parents, etc)
Sometimes you get oddities, like that kid who navigates by echo location. Obviously, no one taught him this. He figured it out, it seems, while he was in preschool, maybe getting the original idea from sesame street or something.
I am reminded of the story of Leonard Bernstein working out the basics of music, such as chords, without lessons, while a young child at his parents piano. Obviously, the obsessive interest of a young child came in handy. [I have a young nephew who has been into Monster trucks and dinosaurs for years, and who can tell you everything about them.]
Factors in talent and ability include (off the top of my head):
One's own interest, proper educational gradient, accuracy/ applicability of education, bullshit detection, blindspot detection, practical skill, willingness to follow through, observation skill, curiosity, and what can be called "interconnection observation" (I.E.-how this thing goes with that thing)
The article seems to be more in the line discovering the value of a correct/efficient education gradient.
For me, talent seems to tie in with this thing I quickly called "interconnection observation", seeing how things go together. This is very much tied into curiosity. The depth of familiarity of subject matter that goes hand in hand with talent is greatly underestimated. Constant curiosity in the subject matter helps alot.
It's the difference between mechanically using (in music) a flat II7 chord for a V7 chord going to a I chord, and knowing why it works, and knowing which chord progression works best for the emotion one is evoking, even if none of the above.
Of course there is also a certain sense of freedom and play that goes into it as well.
There are also other interesting speculations, alot along the line of what would happen if Einstein had been born an aboriginal? would he had made it? and what kind of a whacky relativistic boomarang would he have designed?
Subject change; This company is based in Clearwater, FL. Anybody else get a sneaking suspicion that this has something to do with scientology?
short answer= NO
the company website is a robopark.com - Needless to say, the site is down intermittently since the mention in wired. Research on the site seems to imply that the company has german roots.
side note
Demographics for Clearwater
total population = 108,787
as seen here: About 6,850 Scientology followers have moved to the Clearwater area, joining the church's 1,400 uniformed employees.
See also this report on religios demographics is Pinellas County
Not everyone in Clearwater is a scientologist. Of course you are free to your opinion. But you seem to panic too easily.
Google is your friend.
If someone is claiming that, they're WAY off. Web != internet.
I wish I still had my mod points.
note that I said "never mind if it is compiled". Thus allowing for the difference between a perl script, etc. and a compiled binary.
Actually, Data CD's do employ error correction codes, it's far more robust than for audio CD's.
However, in audio, errors may produce distortion. If the distortion is mild and not particularly long lasting or extensive, then you can blow it off. Similar distortion in a document may leave a sentence or a paragraph, say, of scrambled text.
Such distortion in an executable is going to have far more tragic results. Binary data is much more fragile in this regard. What are the odds of the error occuring only in a section filled with comments? Never mind if it is compiled....
Nope. They'll sell it off to somebody.
There are plenty of old missile silos that were purchased by folks. Can you imagine if this were purchased by any big company. say, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, SCO, or Google?
Can you imagine what they would do?
Engineering Tips is the website with the original online discussion, as referenced in the DesignNews.com story
link to original discussion
link to related items
Unrelated, but possibly of interest:
Link to their Computer Engineers area
As seen here, there is a famed wrestling fan site which is well known for the vast quantities of spyware that it unleashes on an unsuspecting user. the guy writing the article decided to deliberately infect a virtual machine set up especially for the purpose:
By clicking "Yes" to the security warning, one spyware was installed. That first spyware downloaded and installed three other spywares. Those installed three new spywares each. Spyware was procreating on my computer at a geometric rate!
Six new toolbars showed up in Internet Explorer. Something deleted the Google Toolbar entirely. Three new icons appeared in the system tray. Three internet shortcuts appeared on the desktop and well over a hundred more showed up in my "Favorites" folder. Dozens of processes were loaded into memory. 200 new files appeared on the hard drive as well as over 400 new registry entries. And pop-ups were appearing at a rate of five per minute.
Within half an hour, my virtual computer was as infested with malware as anything I have ever seen at the message board.
I believe my favorite was the AdDestroyer program. That one sat in my system tray popping up ad windows, then declaring that "Your trial has expired. Click here to block pop-ups like that one.". It made a very obnoxious squealing noise every time it did it.
Verrry nice. I believe the Federal Trade Commission sued a company last year for doing that.
Once I had decided that all the spyware that was going to be installed was installed, I set about trying to remove it all.
Oh boy.
Group intelligence is multiplicative when idiots are involved - combining a half-wit with another half-wit does not result in a full-witted person, it results in a quarter-witted person (1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4). Combining a full-witted individual with a half-wit still only yields a half-wit. The more of these "half-wits" you have involved in the process, the worse things get.
So, in the case of SCO, the multiplication effect has been carried out to an awe-inspiring degree. Assess the number of people in SCO management, determine what portion are half-wits, then do the math.
I think we can safely assume that the majority of SCO management personnel are half-wits.
Of course, I am trying to sort this out later, and find out that he also took her legitimate disks, because "she did not need them"
sounds like we need to have a talk with the local police detective.
It's not like we're going to see, any time soon, Steve Ballmer, or some other sedate Microsoft exec, dancing around the stage, shouting at the top of their lungs
"Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! Privacy! "
but stranger things have happened.
Genealogists discover royal roots on every family tree
In which they discuss the royal roots of Brooke Shields.
What is it about Brooke? Well, nothing -- at least genealogically.
Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
then there is this old link to the notion of the Most Recent Common Ancestor of Mankind.
The huge number of proven descents of people from common European royal ancestry in historical times, when considered with the vastly greater number of descents that must exist but are not among the rare few that can be proven, suggest strongly that everyone, in the West at least, is descended from an MRCA in historical times. They suggest, for example, that everyone in the West is descended from Charlemagne, c. 800 AD.
It would seem possible that, even with a lot of geographical separation, the MRCA of the entire world is still within historical times, 3000 BC - 1000 AD. In fact, it is quite likely the entire world is descended from the Ancient Egyptian royal house, c. 1600 BC.
We pick them as an example because they left proven descents for centuries, so it seems likely their descents did not die out, and they are ancestors of some people alive today. Hence probably ancestors of all people alive today.
Quite likely almost everyone in the world descends from Confucius, c. 500 BC. We pick him as an example because he is the proven ancestor of some people alive today. Hence probably the ancestor of all people alive today.
Atlantic Magazine, among others, had a story on this a few years back.
The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne
Typically the schools purchased the films for the school system. Renting them from your local video store would not be on the menu. Typically a school also has a small fee that goes to ASCAP, or BMI so the composer's get their share. The RIAA might have other issues with the school dance, however.