telephone keys and thumbpads are "popular" because they're the only option they've come up with for small devices. and t9 is less obnoxious than multi-tap. and they're both popular because texting beats jumping thru voicemail hoops. it doesn't mean they're the solution we need or want. the focus of this market has been on making things less worse, not on making things good. and all by an industry that thinks the thing we want is a phone with more thing crammed into it. we do, just long enough to tell everyone what we just bought.
You could spill anything short of aqua regia on the keyboard, dead ones made dandy high tech doorstops, and oh yeah - we ran a radio interferometry rig off a ZX-80 - it collected the data and periodically (= when we remembered to walk over to it swap wires and do so) saved to cassette tape and printed the data. We'd previously paid $5K to get basically the same thing done with some solar energy data - AtoD to mass storage and printer.
from 1988. It's still hard to argue with it, it's fuzzy enough to accommodate the things you mentioned.
One of the objections at the time was the idea that you were allowed to command a "person" who wasn't really a person and had to do what you say. In the real word that's involuntary servitude at least.
Of course I wouldn't worry - we'd still prolly treat them better than we treat phone drones when we call them...
Ventricular Hypertrophy - in a sedentary person - is an indication of the (usually left) vetricle working too hard to overcome narrowed atreries, and increasing its mass for that reason only.
Many athletes have "enlarged" hearts - simply because the heart is working harder for the right reasons. For years world class athletes were being denied decent health insurance rates, because a chest x-ray would show a larger than normal heart, and MDs knew of only one reason for it - the bad one. It was in large part Kenneth Cooper's study of aerobic exercises for the Air Force that started the large school of info on the actual effects of exercise on the cardiovascular system.
"A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him." The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way."
on the dec systems - you could reroute output to any device on the system - like the user across the room - and then you'd hear a yelp or see a finger rise up from that workstation or cubicle.. IIRC someone invented the "finger" command to stop us using PIP to raise someone's finger to see if they were at their station...
(1) Newspapers should be a factual source that can be counted on for as close to objectivity as can be. Dialog sites like/. are fine for what they do - but remember what they do: we've been told in recent weeks (most notably during the they-took-my-game-name-away episode) that this is essentially CmdrTaco's journal and we've been allowed to hang out and talk. I for one am not going to consider this a definitive source, as lively, diverse and rich as it may be. Yes, the contributors may now more than the editors, but when the Twin Towers fall down, I want to know what's happening, timely and accurate not wade thru threads of riveting but nonetheless tangential posts.
(2) Yes, I know there's bias and opinion in every news source, but their stated mission is to relate the news as clearly and accurately as possible. That's not so far true of blogs or this site whose purpose apparently is "New for Nerds. Stuff that matters." There's a lot of latitude there. More than I want to grant to what's supposed to be my eyes and ears when I need the truth or as close as I can get. I learn a lot and laugh with the Daily Show, I'm amused by Rush Limbaugh, and of course Matt Drudge Has Saved This Country From Secret Impending Doom Several Times, but I'll still watch a major news network if I hear the next wave of visigoths is reportedly marching up Sixth Avenue.
(3) Newpapers are businesses, and some are smarter than others at coping with eventual change. Diversification is key. Ask Berkshire Hathaway. Ask GE. Some papers diversified by sone smart buying. Some didn't. Scripps Howard bought the Food Network and HGTV. The New York Times bought another declining paper - The Boston Globe. This would be some evidence that the NYT is far more intelligent than bright. However as a news organization, they seem to be as self-correcting or responsive to outside information as the next bunch, which seems to be an argument for/., wiki, etc...
Personally? I'd rather pick up a paper than read one online. Newspapers have been successful for so long because they are basically a decent way of dealing with information for a meat-based life form with hands, arms and unreliable short term memory. They are declining because they cost money. Online newspapers succeed because they are largely free to the user (though that is changing). They fail because there is nothing about the typical browser that allows you to tuck the paper under your arm to read when you have the next ten minutes to spare, or know by sight and kinesthetic sense where that article was that you need to show your boss or spouse. Seriously, the tools for browsing hypermedia are not up to snuff yet. And the ads they think will save them just make them worse. The load time for web pages has kept pace with the speed of networks and browsing - as the client speeds have risen, they've just filled that with more animated ads, flash, what-not.
And try swatting a fly with your iBook or Blackberry.
So it's not different enough from the $200 full kit - a crippled version for not much less than the full RIS. And it's not on the shelf of your local store - you have to hunt (prety hard) thru lego or pitsco to find it. My point is it has to be priced along with things that everybody is willing to deal with - if they could price the full RIS at $149 (like a PS2, which everyone has to have for instance) and put the brick/motors/sensors set at $99, and put it on every big box store shelf, they'd be in better shape.
We're about to head to a competition which has over 5,000 teams of middle school kids - FIRST LEGO League. They were overwhelmed by the response this year.
I agree that they should unbundle the RIS - make a $100 core set instead of a 700 piece entry level,
I've worked with LEGO on several projects - as the coach of a LEGO sponsored US FIRST team, in product focus groups, and with the original LEGO TC LOGO - back when it used RJ-11 connectors... A day with Seymour, Mitch Resnick and Steve Ocko was the most successful satellite telecast we ever did - kids calling in to talk to kids in a lab full of building projects - they went right past us adults to the ones who were DOING - and they weren't just geek kids - they were of all stripes. It was a real eye opener.
They make an unparalleled product with amazing tolerances and quality control, end-to-end integration of the produc's image, etc. But they have their own in-house management "system" and they are a private company - so decisions like shipping plastic stock from Pittsfield MA to Enfield CT instead of from Bayer in Germany won't come from stockholder pressure to perform, it has to bubble up.
They also need to have an interim "company" that can work on a long leash with the Media Lab - there are several derivatives of the programmable brick that never got past specialized demo sites and could be big - Crickets, interactive jewelry, etc...
I agree that seeing Robosapiens eating Mindstorms lunch is just silly from a geek point of view.
They need to make the commercial stuff more accessible, and make more derivatives that can be focused into the geek markets (and one of thos eis home schooling - they've been cleaning up at FLL in the past few years, and nobody saw it coming.)
"selling music only usable in their own player" - this is true if you can't - or can't be bothered - burning and re-ripping. Yes, it's two more steps, but it works.
"If Microsoft sold a MS-created player that only played "Microsoft music..." - but that's not what the iPod is - my iPod is loaded with Apple music, Audible books, ripped CD tracks and all the things I got from mp3.com years ago.
"Apple is the living embodiment of evil because they don't deliver me full quality ogg in a DRM free CD and DVD and and thumbdrive and certainly won't call me in 6 months with my free BluRay / HD because information wants to be free as in air."
"All digital music is compromised crap anyway, I only listen to each band live in concert in the first city of every tour, 4th row center. Please IM me at "in33dskymil3s247".
"iPods can't hold a candle to those myriad failed / bankrupt players, but Apple has succeeded because they have managed to emulate MS in their draconian underhanded methods. Fight the power!"
"Ah, yet more solid proof that Apple will in the ashcan in mere hours - Dvorak is working on revision 37 of his eulogy as we speak - this time for sure!"
The first PowerBook was the 100 - I still have one, it still works, it's a pretty sweet thing for its time. You're thinking of the Portable - it was a beast.
The "post-prandial dip" occurs in people who are bedridden and IV-fed, and is actually accompanied by a decrease in body temp - which means it's not due to a rise in body temp or a result of eating.
There is on top of that a sleepiness after meals that comes from a dip in blood sugar once insulin kicks in following the ingeston of sugars. The feedback loop of blood sugar and insulin is usually a bit laggy.
There's a reason that there's no denying - because science does not generate facts. Via empiricism, it generates hypotheses which can contribute to theories that may eventually be so well supported that they're expressed as laws.
About the only fault that can be found there is Hume's observation that empiricism (it worked the same before, it should work the same again) is a circular argument in that we keep using empiricism because if empiricism worked before, empiricism should work again... But since every intellectual endeavor has similar logical weaknesses if you look closely enough (let me get this straight - the bush was on fire, and talking to you?), it's a choice as to which job you take - poet, philosopher, scientist, shaman, etc...
Science is the endeavor which seems to be best at making sure you know why the sky looks like that today and what will happen if you stand in front of a moving bus. It's useful. It can lead to awe. Not a bad day's work.
So there's a first problem with the creationsism and ID crowd - contending that evolution is not a fact. Science concedes that. Science is not about generating facts anymore than religion is. The too-literal scientist will be unpleasantly surprised when the outlier scenario occurs and the damn thing blows up. The too-literal cleric will have a heck of a time explaining how one set of parents had a set of kids who then populated the earth (the admitted incest of their kids has been labeled an OK thing just for them, just in that time - situation ethics at its best, sonething most fundamentalists abhor).
My problem is that if ID is what's at work, then you have big problems negating random genetic variation, radiocarbon dating, and natural selection. If the basis of radiocarbon dating (radioactivity and decay) is false then the sun doesn't fire and it's OK to picnic in the reactor core. If random genetic variation is false, then these two lone deciduous teeth in my jaw and the two-piece navicular bones in my feet are just cruel jokes played on me by an intelligent but way too detail-distracted designer. As far as natural selection, lots of those IDers have goofy looking dogs - their owners can trace their dog's heritage back to a few thousand years ago (way more recent than even the earliest of the young-earth ages). They got those goofy (and by goofy I mean not a wolf) dogs by unnaturally selecting mates and isolating these breeders from the rest of the population, thus accelerating the rate of change in successive generations. But somehow this process can't occur naturally?
I'm a scientists and a Catholic. I've never seen any true conflict between the two. When I want inspiration in the good that we can do and archetypical stories of the human condition, I read scriptures (as well as Shakespeare, Heinlein, Steinbeck, Helprin and even Charlotte's Web). When I want to make sure I don't get hit by a bus or drown, I read a textbook and check out experiments. It's a case of "Pray to God but row towards shore".
The ID-ers seem to take issue with the validity of evolution, particularly the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection for survival.
Pat Roberston just told the people of Dover PA (who ousted the ID school board candidates in this month's election) that they shouldn't be surprised when the next natural disaster occurs and God ignores their pleas and lets them perish, all because they tossed out the ID-ers.
Hmmmm... would bird flu qualify as a natural disaster? I wish no one, certainly not the people of Dover any harm, but how ironic if Robertson's prediction comes true at the hands of an advantageous (for the virus) random genetic variation and biologically successful (again for the virus) natural selection.
They either have to concede that it was natural, or blame it on God - cuz after all, he designed it.
Yes, I posted much the same on Christopher Lydon's OpenSource, but since it's not REALLY open source I figured this crowd may not see it (*ducks*).
Elgar made a lot of cylinder recordings. When they went to digitize them, they figured it was going to be a nightmare assembling long pieces out of 4-minute chunks, the ends of cylinders are often in bad shape, so there'd be gaps between the end of one and the beginning of the next. Then they ran thru them and noticed something amazing - that Elgar et. al. picked the break points for the performances based on the cylinder length, and subtracted a little - so that for each cylinder, they made their break points a few bars back into the end of one cylinder, and started the next cylinder a few bars back - so that except for the begining and end of a work, there was a few bars overlap between two cylinders.
This is exactly what the digitizing folks would tell you to do today. Except it was all done before 1920.
Communication is better & faster and more pervasive than in 1918. We have a greater chance to contain infected populations than in 1918. We shut down flights for 9-11 and we curtailed travel for SARS. People don't spend two months cooped up in a troop ship like in 1918.
You seem to think WHEN is very soon. WHEN next week is very different from WHEN two years from now. It could be very soon if the virus is allowed to move and reproduce unfettered in the bird populations. ON the other hand it could be decades if the virus has a small population and the outbreaks in birds are controlled and the exposure between infected birds and humans is minimized, and the infection in humans is more isolated than not.
As a biologist, I can tell you that mutations happen at a rate - not one known a priori like dice, but one we can only infer from known outcomes and mutation rates in other virii, and those are subject to the law of large numbers - keep the spread down in the birds and the chance of getting that mutated version is lower. And it's not just one mutation. A contained virus in the lab with no vector will not mutate. That's the prefectly safe extreme which does not exist, but it's one end of the spectrum. The other extreme is uncontrolled infection of a unfettered host / vector. There's a continuum there - you want to push as many factors as you can to the former side and away from the latter.
You do want to contain the spread in birds and you do want to limit the bird-to-human exposure. That's harder to do in a market where you eat chicken soup next to a pile of dead birds who probably feasted on dead birds and bird droppings than it is when farms are isolated, more remote and well controlled. There are no absolutes, you're just pushing all factors to one side of the curve or the other.
You want to buy as much time as you can through any and all methods to ramp up vaccine production.
Then there's the problem of growing avian flu to make attenuated vaccine in the usual way - in chicken eggs. You can't make as much as other flus because the growth of the unattenuated virus will kill the chicken egg, too. Your yield is way down. Buy more time.
You do not want to throw up your hands. You do not want to assume it's still 1918. You want to buy time. So you want to push as many factors in your favor as you can. We do not have a cure - but we have better / faster communications and management of transportation than in 1918. We'd be mad not to try what we know that's better or more effective than before.
It tells you it's installing and asks your permission and asks you what to do about media types. it's pretty explicit. The original post called it a trojan, which in the world of SW means disguising intentionally damaging software as useful data. It does not.
This is largely a result of an offhanded comment in a place with strong prejudices on OS. So please.
Right now, they're basing the scary stuff on the behavior of the flu in the not-quite-first-world parts of East Asia. Poultry - animal husbandry in general - techniques are a little different there compared to the US. We don't tend to ship large numbers of live birds in crates through the markets that are right on the main drags in larger cities.
The spread of the avian strains are also based on migrating birds, which are far greater intra-continental than across the two big oceans.
Remember that health care, treatment conditions and general living conditions are very different in no-quite-first-world places and were very different in 1918.
From the accounts I read, they also didn't have a clue it was coming.
iTunes is used to play music and now video. iTunes requires Quicktime. What would be the benefit to Apple of "sneaking" it in when it's already breaking download records with each release?
"in the classical sense"? you mean then that attackers are going to hide in a gift and later emerge to do bad things?
And that's different from the malware connotation how?
I just upgraded Tunes on an XP box the other day, and I'm pretty sure it told me that it was going to install QuickTime and gave me chapter and verse on the progress as it did so. I believe I even agreed to it in the click-thrus.
That would pretty much mean it's not a trojan, but something I decided to install and use.
I suppose I could have just modded this troll, but I'll be posting to this thread - the rest of the comment rates insightful, but that seemed like a cheap shot.
Just use cigarette loads - you know, the ones they maybe still sell in the joke sections of comics books and popular mechanics, say - one per carton. They'll still smoke enough to weaken the heart, then eventually when that load goes off, the shock'll stop their heart. Now that I think about it - this'll prolly only make money for the bunch that makes those portable defibrillators... Oh well. Back to the drawing board.
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telephone keys and thumbpads are "popular" because they're the only option they've come up with for small devices.
and t9 is less obnoxious than multi-tap.
and they're both popular because texting beats jumping thru voicemail hoops.
it doesn't mean they're the solution we need or want.
the focus of this market has been on making things less worse, not on making things good.
and all by an industry that thinks the thing we want is a phone with more thing crammed into it.
we do, just long enough to tell everyone what we just bought.
You could spill anything short of aqua regia on the keyboard, dead ones made dandy high tech doorstops, and oh yeah - we ran a radio interferometry rig off a ZX-80 - it collected the data and periodically (= when we remembered to walk over to it swap wires and do so) saved to cassette tape and printed the data. We'd previously paid $5K to get basically the same thing done with some solar energy data - AtoD to mass storage and printer.
from 1988. It's still hard to argue with it, it's fuzzy enough to accommodate the things you mentioned.
One of the objections at the time was the idea that you were allowed to command a "person" who wasn't really a person and had to do what you say. In the real word that's involuntary servitude at least.
Of course I wouldn't worry - we'd still prolly treat them better than we treat phone drones when we call them...
Ventricular Hypertrophy - in a sedentary person - is an indication of the (usually left) vetricle working too hard to overcome narrowed atreries, and increasing its mass for that reason only.
Many athletes have "enlarged" hearts - simply because the heart is working harder for the right reasons. For years world class athletes were being denied decent health insurance rates, because a chest x-ray would show a larger than normal heart, and MDs knew of only one reason for it - the bad one. It was in large part Kenneth Cooper's study of aerobic exercises for the Air Force that started the large school of info on the actual effects of exercise on the cardiovascular system.
"A man got religion, and asked the priest what he must do to be worthy of his new estate. The priest said, "Imitate our Father in Heaven, learn to be like him." The man studied his Bible diligently and thoroughly and understandingly, and then with prayers for heavenly guidance instituted his imitations. He tricked his wife into falling downstairs, and she broke her back and became a paralytic for life; he betrayed his brother into the hands of a sharper, who robbed him of his all and landed him in the almshouse; he inoculated one son with hookworms, another with the sleeping sickness, another with gonorrhea; he furnished one daughter with scarlet fever and ushered her into her teens deaf, dumb, and blind for life; and after helping a rascal seduce the remaining one, he closed his doors against her and she died in a brothel cursing him. Then he reported to the priest, who said that that was no way to imitate his Father in Heaven. The convert asked wherein he had failed, but the priest changed the subject and inquired what kind of weather he was having, up his way."
on the dec systems - you could reroute output to any device on the system - like the user across the room - and then you'd hear a yelp or see a finger rise up from that workstation or cubicle.. IIRC someone invented the "finger" command to stop us using PIP to raise someone's finger to see if they were at their station...
(1) Newspapers should be a factual source that can be counted on for as close to objectivity as can be. Dialog sites like /. are fine for what they do - but remember what they do: we've been told in recent weeks (most notably during the they-took-my-game-name-away episode) that this is essentially CmdrTaco's journal and we've been allowed to hang out and talk. I for one am not going to consider this a definitive source, as lively, diverse and rich as it may be. Yes, the contributors may now more than the editors, but when the Twin Towers fall down, I want to know what's happening, timely and accurate not wade thru threads of riveting but nonetheless tangential posts.
/., wiki, etc...
(2) Yes, I know there's bias and opinion in every news source, but their stated mission is to relate the news as clearly and accurately as possible. That's not so far true of blogs or this site whose purpose apparently is "New for Nerds. Stuff that matters." There's a lot of latitude there. More than I want to grant to what's supposed to be my eyes and ears when I need the truth or as close as I can get. I learn a lot and laugh with the Daily Show, I'm amused by Rush Limbaugh, and of course Matt Drudge Has Saved This Country From Secret Impending Doom Several Times, but I'll still watch a major news network if I hear the next wave of visigoths is reportedly marching up Sixth Avenue.
(3) Newpapers are businesses, and some are smarter than others at coping with eventual change. Diversification is key. Ask Berkshire Hathaway. Ask GE. Some papers diversified by sone smart buying. Some didn't. Scripps Howard bought the Food Network and HGTV. The New York Times bought another declining paper - The Boston Globe. This would be some evidence that the NYT is far more intelligent than bright. However as a news organization, they seem to be as self-correcting or responsive to outside information as the next bunch, which seems to be an argument for
Personally? I'd rather pick up a paper than read one online. Newspapers have been successful for so long because they are basically a decent way of dealing with information for a meat-based life form with hands, arms and unreliable short term memory. They are declining because they cost money. Online newspapers succeed because they are largely free to the user (though that is changing). They fail because there is nothing about the typical browser that allows you to tuck the paper under your arm to read when you have the next ten minutes to spare, or know by sight and kinesthetic sense where that article was that you need to show your boss or spouse. Seriously, the tools for browsing hypermedia are not up to snuff yet. And the ads they think will save them just make them worse. The load time for web pages has kept pace with the speed of networks and browsing - as the client speeds have risen, they've just filled that with more animated ads, flash, what-not.
And try swatting a fly with your iBook or Blackberry.
So it's not different enough from the $200 full kit - a crippled version for not much less than the full RIS.
And it's not on the shelf of your local store - you have to hunt (prety hard) thru lego or pitsco to find it.
My point is it has to be priced along with things that everybody is willing to deal with - if they could price the full RIS at $149 (like a PS2, which everyone has to have for instance) and put the brick/motors/sensors set at $99, and put it on every big box store shelf, they'd be in better shape.
We're about to head to a competition which has over 5,000 teams of middle school kids - FIRST LEGO League. They were overwhelmed by the response this year.
I agree that they should unbundle the RIS - make a $100 core set instead of a 700 piece entry level,
I've worked with LEGO on several projects - as the coach of a LEGO sponsored US FIRST team, in product focus groups, and with the original LEGO TC LOGO - back when it used RJ-11 connectors... A day with Seymour, Mitch Resnick and Steve Ocko was the most successful satellite telecast we ever did - kids calling in to talk to kids in a lab full of building projects - they went right past us adults to the ones who were DOING - and they weren't just geek kids - they were of all stripes. It was a real eye opener.
They make an unparalleled product with amazing tolerances and quality control, end-to-end integration of the produc's image, etc. But they have their own in-house management "system" and they are a private company - so decisions like shipping plastic stock from Pittsfield MA to Enfield CT instead of from Bayer in Germany won't come from stockholder pressure to perform, it has to bubble up.
They also need to have an interim "company" that can work on a long leash with the Media Lab - there are several derivatives of the programmable brick that never got past specialized demo sites and could be big - Crickets, interactive jewelry, etc...
I agree that seeing Robosapiens eating Mindstorms lunch is just silly from a geek point of view.
They need to make the commercial stuff more accessible, and make more derivatives that can be focused into the geek markets (and one of thos eis home schooling - they've been cleaning up at FLL in the past few years, and nobody saw it coming.)
"selling music only usable in their own player" - this is true if you can't - or can't be bothered - burning and re-ripping. Yes, it's two more steps, but it works.
"If Microsoft sold a MS-created player that only played "Microsoft music..." - but that's not what the iPod is - my iPod is loaded with Apple music, Audible books, ripped CD tracks and all the things I got from mp3.com years ago.
"Apple is the living embodiment of evil because they don't deliver me full quality ogg in a DRM free CD and DVD and and thumbdrive and certainly won't call me in 6 months with my free BluRay / HD because information wants to be free as in air."
"All digital music is compromised crap anyway, I only listen to each band live in concert in the first city of every tour, 4th row center. Please IM me at "in33dskymil3s247".
"iPods can't hold a candle to those myriad failed / bankrupt players, but Apple has succeeded because they have managed to emulate MS in their draconian underhanded methods. Fight the power!"
"Ah, yet more solid proof that Apple will in the ashcan in mere hours - Dvorak is working on revision 37 of his eulogy as we speak - this time for sure!"
The first PowerBook was the 100 - I still have one, it still works, it's a pretty sweet thing for its time.
You're thinking of the Portable - it was a beast.
The "post-prandial dip" occurs in people who are bedridden and IV-fed, and is actually accompanied by a decrease in body temp - which means it's not due to a rise in body temp or a result of eating.
There is on top of that a sleepiness after meals that comes from a dip in blood sugar once insulin kicks in following the ingeston of sugars. The feedback loop of blood sugar and insulin is usually a bit laggy.
There's a reason that there's no denying - because science does not generate facts. Via empiricism, it generates hypotheses which can contribute to theories that may eventually be so well supported that they're expressed as laws.
About the only fault that can be found there is Hume's observation that empiricism (it worked the same before, it should work the same again) is a circular argument in that we keep using empiricism because if empiricism worked before, empiricism should work again... But since every intellectual endeavor has similar logical weaknesses if you look closely enough (let me get this straight - the bush was on fire, and talking to you?), it's a choice as to which job you take - poet, philosopher, scientist, shaman, etc...
Science is the endeavor which seems to be best at making sure you know why the sky looks like that today and what will happen if you stand in front of a moving bus. It's useful. It can lead to awe. Not a bad day's work.
So there's a first problem with the creationsism and ID crowd - contending that evolution is not a fact. Science concedes that. Science is not about generating facts anymore than religion is. The too-literal scientist will be unpleasantly surprised when the outlier scenario occurs and the damn thing blows up. The too-literal cleric will have a heck of a time explaining how one set of parents had a set of kids who then populated the earth (the admitted incest of their kids has been labeled an OK thing just for them, just in that time - situation ethics at its best, sonething most fundamentalists abhor).
My problem is that if ID is what's at work, then you have big problems negating random genetic variation, radiocarbon dating, and natural selection. If the basis of radiocarbon dating (radioactivity and decay) is false then the sun doesn't fire and it's OK to picnic in the reactor core. If random genetic variation is false, then these two lone deciduous teeth in my jaw and the two-piece navicular bones in my feet are just cruel jokes played on me by an intelligent but way too detail-distracted designer. As far as natural selection, lots of those IDers have goofy looking dogs - their owners can trace their dog's heritage back to a few thousand years ago (way more recent than even the earliest of the young-earth ages). They got those goofy (and by goofy I mean not a wolf) dogs by unnaturally selecting mates and isolating these breeders from the rest of the population, thus accelerating the rate of change in successive generations. But somehow this process can't occur naturally?
I'm a scientists and a Catholic. I've never seen any true conflict between the two. When I want inspiration in the good that we can do and archetypical stories of the human condition, I read scriptures (as well as Shakespeare, Heinlein, Steinbeck, Helprin and even Charlotte's Web). When I want to make sure I don't get hit by a bus or drown, I read a textbook and check out experiments. It's a case of "Pray to God but row towards shore".
The ID-ers seem to take issue with the validity of evolution, particularly the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection for survival.
Pat Roberston just told the people of Dover PA (who ousted the ID school board candidates in this month's election) that they shouldn't be surprised when the next natural disaster occurs and God ignores their pleas and lets them perish, all because they tossed out the ID-ers.
Hmmmm... would bird flu qualify as a natural disaster? I wish no one, certainly not the people of Dover any harm, but how ironic if Robertson's prediction comes true at the hands of an advantageous (for the virus) random genetic variation and biologically successful (again for the virus) natural selection.
They either have to concede that it was natural, or blame it on God - cuz after all, he designed it.
Yes, I posted much the same on Christopher Lydon's OpenSource, but since it's not REALLY open source I figured this crowd may not see it (*ducks*).
Dear Coward,
Thanks for the ad hominem argument.
I understand it all so much better now.
Regards,
Elgar made a lot of cylinder recordings. When they went to digitize them, they figured it was going to be a nightmare assembling long pieces out of 4-minute chunks, the ends of cylinders are often in bad shape, so there'd be gaps between the end of one and the beginning of the next. Then they ran thru them and noticed something amazing - that Elgar et. al. picked the break points for the performances based on the cylinder length, and subtracted a little - so that for each cylinder, they made their break points a few bars back into the end of one cylinder, and started the next cylinder a few bars back - so that except for the begining and end of a work, there was a few bars overlap between two cylinders.
This is exactly what the digitizing folks would tell you to do today. Except it was all done before 1920.
Communication is better & faster and more pervasive than in 1918.
We have a greater chance to contain infected populations than in 1918.
We shut down flights for 9-11 and we curtailed travel for SARS.
People don't spend two months cooped up in a troop ship like in 1918.
You seem to think WHEN is very soon. WHEN next week is very different from WHEN two years from now. It could be very soon if the virus is allowed to move and reproduce unfettered in the bird populations. ON the other hand it could be decades if the virus has a small population and the outbreaks in birds are controlled and the exposure between infected birds and humans is minimized, and the infection in humans is more isolated than not.
As a biologist, I can tell you that mutations happen at a rate - not one known a priori like dice, but one we can only infer from known outcomes and mutation rates in other virii, and those are subject to the law of large numbers - keep the spread down in the birds and the chance of getting that mutated version is lower. And it's not just one mutation. A contained virus in the lab with no vector will not mutate. That's the prefectly safe extreme which does not exist, but it's one end of the spectrum. The other extreme is uncontrolled infection of a unfettered host / vector. There's a continuum there - you want to push as many factors as you can to the former side and away from the latter.
You do want to contain the spread in birds and you do want to limit the bird-to-human exposure. That's harder to do in a market where you eat chicken soup next to a pile of dead birds who probably feasted on dead birds and bird droppings than it is when farms are isolated, more remote and well controlled. There are no absolutes, you're just pushing all factors to one side of the curve or the other.
You want to buy as much time as you can through any and all methods to ramp up vaccine production.
Then there's the problem of growing avian flu to make attenuated vaccine in the usual way - in chicken eggs. You can't make as much as other flus because the growth of the unattenuated virus will kill the chicken egg, too. Your yield is way down. Buy more time.
You do not want to throw up your hands. You do not want to assume it's still 1918. You want to buy time. So you want to push as many factors in your favor as you can. We do not have a cure - but we have better / faster communications and management of transportation than in 1918. We'd be mad not to try what we know that's better or more effective than before.
i have to write somthing here to get posted, but the answer to the parent question is in the subject line. nothing more to see her. move along.
dear coward,
It tells you it's installing and asks your permission and asks you what to do about media types. it's pretty explicit. The original post called it a trojan, which in the world of SW means disguising intentionally damaging software as useful data. It does not.
This is largely a result of an offhanded comment in a place with strong prejudices on OS. So please.
Right now, they're basing the scary stuff on the behavior of the flu in the not-quite-first-world parts of East Asia. Poultry - animal husbandry in general - techniques are a little different there compared to the US. We don't tend to ship large numbers of live birds in crates through the markets that are right on the main drags in larger cities.
The spread of the avian strains are also based on migrating birds, which are far greater intra-continental than across the two big oceans.
Remember that health care, treatment conditions and general living conditions are very different in no-quite-first-world places and were very different in 1918.
From the accounts I read, they also didn't have a clue it was coming.
It's a "sneak" but it's not underhanded?
iTunes is used to play music and now video. iTunes requires Quicktime. What would be the benefit to Apple of "sneaking" it in when it's already breaking download records with each release?
"in the classical sense"? you mean then that attackers are going to hide in a gift and later emerge to do bad things?
And that's different from the malware connotation how?
I just upgraded Tunes on an XP box the other day, and I'm pretty sure it told me that it was going to install QuickTime and gave me chapter and verse on the progress as it did so. I believe I even agreed to it in the click-thrus.
That would pretty much mean it's not a trojan, but something I decided to install and use.
I suppose I could have just modded this troll, but I'll be posting to this thread - the rest of the comment rates insightful, but that seemed like a cheap shot.
Jon Jakobs just bought the virtual space station for $100G, he's going to turn it into a cross between Jurassic Park and a disco.
As Dave Barry is so fond of saying, I am not making this up.
Just use cigarette loads - you know, the ones they maybe still sell in the joke sections of comics books and popular mechanics, say - one per carton.
They'll still smoke enough to weaken the heart, then eventually when that load goes off, the shock'll stop their heart.
Now that I think about it - this'll prolly only make money for the bunch that makes those portable defibrillators...
Oh well. Back to the drawing board.