Indeed, he seems to set up a huge conspiracy theory for what could be a faulty digital to analog conversion
Perhaps, though he quote a reader who had worked for Road Runner and claimed that their internal operating procedure was to prioritize packets based on content. So his conclusion may well stand even if the personal anecdote that inspired it is faulty.
Also, another poster here claims to have gotten faxes to work with Vonage, which suggests that it is at least possible. Given that Vonage's goal is a replacement of phones with VOIP "under the hood", their customer base probably includes a lot of people who don't want to know or care about the details of VOIP, many of whom are the same sort of people still using faxes in 2007.
So I would expect that faxing is actually a big part of their business. It shouldn't be hard to do it over VOIP: just force the customer to specify somehow that this is a fax, and use a different encoding.
I rewatched it a few months ago, and found it interesting that some of the concepts about dinosaurs that characters in the film considered "out there" -- namely, that dinosaurs evolved into birds, and that they were probably warm-blooded -- are pretty much the mainstream view today.
They were mainstream in 1994 too. Even when I was a kid in the early eighties I remember seeing mainstream science programs constrasting the nimble warm-blooded dinosaurs with the old-school nineteenth century characterization as cold-blooded giant lizards.
See, you're actually assuming that they are good models, whereas it's not clear that they are.
Yes, that's true.
It may well be that any old mammal would do, and mice are merely good because they are small (and for breeding purposes, they have a very short generational cycle and large litters).
I suppose what I was trying to suggest was that mice may be particularly good to compare for specific genetic reasons beyond the obvious ones I just mentioned. Though any argument about our particular closeness to mice could be made about any other rodent or lagomorph just as easily: mice are just as close to us as the cute bunnies are, and as the R.O.U.s would be if they existed.
If you read The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, you'll find that recent genetic evidence suggests that many of the distinct branches of modern mammals predate the K-T extinction.
In particular, by the time of the K-T extinction, I believe that the primate lineage had already separated from rodents, as well as the laurasiatheres (all hoofed mammals, lions, tigers, bears, etc.), xenarthrans (armadillos, sloths, etc.), and afrotheres (elephants, manatees, anteaters, etc.).
So, while most mammals in the Cretaceous may still have been tiny shrew-like creatures scurrying around in the underbrush, many of the modern lineages had already come into separate existence.
It is also interesting to read, in the book, that our nearest non-primate relatives aside from the tree shrews are rodents. I can sort of see it: give a mouse a little more finger dexterity and it wouldn't not that different from a lemur. It also might explain why rodents are such good laboratory specimens.
Would a liberal government in Canada be similar to one in the USA?
Well, the main issue is that we have a political party in Canada called 'the Liberal Party', which is what was referred to in TFA. As that is their name, that is almost exclusively what is meant by the word "Liberal" in Canadian politics; when we must talk about a "liberal" political position independent of the party, we typically say "small-L liberal" (as opposed to "big-L Liberal", connected with the party).
So you need to make clear whether you're referring to the party or "liberalism" whatever that is (which can be anything from nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism to the modern conception of a social infrastructure).
In any case, regardless of the definition chosen it would be hard to compare, because the U.S. hasn't had a liberal government (in the small-l modern sense) in a quite a while — at least not since Carter, and probably well before — and isn't likely to have one any time soon. Certainly the policies of both Clinton and Obama are very far from what passes for liberalism in the rest of the Western world.
So, posting comments under some random screen-name gives you some kind of street cred? You are just as anonymous to him as he is to you.
I wasn't attempting to claim some sort of superior credibility than the AC. I just thought a particularly boastful claim (never surrendering) alongside a completely asinine remark (that a culture killed off by rampant disease and vastly superior technology ought to have fought harder) was crap. That it came from an AC was icing on the cake.
As a matter of fact, most of the native American population was killed off by disease, not warfare. So blaming them for not fighting harder seems more than a bit harsh.
I'm not the idiotic troll who was blaming aboriginals; that was the AC I was replying to. And blaming them for not fighting harder is crap regardless of what killed then, whether it be disease or vastly superior technology.
If by forced you mean they lost the war then yes, they were forced. If somebody tried to claim your land would you ever stop fighting. I know I would stop when i was dead. They were just pussies. If they had any conviction we woudl be at war with them today.
Ballsy words for an Anonymous Coward. Hopefully you'd stick to them if your hometown were invaded.
While whites did enough evil, like stealing the whole country, American Indian writing systems were actually developed by missionaries.
I think that was the point behind "depending on how you define American" -- the GP was referring to the urbanized cultures of Mexico, Central and South America that had writing systems that they were forced to give up along with the rest of their culture.
Migration isn't even all that necessary. All it takes is one sweet talking sailor and a careless bar maid.:)
Well, in this case our enterprising adventurer needs to have been a woman (because mitochondrial DNA is female-line): a sweet-talking Xena of the waves, if you will.
Given that this mummy died well after the time of Alexander the great, having a mother with European ancestry is not at all surprising.
Yes, it would not be surprising, but I have to question the conclusions. It is impossible, yes, impossible to conclude from genetic evidence that the mother was European. There is simply too much gene exchange between Europe and Egypt over the preceding centuries for mitochondrial genes to be so perfectly segregated.
Presumably the child had a mitochondrial haplotype associated with Europe, such as H or V, and that is where the "Europe" label comes from. But even if this haplotype is associated with Europe and not with Egypt, no one can say for sure whether it was this child's mother, grandmother, or great-great-great-45-times-over-grandmother who emigrated from Europe to Egypt.
There were many documented historical interactions between Egypt and the Middle East prior to the Ptolemaic period, including the time when it was ruled by the Hyksos. As well I recall some suggestion that the ancient Minoans might have had connections with Egypt, and certainly the Greeks did even before Alexander's conquest of Egypt. And all it takes is one migration to leave a "foriegn" genetic signature.
The problem is that for every scientific opinion that the press reports, they will spout ten half-thought-out celebrity utterances. So anyone with a reflexive disregard for celebrity opinion will hear that opinion much more often than that of the scientists.
We could assume this hypothetical person was able to deliberately shut out the celebrities and focus on the scientists, possibly even seek out scientific opinion rather than wait for it to be doled out by media appearances. But that's such a tall order and rules out a sufficiently large ratio of the population that it defeats the argument of this approach being a strategy for change.
The CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) was renamed CCRA (Canada Customs and Revenue Agency) years ago.
No, actually Revenue Canada was renamed the CCRA, then in 2003 it was split into the CRA and Border Services, after the Americans kept running stories insisting we were letting in terrorists by the boatload.
A joke about strikes in Canada: Air Canada (our national subsidized air-carrier) goes on stike? Who cares, we'll walk. The Canadian postal workers goe on strike? (usually before Christmas). Great! It means Visa won't be able to find us! The Breweries (Moslon, Labatts,...) go on strike? Holy Crap! Rip the furnace out of the basement to make more room, and send all the vehicles you can muster to the beer store and stock up for the winter.
Ha ha! It's really cold up here, and we sure do like beer!
I mean, jeez, the stereotypes are true: but why we still find jokes about them funny is beyond me.
Most "philanthropists" _want_ to be known. They want to be thanked and patted on the back for giving from their extreme abundance. That is my big beef with the "philanthropists" of the world.
I can see where you're coming from, but I think the problem is not philanthropists who publicize their donations: there is an objectively good argument to made for publicizing, since it raises awareness of the donation, encourages others to give, and probably even reduces class tensions.
The problem is the public that is willing to adore them for it. Sitting on a mountain of cash ought to carry with it an automatic moral penalty.
Re:why not spend 1 billion on asteroid location
on
Lunar Dustbusters
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You mean the one you bombed the whole country and then tried to see if there were anyone left, or the more recent one, where you invaded the country, and are choosing a new governor that will give a better price for their oil?
You know, the really sad thing here is that those descriptions don't even apply uniquely to Iraq.
You can rely on $HOME to be set to wherever the home directory is.
Re:Pronunciation?
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
'm replying to you because you were more polite than the sibling. Just because the word "cetera" is Latin does not mean that it is pronounced with an S sound. In fact, in Latin, it would never have been pronounced that way. In the days of Caesar, it would have been pronounced with a K sound and, as the Latin language evolved into ecclesiastical Latin, it would be pronounced with a CH sound.
You're quite right of course, but do you actually use these pronunciations in casual conversation?
Not that I have a lot of cause to randomly speak in Latin, but when I do, I usually say "venee, vedee, veechee", "et setera", "Sisero", rather than the corresponding correct versions with double-U's and hard C's. To do otherwise would usually prompt a blank look, followed by an forced explanation on my part which would probably come off as being rather pedantic.
This story has very little to say about the credibility of Wikipedia as a useful source of information.
It's no big shocker that people will lie when they have no oversight and effectively no chance of getting called on it. It happens everywhere, in government, industry, and private relationship. Wikipedia is probably full of liars. That's not to say that getting caught in a lie shouldn't come with a price, and I hope Essjay at the least loses some credibility with Wikipedians!
But Wikipedia's utility as an information source comes from the verifiable facts submitted by contributers. It is these facts, and not contributors' credentials, that are submitted to the rigorous scrutiny, the thousands of eyeballs, the selective forces, that have made Wikipedia as useful as it is now.
If anything, this whole business demonstrates why Wikipedia's lack of official recognition of credentials is a good idea, and why any sort of credential-based system like Larry Sanger's Citizendium had better have some awfully reliable connections to the real world for verifying credentials.
Well, my best guess at resolving this discrepancy is with a minor enough offence and enough elapsed time, they won't deny you entry in practice. However, they still retain the legal right to do so, and may exercise it in exceptional cases, i.e. where they really want to keep a specific individual from crossing.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, he seems to set up a huge conspiracy theory for what could be a faulty digital to analog conversion
Perhaps, though he quote a reader who had worked for Road Runner and claimed that their internal operating procedure was to prioritize packets based on content. So his conclusion may well stand even if the personal anecdote that inspired it is faulty.
Also, another poster here claims to have gotten faxes to work with Vonage, which suggests that it is at least possible. Given that Vonage's goal is a replacement of phones with VOIP "under the hood", their customer base probably includes a lot of people who don't want to know or care about the details of VOIP, many of whom are the same sort of people still using faxes in 2007.
So I would expect that faxing is actually a big part of their business. It shouldn't be hard to do it over VOIP: just force the customer to specify somehow that this is a fax, and use a different encoding.
I rewatched it a few months ago, and found it interesting that some of the concepts about dinosaurs that characters in the film considered "out there" -- namely, that dinosaurs evolved into birds, and that they were probably warm-blooded -- are pretty much the mainstream view today.
They were mainstream in 1994 too. Even when I was a kid in the early eighties I remember seeing mainstream science programs constrasting the nimble warm-blooded dinosaurs with the old-school nineteenth century characterization as cold-blooded giant lizards.
Somewhat better than you spotted the humor in my post, I suspect :)
I considered the possibility that it was a joke, but it really could've gone either way. Sorry about that.
Oh please... you expect us to believe that humans cause sunspots???
Even if one accepts the premise that sunspots do raise global temperature, the above sort of logic amounts to:
A causes C,
A is true,
C is true.
Therefore, B does not cause C.
where A = "sunspots", C = "global warming", and B = "carbon emissions".
Can you spot the flaw in this logic?
See, you're actually assuming that they are good models, whereas it's not clear that they are.
Yes, that's true.
It may well be that any old mammal would do, and mice are merely good because they are small (and for breeding purposes, they have a very short generational cycle and large litters).
I suppose what I was trying to suggest was that mice may be particularly good to compare for specific genetic reasons beyond the obvious ones I just mentioned. Though any argument about our particular closeness to mice could be made about any other rodent or lagomorph just as easily: mice are just as close to us as the cute bunnies are, and as the R.O.U.s would be if they existed.
hell, if you want to annoy them, just spell color
Yes, well the problem there is that as a Canadian that would annoy me too.
If you read The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, you'll find that recent genetic evidence suggests that many of the distinct branches of modern mammals predate the K-T extinction.
In particular, by the time of the K-T extinction, I believe that the primate lineage had already separated from rodents, as well as the laurasiatheres (all hoofed mammals, lions, tigers, bears, etc.), xenarthrans (armadillos, sloths, etc.), and afrotheres (elephants, manatees, anteaters, etc.).
So, while most mammals in the Cretaceous may still have been tiny shrew-like creatures scurrying around in the underbrush, many of the modern lineages had already come into separate existence.
It is also interesting to read, in the book, that our nearest non-primate relatives aside from the tree shrews are rodents. I can sort of see it: give a mouse a little more finger dexterity and it wouldn't not that different from a lemur. It also might explain why rodents are such good laboratory specimens.
How about Cshaina, EEndeea, Gapania, Jermania and Greit Britonia?
For Brits you might try "Great Britian": this has successfully annoyed British friends of mine in the past.
Would a liberal government in Canada be similar to one in the USA?
Well, the main issue is that we have a political party in Canada called 'the Liberal Party', which is what was referred to in TFA. As that is their name, that is almost exclusively what is meant by the word "Liberal" in Canadian politics; when we must talk about a "liberal" political position independent of the party, we typically say "small-L liberal" (as opposed to "big-L Liberal", connected with the party).
So you need to make clear whether you're referring to the party or "liberalism" whatever that is (which can be anything from nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism to the modern conception of a social infrastructure).
In any case, regardless of the definition chosen it would be hard to compare, because the U.S. hasn't had a liberal government (in the small-l modern sense) in a quite a while — at least not since Carter, and probably well before — and isn't likely to have one any time soon. Certainly the policies of both Clinton and Obama are very far from what passes for liberalism in the rest of the Western world.
There are no links to the actual news story... surely this was covered in the local paper or something???
A Google News search revealed this story which elaborates on the details in the article summary.
So, posting comments under some random screen-name gives you some kind of street cred? You are just as anonymous to him as he is to you.
I wasn't attempting to claim some sort of superior credibility than the AC. I just thought a particularly boastful claim (never surrendering) alongside a completely asinine remark (that a culture killed off by rampant disease and vastly superior technology ought to have fought harder) was crap. That it came from an AC was icing on the cake.
As a matter of fact, most of the native American population was killed off by disease, not warfare. So blaming them for not fighting harder seems more than a bit harsh.
I'm not the idiotic troll who was blaming aboriginals; that was the AC I was replying to. And blaming them for not fighting harder is crap regardless of what killed then, whether it be disease or vastly superior technology.
If by forced you mean they lost the war then yes, they were forced. If somebody tried to claim your land would you ever stop fighting. I know I would stop when i was dead. They were just pussies. If they had any conviction we woudl be at war with them today.
Ballsy words for an Anonymous Coward. Hopefully you'd stick to them if your hometown were invaded.
While whites did enough evil, like stealing the whole country, American Indian writing systems were actually developed by missionaries.
I think that was the point behind "depending on how you define American" -- the GP was referring to the urbanized cultures of Mexico, Central and South America that had writing systems that they were forced to give up along with the rest of their culture.
Would you buy the possibility of a captured slave, then?
Sure, that would work. (And we know from historical records that it happened regularly, too.)
Migration isn't even all that necessary. All it takes is one sweet talking sailor and a careless bar maid. :)
Well, in this case our enterprising adventurer needs to have been a woman (because mitochondrial DNA is female-line): a sweet-talking Xena of the waves, if you will.
Given that this mummy died well after the time of Alexander the great, having a mother with European ancestry is not at all surprising.
Yes, it would not be surprising, but I have to question the conclusions. It is impossible, yes, impossible to conclude from genetic evidence that the mother was European. There is simply too much gene exchange between Europe and Egypt over the preceding centuries for mitochondrial genes to be so perfectly segregated.
Presumably the child had a mitochondrial haplotype associated with Europe, such as H or V, and that is where the "Europe" label comes from. But even if this haplotype is associated with Europe and not with Egypt, no one can say for sure whether it was this child's mother, grandmother, or great-great-great-45-times-over-grandmother who emigrated from Europe to Egypt.
There were many documented historical interactions between Egypt and the Middle East prior to the Ptolemaic period, including the time when it was ruled by the Hyksos. As well I recall some suggestion that the ancient Minoans might have had connections with Egypt, and certainly the Greeks did even before Alexander's conquest of Egypt. And all it takes is one migration to leave a "foriegn" genetic signature.
The problem is that for every scientific opinion that the press reports, they will spout ten half-thought-out celebrity utterances. So anyone with a reflexive disregard for celebrity opinion will hear that opinion much more often than that of the scientists.
We could assume this hypothetical person was able to deliberately shut out the celebrities and focus on the scientists, possibly even seek out scientific opinion rather than wait for it to be doled out by media appearances. But that's such a tall order and rules out a sufficiently large ratio of the population that it defeats the argument of this approach being a strategy for change.
The CRA (Canada Revenue Agency) was renamed CCRA (Canada Customs and Revenue Agency) years ago.
...) go on strike? Holy Crap! Rip the furnace out of the basement to make more room, and send all the vehicles you can muster to the beer store and stock up for the winter.
No, actually Revenue Canada was renamed the CCRA, then in 2003 it was split into the CRA and Border Services, after the Americans kept running stories insisting we were letting in terrorists by the boatload.
A joke about strikes in Canada: Air Canada (our national subsidized air-carrier) goes on stike? Who cares, we'll walk. The Canadian postal workers goe on strike? (usually before Christmas). Great! It means Visa won't be able to find us! The Breweries (Moslon, Labatts,
Ha ha! It's really cold up here, and we sure do like beer!
I mean, jeez, the stereotypes are true: but why we still find jokes about them funny is beyond me.
Most "philanthropists" _want_ to be known. They want to be thanked and patted on the back for giving from their extreme abundance. That is my big beef with the "philanthropists" of the world.
I can see where you're coming from, but I think the problem is not philanthropists who publicize their donations: there is an objectively good argument to made for publicizing, since it raises awareness of the donation, encourages others to give, and probably even reduces class tensions.
The problem is the public that is willing to adore them for it. Sitting on a mountain of cash ought to carry with it an automatic moral penalty.
You mean the one you bombed the whole country and then tried to see if there were anyone left, or the more recent one, where you invaded the country, and are choosing a new governor that will give a better price for their oil?
You know, the really sad thing here is that those descriptions don't even apply uniquely to Iraq.
You can rely on $HOME to be set to wherever the home directory is.
'm replying to you because you were more polite than the sibling. Just because the word "cetera" is Latin does not mean that it is pronounced with an S sound. In fact, in Latin, it would never have been pronounced that way. In the days of Caesar, it would have been pronounced with a K sound and, as the Latin language evolved into ecclesiastical Latin, it would be pronounced with a CH sound.
You're quite right of course, but do you actually use these pronunciations in casual conversation?
Not that I have a lot of cause to randomly speak in Latin, but when I do, I usually say "venee, vedee, veechee", "et setera", "Sisero", rather than the corresponding correct versions with double-U's and hard C's. To do otherwise would usually prompt a blank look, followed by an forced explanation on my part which would probably come off as being rather pedantic.
This story has very little to say about the credibility of Wikipedia as a useful source of information.
It's no big shocker that people will lie when they have no oversight and effectively no chance of getting called on it. It happens everywhere, in government, industry, and private relationship. Wikipedia is probably full of liars. That's not to say that getting caught in a lie shouldn't come with a price, and I hope Essjay at the least loses some credibility with Wikipedians!
But Wikipedia's utility as an information source comes from the verifiable facts submitted by contributers. It is these facts, and not contributors' credentials, that are submitted to the rigorous scrutiny, the thousands of eyeballs, the selective forces, that have made Wikipedia as useful as it is now.
If anything, this whole business demonstrates why Wikipedia's lack of official recognition of credentials is a good idea, and why any sort of credential-based system like Larry Sanger's Citizendium had better have some awfully reliable connections to the real world for verifying credentials.
Ah, I see.
Well, my best guess at resolving this discrepancy is with a minor enough offence and enough elapsed time, they won't deny you entry in practice. However, they still retain the legal right to do so, and may exercise it in exceptional cases, i.e. where they really want to keep a specific individual from crossing.