Actually, that looks like the handiwork of an automated rant generator. It's scary, in a way, that we've developed computer software that's almost as coherent as the less coherent of Usenet kooks... though the software probably draws from their works for their vocabulary and sentence structure:)
That's exactly what the Mozilla people have done. At the very least, the rendering engine is almost totally from scratch. That, in fact, is why Mozilla is taking so long.
Thanks for the pointer. It's a good thing I'm not famous or creationists would be misquoting that comment for the next 100 years.;)
What I should've said was that it could overturn current abiogenesis research, by providing an alternative pathway for natural abiogenesis. Evolutionary biology, far from being overturned, would be resoundingly vindicated.
But hydrocarbons only require hydrogen and carbon - that's elements 1 and 6. They might also incorporate oxygen (8) and whatever other elements are handy. Remember that quartz figures heavily in our earth's crust's composition - and quartz is silicon dioxide, and silicon is atomic number 14 (!).
So all the elements needed to make hydrocarbons are handily available. What is tricky is producing the actual hydrocarbons themselves. Off hand, I don't see any reason why there couldn't be a flourishing biosphere in the deeper layers of the earth's crust.
What we need to do is study the dead microbes we're finding in the oil. If we could somehow demonstrate that those microbes died recently, rather than billions of years ago - and that's tricky, because carbon dating won't work for them (carbon dating requires the organism to have been interacting with the atmosphere) - that'd be strong evidence for Gold's theory. At worst, someday we'll be able to sequence the genomes of these bugs, reconstruct their biology, and show that they're evolved for an environment that could only be found in deep layers.
Frankly, this could overturn not only geology, but evolutionary biology as well. Could it be as Gold thinks, that abiogenesis originated deep in the Earth's surface, and that modern life as we know it didn't evolve until some of those deep bugs broke through to a radically different environment? Darned interesting.
I mean, the Evil Geniuses for Dummies User Friendly strips were clearly referring to IDG's book series...
Of course, maybe they were so obviously not an attempt to infringe on the trademark (and were parody besides) that even IDG's ambula^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers didn't take an interest...
It probably has something to do with the fact that the default network byte ordering is big-endian. Of course, that probably has its roots in the platforms the Internet got its start on...
I have very little faith in this sort of testing. To say "yes, there will be false positives" is a gross understatement - absent any specific evidence to believe otherwise, I strongly suspect that the false positives are going to outnumber the true positives by several orders of magnitude. So to the extent that we act on the results of this test, we'll harass thousands of kids who would never be a threat to anyone.
And of course it'll totally miss the most dangerous ones, the ones that are psychotic in the clinical sense but clever enough to give the "right" answers.
In other words, all the negative consequences you describe to armed guards and metal detectors (and I do agree with you about those) would also apply to this test.
I think this sort of testing would cause more harm than good. And in that case, doing nothing is better.
I've known a lot of tech support people who've wished software licenses did work that way - that is, that users had to pass a test before they were allowed to use the software...
Isn't that just typical of humans? The house is on fire and they waste their time bickering about who was smoking in bed.
Even from a selfish business perspective, you'd think that Apple and Motorola would just focus on making and selling product. But noooooo. Of course, as with so many other things of this type, it's the same all over...
Never mind Tanzania, how about the Himalayas? India and China, anyone? (Though the folks in Southeast Asia might be a bit leery of that sort of thing...)
The comment I just posted below has to do with the Space Shuttle. The various conventional rockets use different propellants of varying environmental friendliness (for which I have no data on hand). But a lot of the big rockets use some sort of solid rocket boosters, probably with a propellant similar to that in the Shuttle's SRBs.
It's true that the external tank contains liquid hydrogen and oxygen. But the initial thrust, the part that the maglev would be replacing or supplementing, is largely provided by the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs.
The two SRBs provide 71.4 percent of the thrust at lift- off and during first-stage ascent.
(snip)
The propellant mixture in each SRB motor consists of an ammonium perchlorate (oxidizer, 69.6 percent by weight), aluminum (fuel, 16 percent), iron oxide (a catalyst, 0.4 percent), a polymer (a binder that holds the mixture together, 12.04 percent), and an epoxy curing agent (1.96 percent).
Now, if that mixture combusts to steam, I'll eat it.
The length of a track needed to accelerate from 0 to v is equal to v^2/2a, where a is the acceleration. One G of acceleration is about 10 m/s^2. Thus, the length of the track needed is about 3.9 kilometers divided by the number of Gs.
According to NASA, the Shuttle accelerates no faster than 3 Gs, so we'd need a 1.3 km track, or about 4300 feet. For comparison, the Shuttle requires 2500 feet. (That figure's at the very end of the document I linked to.)
So, the track you'd need is long, but not outrageously long.
Actually, the proposed launch mechanism saves fuel and reduces pollution. This is because an ordinary rocket wastes a lot of energy accelerating its own fuel; if you can reduce the amount of fuel that's on the rocket, you can get away with considerably less fuel total. Less fuel = less pollution. (This doesn't even violate TANSTAAFL, because the ordinary rocket effectively buys two lunches only to vomit one.)
Furthermore, as bad as coal may be, I tend to suspect that rocket fuel is worse on an environmental impact per joule basis. Unless you're dealing with reeeeealy high-sulfur coal...
Obviously Microsoft wouldn't use only one server. It doesn't matter what server OS or even hardware you use, one box could never hope to keep up with the load that a Passport-style system would generate when widely adopted. Obviously the login and other servers would be clusters - just like Microsoft's existing websites. (You didn't think MSNBC came from just one box, did you?)
It only takes about 15 seconds to tell someone: "Side with the label goes on top, metal part goes in first." THERE. That wasn't so hard, now was it? Now he/she knows.
I'm with you up until "Now he/she knows"...
Seriously, the guy you're responding to specifically referred to "ones that ask you the same questions over and over again". In other words, not those that have to ask how to put a disk in a drive, but those who have to ask multiple times.
And let's just hope he remembered to tell them to take it out before putting in the next one...
I believe it's The Feeling of Power. The premise of the story, for those who haven't read it, is a society that long forgot arithmetic, entrusting it to calculating machines that the builders no longer understood. Then one lowly calculator builder reverse-engineers the principles of calculation and discovers ways of doing arithmetic without a computer...
Still, it's sad. Perhaps the Pentagon should follow a short little motto: The most secure box on the earth is one that's turned off. (Or at least not connected to the internet without a firewall.)
s/without a firewall//
In fact, the DoD security rules dictate that any information with more than a given level of sensitivity (I used to know what the level was, but long since forgot) is not to be stored on any computer with a network connection. And access to that computer is physically controlled. So if any important information was even on the public Internet, then whichever DoD employee or contractor put it there ought to be in deep trouble.
I remember being told, once, of a RP contest between two different D&D groups where the object was for one group's characters to kill off the other groups'. The winning team succeeded by convincing their opponents of the existence of a Head of Vecna.
As I recall, to use the $BODYPART of Vecna, you had to cut off your own $BODYPART to make room for the replacement. Therefore, for the alleged Head of Vecna...
Ever wonder why the human body temperature is canonically 98.6 F? Seems awfully precise for something as variable as human body temperature, doesn't it?
It turns out that the folks doing the measurements were using Celsius degrees, and they settled on 37 C as a value. Now that makes sense - it implies only two digits of precision, which is reasonable. But when you translate that to Fahrenheit, you get that 98.6 number, with that extraneous digit of precision. So there.
On another note, the temperature -40 is universally unambiguous in the three most common temperature scales. It's the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius, and impossible in Kelvin.:-)
Giving areas their specific number ranges is a rather sensible thing, really - it makes it much easier to prevent duplicates if you only have a small area to worry about. Of course, it seems to me that if only a few areas are running out of ranges, the thing to do is reshuffle them. Heck, it's not like phone area codes - it doesn't matter if you get a range that was originally assigned to a different area, provided the original area is properly informed and doesn't try to assign numbers in that range anymore.
Yes, but if you've already pulled your kid out of public school, you're not going to have any qualms about shopping around until you find a private school that isn't as bad.
Plus... aren't we either out of SSN's or have we been recycling them?
If we're running out of SSNs, it's because we aren't using the number space efficiently, either that or we aren't recycling them. Nine digits gives you room for exactly a billion different numbers, and the US population isn't yet 300 million yet. In fact, I expect there's fewer than 700 million dead Americans who held SSN's too, so that just about leaves inefficient use of the SSN space. (Which is possible, I'll admit.)
I wonder if anyone's had SSN 000-00-0001, and who it was. FDR himself, maybe?
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Actually, that looks like the handiwork of an automated rant generator. It's scary, in a way, that we've developed computer software that's almost as coherent as the less coherent of Usenet kooks... though the software probably draws from their works for their vocabulary and sentence structure :)
That's exactly what the Mozilla people have done. At the very least, the rendering engine is almost totally from scratch. That, in fact, is why Mozilla is taking so long.
What I should've said was that it could overturn current abiogenesis research, by providing an alternative pathway for natural abiogenesis. Evolutionary biology, far from being overturned, would be resoundingly vindicated.
So all the elements needed to make hydrocarbons are handily available. What is tricky is producing the actual hydrocarbons themselves. Off hand, I don't see any reason why there couldn't be a flourishing biosphere in the deeper layers of the earth's crust.
What we need to do is study the dead microbes we're finding in the oil. If we could somehow demonstrate that those microbes died recently, rather than billions of years ago - and that's tricky, because carbon dating won't work for them (carbon dating requires the organism to have been interacting with the atmosphere) - that'd be strong evidence for Gold's theory. At worst, someday we'll be able to sequence the genomes of these bugs, reconstruct their biology, and show that they're evolved for an environment that could only be found in deep layers.
Frankly, this could overturn not only geology, but evolutionary biology as well. Could it be as Gold thinks, that abiogenesis originated deep in the Earth's surface, and that modern life as we know it didn't evolve until some of those deep bugs broke through to a radically different environment? Darned interesting.
If you think admins aren't worried about zombie processes, then I guess you've never administered a cluster that makes heavy use of NFS...
Of course, maybe they were so obviously not an attempt to infringe on the trademark (and were parody besides) that even IDG's ambula^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers didn't take an interest...
It probably has something to do with the fact that the default network byte ordering is big-endian. Of course, that probably has its roots in the platforms the Internet got its start on...
And of course it'll totally miss the most dangerous ones, the ones that are psychotic in the clinical sense but clever enough to give the "right" answers.
In other words, all the negative consequences you describe to armed guards and metal detectors (and I do agree with you about those) would also apply to this test.
I think this sort of testing would cause more harm than good. And in that case, doing nothing is better.
I've known a lot of tech support people who've wished software licenses did work that way - that is, that users had to pass a test before they were allowed to use the software...
Even from a selfish business perspective, you'd think that Apple and Motorola would just focus on making and selling product. But noooooo. Of course, as with so many other things of this type, it's the same all over...
Never mind Tanzania, how about the Himalayas? India and China, anyone? (Though the folks in Southeast Asia might be a bit leery of that sort of thing...)
The comment I just posted below has to do with the Space Shuttle. The various conventional rockets use different propellants of varying environmental friendliness (for which I have no data on hand). But a lot of the big rockets use some sort of solid rocket boosters, probably with a propellant similar to that in the Shuttle's SRBs.
From NASA's website:
Now, if that mixture combusts to steam, I'll eat it.The length of a track needed to accelerate from 0 to v is equal to v^2/2a, where a is the acceleration. One G of acceleration is about 10 m/s^2. Thus, the length of the track needed is about 3.9 kilometers divided by the number of Gs.
According to NASA, the Shuttle accelerates no faster than 3 Gs, so we'd need a 1.3 km track, or about 4300 feet. For comparison, the Shuttle requires 2500 feet. (That figure's at the very end of the document I linked to.)
So, the track you'd need is long, but not outrageously long.
Furthermore, as bad as coal may be, I tend to suspect that rocket fuel is worse on an environmental impact per joule basis. Unless you're dealing with reeeeealy high-sulfur coal...
Obviously Microsoft wouldn't use only one server. It doesn't matter what server OS or even hardware you use, one box could never hope to keep up with the load that a Passport-style system would generate when widely adopted. Obviously the login and other servers would be clusters - just like Microsoft's existing websites. (You didn't think MSNBC came from just one box, did you?)
Seriously, the guy you're responding to specifically referred to "ones that ask you the same questions over and over again". In other words, not those that have to ask how to put a disk in a drive, but those who have to ask multiple times.
And let's just hope he remembered to tell them to take it out before putting in the next one...
I believe it's The Feeling of Power. The premise of the story, for those who haven't read it, is a society that long forgot arithmetic, entrusting it to calculating machines that the builders no longer understood. Then one lowly calculator builder reverse-engineers the principles of calculation and discovers ways of doing arithmetic without a computer...
Negative karma. Your posts got moderated down too many times.
In fact, the DoD security rules dictate that any information with more than a given level of sensitivity (I used to know what the level was, but long since forgot) is not to be stored on any computer with a network connection. And access to that computer is physically controlled. So if any important information was even on the public Internet, then whichever DoD employee or contractor put it there ought to be in deep trouble.
As I recall, to use the $BODYPART of Vecna, you had to cut off your own $BODYPART to make room for the replacement. Therefore, for the alleged Head of Vecna...
It turns out that the folks doing the measurements were using Celsius degrees, and they settled on 37 C as a value. Now that makes sense - it implies only two digits of precision, which is reasonable. But when you translate that to Fahrenheit, you get that 98.6 number, with that extraneous digit of precision. So there.
On another note, the temperature -40 is universally unambiguous in the three most common temperature scales. It's the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius, and impossible in Kelvin. :-)
Giving areas their specific number ranges is a rather sensible thing, really - it makes it much easier to prevent duplicates if you only have a small area to worry about. Of course, it seems to me that if only a few areas are running out of ranges, the thing to do is reshuffle them. Heck, it's not like phone area codes - it doesn't matter if you get a range that was originally assigned to a different area, provided the original area is properly informed and doesn't try to assign numbers in that range anymore.
Yes, but if you've already pulled your kid out of public school, you're not going to have any qualms about shopping around until you find a private school that isn't as bad.
I wonder if anyone's had SSN 000-00-0001, and who it was. FDR himself, maybe?