I remember kangaroo meat (as served by some upscale restaurant in Adelaide) as tasting more like elk (as served by some upscale restaurant in San Diego) than beef. I had the fortune to enjoy the above meals within a few weeks of each other.
I've also tried antelope (I forget what kind) jerky, but like most other meat jerkies it tasted like dried shoe leather.
And if you're really paranoid, make sure everything is running on a UPS. Sure, the odds of the power failing just as you're flashing new firmware are low, but the Truly Paranoid don't care about the odds;-)
SDI worked, it defeated the Soviet Union. That was all it was intended to do. For all the risk that nuke wielding terrorist nations, and even China, might pose, that's a tiny percentage of the thousands of nukes that the USSR had ready to go. (Sure, Russia still has plenty of those, but they are far less likely to use them. We're not exactly worried about Britain or France's nukes, either.)
They'll build bigger missiles or lighter warheads.... The best way for them to increase that number is to just build more nukes,
All those approaches cost money. Lots of it. Nuclear and missile technology is expensive, especially if you want it to work when and only when desired. It also takes time to develop and deploy. Buying time is worth doing, because the rules of the game may suddenly change (as witness the USSR in the fall of 1991).
As for whether it would "really" work if push came to shove, that's irrelevant. As Sun Tzu tells us, defeat occurs in the mind of the enemy. If he believes the defense may work well enough to spoil his offense, he will not launch it. If he doesn't believe that and launches an attack, then even if the defense turns out to be an amazingly 99% effective (nothing is 100%) we have a mess on our hands. (And the enemy is toast.)
Those are pretty damn funny! I note you didn't discuss the effect on the launch vehicle, i.e. the engineering effort to get some of your gizmos to actually work.
And none of your techniques (save the last, sort of) address boost-phase intercept (eg by airborne laser or orbital-based kinetic interceptor.)
1 - That will nicely fry the rest of the attacking missile fleet electronics and the neutron pulses may well mess up the fissionables in them. You basically have the attackers do a self-inflicted Spartan/Sprint (look 'em up) defense on themselves.
2 - Warhead heat shields fail from thermal shock, warheads disintegrate on reentry. And, lookdown sensors from satellites see very obvious cold spots against the warm background of Earth and relay the coordinates. And, the LN2 plumbing (and LN reserve) reduce the payload, thus range, of the LV.
3 - Again, multiple sensors in different locations have no problem differentiating flares from RVs, and the weight of the flares and ejection mechanism reduce payload/range. Flares do NOT weigh "almost nothing", neither does the ejection mechanism. If they do weigh almost nothing, they'll lag behind the RV as soon as it hits upper atmo.
4 - Only "a little bit of engineering". Clearly you're no engineer. It adds weight (reducing range and payload), it really messes up targeting (oh well, if the nuke targetted for Los Angeles detonates in Death Valley, no big deal). Some of the designed and tested kinetic interceptors deploy to a rather large structure a lot bigger than "a few yards".
5 - Clouds in vacuum disperse pretty damn quickly, both from internal and sunlight pressure. And the denser LV will soon leave the cloud behind in the extreme upper atmo. Besides, the cloud disperses predictably, so we just have a bigger target for the interceptor to aim for the center of. (If the cloud is dispersed directionally, again you've messed up the warhead trajectory and targetting.)
6 - Now that really messes up the targetting, especially if the tether breaks (or is broken by the interceptor). Deploying it is no engineering triviality in the few minutes of ballistic coast that the warhead has, either.
7 - Inflatable decoys are trivial to differentiate from the real thing, even if you manage to give them the same thermal characteristics (careful choice of materials, paint, etc) they react differently to sunlight pressure, atmospheric drag (even very tenuous), or being pinged by a laser beam.
8 - An intercontinental missile is always going to be more expensive than a much smaller interceptor. You need to add in launch and command infrastructure on the attacking side, too. If you go the cheap route and base your decoys at obviously non-nuclear missile launch facilities (consider the relative security and command and control infrastructures), then the defender can ignore missiles tracked as launched from those sites.
9 - Yes please! That greatly simplifies the interceptor's job -- just home in on the strobe lights and radar transmitters.
10 - Again, rockets launched from known decoy sites can be ignored. If you want to convincingly make a decoy site look like the real thing, it's going to cost as much as making the real thing.
Nobody is claiming that a missile defense would be 100% effective -- any more than a bulletproof vest is 100% effective. But if someone is going to be shooting at you, you'd probably want one. Further, protective gear (or missile shields) are effective against accidents or single (or few) shot attacks.
Nothing is going to significantly protect against an all-out attack (although the severity can be reduced), the only hope there is to discourage the attack from being launched in the first place. This is much easier to do if the attacker knows that a significant portion of the attacking missiles won't make it to their targets, and that he cannot prevent a certain, devastating retaliation. Ultimately the potential attacker has to be convinced that he has more to lose than to gain by attacking.
There are literally hundreds of possible easy-to-implement countermeasures,
Describe ten, along with an assessment of their impact on both the launch vehicle and the defensive systems. Come on, if they're easy to implement I'm sure that will be easy to do. I'm only asking for less than 5% of what you're claiming ("hundreds" implies at least 200).
I don't see how what OS an application has to do with it.
Unless you know what the OS is doing, you don't know that it isn't diddling with the data every time you make a system call to e.g. save that data to disk.
Now, if it's an off-the-shelf OS, it ought to be possible to wipe the voting machine clean and re-install with some other copy of the OS plus the app, and have it work the same. That's testable. (A pain, but testable.) I'd probably be willing to go along with that level of openness. Any custom drivers (eg for custom hardware) would have to have source available, of course.
Of course if there's any chance of collusion between the voting app vendor and the OS vendor ("if memory location X is set to 1234, then system call foo() will do secret behaviour Y"), then the OS has to be open.
I don't think the state regulators care about the OS but rather the software used to control the voting machine.
Remember, it is the OS that controls the machine. The application has to request of the OS anything it wants the hardware to do.
Of course why a paper ballot and pen isn't good enough baffles me...
It's because of the USA's silly-ass system of having all elections for everything from President down to dogcatcher and local schoolboard members on the same day. (Unlike most other democracies where different levels of government set their own election days)
This means that each voter's stack of paper ballots, come Election Day, would resemble a small phone book.
Sure, it could be done, but that's why the motivation is there to automate the process.
Given that it costs orders of magnitude more to defend against an ICBM as it does to build one,
That's far from a given. There are many ways to interfere with an ICBM attack, THAAD is just one, and is one of the last resorts if other methods (airborne laser attack on the ICBM booster, coast-phase interception, etc) let something through.
The point, though, is that it messes up the attacker's planning. He can no longer count on every ICBM (less normal malfunctions) getting through, he has to figure that only some percentage will get through, and some targets may not be hit at all. This raises the stakes considerably -- a knock-out first strike becomes impossible, unless one is willing to spend the money on enough more ICBMs (or to toughen them up to resist counter attack) to again give the attacker overwhelming odds.
Not to mention that countermeasures against the defense system are trivial,
Right, don't mention that, because it isn't true. That canard was trotted out in the 80s, and some of the suggestions were positively ludicrous. (For example, it was suggested that defending against boost-phase laser attack was simply a matter of "spinning the booster". Consider the dynamics of a rapidly rotating cylinder of liquid fuel (as were Soviet ICBM boosters) on top of normal launch stresses. No laser required, the thing would probably disintegrate of its own accord. Decoys? Yes, please! To fool modern sensor technology, the decoy has to be roughly the same shape and mass as a real warhead -- so every decoy launched is one less real warhead for a given launch capacity.)
The cold-war defeat of the Soviet Union was exactly for this reason: they couldn't afford the spending to maintain their ICBM force at their desired threat level in the face of the various defensive strategies.
Now, you have a valid point with "we're sending them $Billions more resources every quarter in exchange for trinkets", which certainly wasn't the case with the Soviet Union. We could hope that this raises the standard of living of the Chinese to the point where they feel they have too much to lose themselves to start a war, but given the totalitarian government, there's no guarantee. Meanwhile, given a choice, try to avoid buying Chinese goods. (Yeah, good luck.)
Yeah, DPS Perception PVR. There was an optional daughter board to capture video. The thing was a huge card, with a built-in SCSI controller for the video drive. We had a couple of dozen for the tape farm, along with 20 modified VCRs with serial controllers. Hosted on P166s with 64M RAM running NT4, we used them from about 1997-8 to 2001-2.
For what we were doing with it, nowadays I'd probably just use a modest graphics card that had a composite video output. (Actually, nowadays I'd forget tape altogether and go straight to DVD).
I can't remember the name of the video output board that replaced my single frame recording deck. Something PVR, hmm.
Perception PVR, perhaps? We had a bunch of those for generating tapes from stored clips. I eventually redesigned the system to store the clips as DV and used DV-to-analog (PAL, as it happened for that project, but we tested with NTSC too) converters.
If you consider birds to be (even if via dinosaurs) reptiles, then clearly such minor physiological characteristics as endothermy vs exothermy don't enter into it. Sure, if you're just going by the number and location of holes in the skull, then dinosaurs (and thus birds) are reptiles.
But to most people -- and granted it's a lay definition -- a reptile isn't determined by the makeup of its skull but by being a vertebrate that is (a) cold blooded, (b) egg-laying and (c) more or less scaley (no hair or feathers). (And differentiated from amphibians by not having an aquatic stage or by laying eggs on land). Birds certainly don't qualify under (a) or (c), and it's becoming more clear that many -- perhaps most -- dinosaurs didn't qualify under (a) and some not under (c) either.
No doubt much of the resistance to the latter ideas is due to calling dinosaurs "reptiles" and the consequent image of a dinosaur as a rather large but yet cold-blooded scaley (or at least, featherless) beast. This masks (in popular perception) the gradual transition of vertebrate species over the last couple of hundred million years -- there's a perceived "giant lizards to sparrows and pigeons" transition at the K-T boundary, which makes evolution harder to grasp.
(I'm no paleontologist myself, although I spent many hours amongst the collections of the ROM in Toronto as a kid. One of my 7 year old boys has wanted to be a paleontologist since about age four, and can probably recognize more dinosaur species than I can. He refers to the local Denver Museum of Nature and Science as "the dinosaur museum".)
Certainly not in the sense that most people think of reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc). To say dinosaurs are (or rather, were) reptiles, you might as well also say that birds are reptiles and even that mammals are reptiles (descended, as they are, from mammal-like reptiles like cynognathus or dimetrodon, and indeed monotreme mammals still lay eggs).
Indeed "dinosaur" itself is a rather vague catchall term, meaning anything from "any Jurrasic to Cretaceous animal not obviously a fish, bird or mammal" to its more technically correct meaning "a member of the order Ornithischia or Saurischia, and certainly excluding pterosaurs or pleisiosaurs".
Alas, we're pretty much stuck with the imprecise terminology that was first popularized. Consider how surprising the article would be if the title were "Grass Grazing in Therapods Confirmed", vs the more accurate (given TFA's contents) "Grass Grazing in Sauropods Confirmed". If they'd found grass in Tyrannosaur droppings, I'd be amazed! (As it is, evidence of late Cretaceous grass is still surprising, conventional wisdom is that grasses arose in the Tertiary.)
* Put up your hand if you played with Lego (mechano/etc) as a child, and
* Put up your hand if you can appreciate Monty Python (the Goodies / Red Dwarf / etc) humour.
And for those of you with both hands up who haven't seen it yet, check out the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" special edition DVD. One of the extra features is an animated Lego version of the Camelot song and dance number. (You can also download it from a link here.) Even funnier than the original.
The White Album MUST be listened to in it's entirety, with the only breaks being getting up to flip or switch the LP,
..or to skip "Revolution 9".
Sorry, but it has to be said. Love the rest of the album, and in fact first heard "Birthday" actually on my birthday, when I got a copy about a month after the album was released. But Rev9 was 9 minutes of wasted vinyl. (At that point I already had a couple of LPs of music concrete and early electronic music, and while it's historically interesting given the technology available at the time, it's not exactly enjoyable to listen to. And you certainly can't dance to it;-)
corporations are not farming stuff out overseas because they're easier to manipulate, use, get around laws that would raise problems in America. They're doing it because they are smarter and work harder.
Um, no.
From a good deal of first hand experience with such outsourcing, no. In general (of course there may be exceptions), they make stupid mistakes, lack initiative, and work no harder -- in many cases less hard. But, they are an order or two of magnitude cheaper.
With some things, stupider and slower is okay if what they're being paid is low enough -- they'll make it up in volume, so to speak.
At least that's the theory. If outsourced work ends up pissing off your customers because it has taken longer and shows evidence of decisions made by people with no clue about your customers' culture, then down the road you may end up going out of business. But in the meantime those quarterly figures look wonderful.
I own every season of Stargate: SG-1 that has made it to DVD, ditto for Smallville (and Firefly). They sell for less than $50/season, and include extras. (And originally filmed in widescreen.) Trek? I won't fork over for any of those until they're in the $40/season range, (or $50 with lots of extras). Ditto for B5 and Farscape (I do own the B5 movies and a Farscape "best of" set), $80-$100+ a season is just too much. (I'll throw in a gripe about Sliders pricing too -- cheap ass packaging and now double-sided discs -- but I did get them on sale.)
Heck, at $30 I'll even buy a season of something I'd never seen but thought I might like (Lois & Clarke, Remington Steele).
But, Paramount knows they can continue to milk Trekkies for everything they've got (which is a fair bit, think of the rent they save living in their parents' basements;-), and so they do. (Okay, I do have the first five or six movies on VHS, also the TOS and DS9 tribble episodes.)
In the abstract, looking for an intelligent creator is no different than SETI.
But we're not talking about the abstract (although I'd disagree anyway), we're talking about a very specific notion of an "Intelligent Designer" -- who has designed stuff right down to the biochemical level of life as we know it -- versus searching for signs that critters more or less like us (at least to the extent of developing technological means of communication, such as radio) have evolved (or, as the IDers would prefer, have been created) on other planets. Two VERY different things, totally orthogonal to each other.
Unless you're proposing that the IDers' Designer was actually an extra-terrestrial (FSM, anyone)? That just complicates the situation -- you have to come up with a totally alien biochemistry (ours was "designed", say the IDiots), which in turn is probably so complex that it could only have arisen by design, so there was another designer. (Yeah, it's Intelligent Designers all the way back and turtles all the way down.)
'where did the matter come from' pops up, and evolution comes alogn and says that matter is eternal: we've been in an unending cycle of compression and expansion of matter for eternity
See, here's a prime example of the idiocy of ID proponents. Evolution says nothing of the sort, evolution is concerned purely with biology. It's cosmology that talks about the origins of the universe (and the matter in it), and the Big Bang theory says nothing about what (if anything) may have been around before said Big Bang. (Some other theories do say such things.)
If somebody doesn't know the difference between cosmology and biology, why should anyone listen to their opinion about either?
The Dems didn't like this for the same reasons that Dems don't like talk radio -- they don't control it. They like the fact that Big Media tends to lean left (no, not exclusively, but that's the tendency). In turn, Big Media hates bloggers -- it undermines their control over popular opinion.
Despite what they say, the left likes to limit free speech, so long as it is free speech on the right. The Campaign Finance Law itself is a limit on free speech -- you can't take out an ad supporting your favorite candidate why now? Be suspicious of anyone trying to limit your freedom, whether that's the Patriot Act or Campaign Speech^WFinance Reform or restrictions on blogging. Actually be more suspicious of the latter -- a limit on what you can say is more pernicious than a limit on what you can do -- with free speech you can at least complain, and maybe bring about a change.
When black apears white or pigs appear to have sprouted wings, there's usually politics behind it, that's where Critical Thinking separates the herd.
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I remember kangaroo meat (as served by some upscale restaurant in Adelaide) as tasting more like elk (as served by some upscale restaurant in San Diego) than beef. I had the fortune to enjoy the above meals within a few weeks of each other.
I've also tried antelope (I forget what kind) jerky, but like most other meat jerkies it tasted like dried shoe leather.
And if you're really paranoid, make sure everything is running on a UPS. Sure, the odds of the power failing just as you're flashing new firmware are low, but the Truly Paranoid don't care about the odds ;-)
No problem, just store the ID and password in the app as an encoded string. When the app starts up, it just decodes it using the ... Oh, wait.
Actually, water vapor is a greenhouse gas.
SDI worked, it defeated the Soviet Union. That was all it was intended to do. For all the risk that nuke wielding terrorist nations, and even China, might pose, that's a tiny percentage of the thousands of nukes that the USSR had ready to go. (Sure, Russia still has plenty of those, but they are far less likely to use them. We're not exactly worried about Britain or France's nukes, either.)
... The best way for them to increase that number is to just build more nukes,
They'll build bigger missiles or lighter warheads.
All those approaches cost money. Lots of it. Nuclear and missile technology is expensive, especially if you want it to work when and only when desired. It also takes time to develop and deploy. Buying time is worth doing, because the rules of the game may suddenly change (as witness the USSR in the fall of 1991).
As for whether it would "really" work if push came to shove, that's irrelevant. As Sun Tzu tells us, defeat occurs in the mind of the enemy. If he believes the defense may work well enough to spoil his offense, he will not launch it. If he doesn't believe that and launches an attack, then even if the defense turns out to be an amazingly 99% effective (nothing is 100%) we have a mess on our hands. (And the enemy is toast.)
Those are pretty damn funny! I note you didn't discuss the effect on the launch vehicle, i.e. the engineering effort to get some of your gizmos to actually work.
And none of your techniques (save the last, sort of) address boost-phase intercept (eg by airborne laser or orbital-based kinetic interceptor.)
1 - That will nicely fry the rest of the attacking missile fleet electronics and the neutron pulses may well mess up the fissionables in them. You basically have the attackers do a self-inflicted Spartan/Sprint (look 'em up) defense on themselves.
2 - Warhead heat shields fail from thermal shock, warheads disintegrate on reentry. And, lookdown sensors from satellites see very obvious cold spots against the warm background of Earth and relay the coordinates. And, the LN2 plumbing (and LN reserve) reduce the payload, thus range, of the LV.
3 - Again, multiple sensors in different locations have no problem differentiating flares from RVs, and the weight of the flares and ejection mechanism reduce payload/range. Flares do NOT weigh "almost nothing", neither does the ejection mechanism. If they do weigh almost nothing, they'll lag behind the RV as soon as it hits upper atmo.
4 - Only "a little bit of engineering". Clearly you're no engineer. It adds weight (reducing range and payload), it really messes up targeting (oh well, if the nuke targetted for Los Angeles detonates in Death Valley, no big deal). Some of the designed and tested kinetic interceptors deploy to a rather large structure a lot bigger than "a few yards".
5 - Clouds in vacuum disperse pretty damn quickly, both from internal and sunlight pressure. And the denser LV will soon leave the cloud behind in the extreme upper atmo. Besides, the cloud disperses predictably, so we just have a bigger target for the interceptor to aim for the center of. (If the cloud is dispersed directionally, again you've messed up the warhead trajectory and targetting.)
6 - Now that really messes up the targetting, especially if the tether breaks (or is broken by the interceptor). Deploying it is no engineering triviality in the few minutes of ballistic coast that the warhead has, either.
7 - Inflatable decoys are trivial to differentiate from the real thing, even if you manage to give them the same thermal characteristics (careful choice of materials, paint, etc) they react differently to sunlight pressure, atmospheric drag (even very tenuous), or being pinged by a laser beam.
8 - An intercontinental missile is always going to be more expensive than a much smaller interceptor. You need to add in launch and command infrastructure on the attacking side, too. If you go the cheap route and base your decoys at obviously non-nuclear missile launch facilities (consider the relative security and command and control infrastructures), then the defender can ignore missiles tracked as launched from those sites.
9 - Yes please! That greatly simplifies the interceptor's job -- just home in on the strobe lights and radar transmitters.
10 - Again, rockets launched from known decoy sites can be ignored. If you want to convincingly make a decoy site look like the real thing, it's going to cost as much as making the real thing.
Nobody is claiming that a missile defense would be 100% effective -- any more than a bulletproof vest is 100% effective. But if someone is going to be shooting at you, you'd probably want one. Further, protective gear (or missile shields) are effective against accidents or single (or few) shot attacks.
Nothing is going to significantly protect against an all-out attack (although the severity can be reduced), the only hope there is to discourage the attack from being launched in the first place. This is much easier to do if the attacker knows that a significant portion of the attacking missiles won't make it to their targets, and that he cannot prevent a certain, devastating retaliation. Ultimately the potential attacker has to be convinced that he has more to lose than to gain by attacking.
There are literally hundreds of possible easy-to-implement countermeasures,
Describe ten, along with an assessment of their impact on both the launch vehicle and the defensive systems. Come on, if they're easy to implement I'm sure that will be easy to do. I'm only asking for less than 5% of what you're claiming ("hundreds" implies at least 200).
I don't see how what OS an application has to do with it.
Unless you know what the OS is doing, you don't know that it isn't diddling with the data every time you make a system call to e.g. save that data to disk.
Now, if it's an off-the-shelf OS, it ought to be possible to wipe the voting machine clean and re-install with some other copy of the OS plus the app, and have it work the same. That's testable. (A pain, but testable.) I'd probably be willing to go along with that level of openness. Any custom drivers (eg for custom hardware) would have to have source available, of course.
Of course if there's any chance of collusion between the voting app vendor and the OS vendor ("if memory location X is set to 1234, then system call foo() will do secret behaviour Y"), then the OS has to be open.
I don't think the state regulators care about the OS but rather the software used to control the voting machine.
Remember, it is the OS that controls the machine. The application has to request of the OS anything it wants the hardware to do.
Of course why a paper ballot and pen isn't good enough baffles me...
It's because of the USA's silly-ass system of having all elections for everything from President down to dogcatcher and local schoolboard members on the same day. (Unlike most other democracies where different levels of government set their own election days)
This means that each voter's stack of paper ballots, come Election Day, would resemble a small phone book.
Sure, it could be done, but that's why the motivation is there to automate the process.
Given that it costs orders of magnitude more to defend against an ICBM as it does to build one,
That's far from a given. There are many ways to interfere with an ICBM attack, THAAD is just one, and is one of the last resorts if other methods (airborne laser attack on the ICBM booster, coast-phase interception, etc) let something through.
The point, though, is that it messes up the attacker's planning. He can no longer count on every ICBM (less normal malfunctions) getting through, he has to figure that only some percentage will get through, and some targets may not be hit at all. This raises the stakes considerably -- a knock-out first strike becomes impossible, unless one is willing to spend the money on enough more ICBMs (or to toughen them up to resist counter attack) to again give the attacker overwhelming odds.
Not to mention that countermeasures against the defense system are trivial,
Right, don't mention that, because it isn't true. That canard was trotted out in the 80s, and some of the suggestions were positively ludicrous. (For example, it was suggested that defending against boost-phase laser attack was simply a matter of "spinning the booster". Consider the dynamics of a rapidly rotating cylinder of liquid fuel (as were Soviet ICBM boosters) on top of normal launch stresses. No laser required, the thing would probably disintegrate of its own accord. Decoys? Yes, please! To fool modern sensor technology, the decoy has to be roughly the same shape and mass as a real warhead -- so every decoy launched is one less real warhead for a given launch capacity.)
The cold-war defeat of the Soviet Union was exactly for this reason: they couldn't afford the spending to maintain their ICBM force at their desired threat level in the face of the various defensive strategies.
Now, you have a valid point with "we're sending them $Billions more resources every quarter in exchange for trinkets", which certainly wasn't the case with the Soviet Union. We could hope that this raises the standard of living of the Chinese to the point where they feel they have too much to lose themselves to start a war, but given the totalitarian government, there's no guarantee. Meanwhile, given a choice, try to avoid buying Chinese goods. (Yeah, good luck.)
Yeah, DPS Perception PVR. There was an optional daughter board to capture video. The thing was a huge card, with a built-in SCSI controller for the video drive. We had a couple of dozen for the tape farm, along with 20 modified VCRs with serial controllers. Hosted on P166s with 64M RAM running NT4, we used them from about 1997-8 to 2001-2.
For what we were doing with it, nowadays I'd probably just use a modest graphics card that had a composite video output. (Actually, nowadays I'd forget tape altogether and go straight to DVD).
I can't remember the name of the video output board that replaced my single frame recording deck. Something PVR, hmm.
Perception PVR, perhaps? We had a bunch of those for generating tapes from stored clips. I eventually redesigned the system to store the clips as DV and used DV-to-analog (PAL, as it happened for that project, but we tested with NTSC too) converters.
If you consider birds to be (even if via dinosaurs) reptiles, then clearly such minor physiological characteristics as endothermy vs exothermy don't enter into it. Sure, if you're just going by the number and location of holes in the skull, then dinosaurs (and thus birds) are reptiles.
But to most people -- and granted it's a lay definition -- a reptile isn't determined by the makeup of its skull but by being a vertebrate that is (a) cold blooded, (b) egg-laying and (c) more or less scaley (no hair or feathers). (And differentiated from amphibians by not having an aquatic stage or by laying eggs on land). Birds certainly don't qualify under (a) or (c), and it's becoming more clear that many -- perhaps most -- dinosaurs didn't qualify under (a) and some not under (c) either.
No doubt much of the resistance to the latter ideas is due to calling dinosaurs "reptiles" and the consequent image of a dinosaur as a rather large but yet cold-blooded scaley (or at least, featherless) beast. This masks (in popular perception) the gradual transition of vertebrate species over the last couple of hundred million years -- there's a perceived "giant lizards to sparrows and pigeons" transition at the K-T boundary, which makes evolution harder to grasp.
(I'm no paleontologist myself, although I spent many hours amongst the collections of the ROM in Toronto as a kid. One of my 7 year old boys has wanted to be a paleontologist since about age four, and can probably recognize more dinosaur species than I can. He refers to the local Denver Museum of Nature and Science as "the dinosaur museum".)
Certainly not in the sense that most people think of reptiles (snakes, lizards, etc). To say dinosaurs are (or rather, were) reptiles, you might as well also say that birds are reptiles and even that mammals are reptiles (descended, as they are, from mammal-like reptiles like cynognathus or dimetrodon, and indeed monotreme mammals still lay eggs).
Indeed "dinosaur" itself is a rather vague catchall term, meaning anything from "any Jurrasic to Cretaceous animal not obviously a fish, bird or mammal" to its more technically correct meaning "a member of the order Ornithischia or Saurischia, and certainly excluding pterosaurs or pleisiosaurs".
Alas, we're pretty much stuck with the imprecise terminology that was first popularized. Consider how surprising the article would be if the title were "Grass Grazing in Therapods Confirmed", vs the more accurate (given TFA's contents) "Grass Grazing in Sauropods Confirmed".
If they'd found grass in Tyrannosaur droppings, I'd be amazed! (As it is, evidence of late Cretaceous grass is still surprising, conventional wisdom is that grasses arose in the Tertiary.)
* Put up your hand if you played with Lego (mechano/etc) as a child, and
* Put up your hand if you can appreciate Monty Python (the Goodies / Red Dwarf / etc) humour.
And for those of you with both hands up who haven't seen it yet, check out the "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" special edition DVD. One of the extra features is an animated Lego version of the Camelot song and dance number. (You can also download it from a link here.) Even funnier than the original.
The UK Gov't hasn't given us a whole heck of a lot of trouble since...
Well, there was that little incident where they attacked Washington and burned down the White House. But that was nearly 200 years ago now.
Oh. I thought it was møøsë.
And a half a bee named Eric. Among other animals.
Sorry, but it has to be said. Love the rest of the album, and in fact first heard "Birthday" actually on my birthday, when I got a copy about a month after the album was released. But Rev9 was 9 minutes of wasted vinyl. (At that point I already had a couple of LPs of music concrete and early electronic music, and while it's historically interesting given the technology available at the time, it's not exactly enjoyable to listen to. And you certainly can't dance to it
corporations are not farming stuff out overseas because they're easier to manipulate, use, get around laws that would raise problems in America. They're doing it because they are smarter and work harder.
Um, no.
From a good deal of first hand experience with such outsourcing, no. In general (of course there may be exceptions), they make stupid mistakes, lack initiative, and work no harder -- in many cases less hard. But, they are an order or two of magnitude cheaper.
With some things, stupider and slower is okay if what they're being paid is low enough -- they'll make it up in volume, so to speak.
At least that's the theory. If outsourced work ends up pissing off your customers because it has taken longer and shows evidence of decisions made by people with no clue about your customers' culture, then down the road you may end up going out of business. But in the meantime those quarterly figures look wonderful.
Ditto.
;-), and so they do. (Okay, I do have the first five or six movies on VHS, also the TOS and DS9 tribble episodes.)
I own every season of Stargate: SG-1 that has made it to DVD, ditto for Smallville (and Firefly). They sell for less than $50/season, and include extras. (And originally filmed in widescreen.) Trek? I won't fork over for any of those until they're in the $40/season range, (or $50 with lots of extras). Ditto for B5 and Farscape (I do own the B5 movies and a Farscape "best of" set), $80-$100+ a season is just too much. (I'll throw in a gripe about Sliders pricing too -- cheap ass packaging and now double-sided discs -- but I did get them on sale.)
Heck, at $30 I'll even buy a season of something I'd never seen but thought I might like (Lois & Clarke, Remington Steele).
But, Paramount knows they can continue to milk Trekkies for everything they've got (which is a fair bit, think of the rent they save living in their parents' basements
In the abstract, looking for an intelligent creator is no different than SETI.
But we're not talking about the abstract (although I'd disagree anyway), we're talking about a very specific notion of an "Intelligent Designer" -- who has designed stuff right down to the biochemical level of life as we know it -- versus searching for signs that critters more or less like us (at least to the extent of developing technological means of communication, such as radio) have evolved (or, as the IDers would prefer, have been created) on other planets. Two VERY different things, totally orthogonal to each other.
Unless you're proposing that the IDers' Designer was actually an extra-terrestrial (FSM, anyone)? That just complicates the situation -- you have to come up with a totally alien biochemistry (ours was "designed", say the IDiots), which in turn is probably so complex that it could only have arisen by design, so there was another designer. (Yeah, it's Intelligent Designers all the way back and turtles all the way down.)
'where did the matter come from' pops up, and evolution comes alogn and says that matter is eternal: we've been in an unending cycle of compression and expansion of matter for eternity
See, here's a prime example of the idiocy of ID proponents. Evolution says nothing of the sort, evolution is concerned purely with biology. It's cosmology that talks about the origins of the universe (and the matter in it), and the Big Bang theory says nothing about what (if anything) may have been around before said Big Bang. (Some other theories do say such things.)
If somebody doesn't know the difference between cosmology and biology, why should anyone listen to their opinion about either?
Sigh, newbies. (Shakes head, rolls eyes.)
;-)
The Dems didn't like this for the same reasons that Dems don't like talk radio -- they don't control it. They like the fact that Big Media tends to lean left (no, not exclusively, but that's the tendency). In turn, Big Media hates bloggers -- it undermines their control over popular opinion.
Despite what they say, the left likes to limit free speech, so long as it is free speech on the right. The Campaign Finance Law itself is a limit on free speech -- you can't take out an ad supporting your favorite candidate why now? Be suspicious of anyone trying to limit your freedom, whether that's the Patriot Act or Campaign Speech^WFinance Reform or restrictions on blogging. Actually be more suspicious of the latter -- a limit on what you can say is more pernicious than a limit on what you can do -- with free speech you can at least complain, and maybe bring about a change.
When black apears white or pigs appear to have sprouted wings, there's usually politics behind it, that's where Critical Thinking separates the herd.
Indeed. You might apply some of that yourself.