Re:Plausible explanation -- though improbable
on
Living Without a Pulse
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
From the quoted article: (3) Only one major system-level change of function, and four minor shifts of function, need be invoked to explain the origin of the flagellum; this involves five subsystem-level cooption events.
Only four minor shifts of function - all in the correct order, and only after all the requisite pieces have been evolved into place. Doesn't that sound statistically implausible? Doesn't that sound at all like constructing a remotely possible chain of events after the fact to fit the observed end state?
I call on Occam's Razor, and deduce that it's much more likely that the flagellum was created in place, rather than evolved through a bizarre sequence of highly improbable random events.
You are free to draw your own conclusions as to the nature of the creator.
I've got to start reading the submitter's name more often. Every time I click through on a story Roland's submitted, I feel I've been duped. You're welcome, RP.
Is there any way I can configure my slash options to ignore his stories altogether?
Google is currently a corporation, with shareholders, and a fixed number of shares. About 24.6 million of those shares are sitting in Google's treasury waiting to be sold in the IPO. I'm guessing a number of shares will remain in the treasury, and know that there are significant outside ownership positions already. AOL and Yahoo together own 13 million shares, and the founders together own about 87 million shares. The current market value of the company ($36 Billion, according to the Yahoo! story) is based on total of about 268M shares at $135 each.
It would be possible to do a 10-for-one split, which would produce 2.68 Billion shares, each valued at $10 to $13. But it's unneccessary and expensive for the company to do so. Google will be able to sell its 24.6 million IPO shares at a "fair" value, which should allow current shareholders to acheive a handsome profit.
Don't be surprised if, within the year, there are some splits - just don't expect it before an IPO.
Re:Busting him for violating sanctions
on
Bobby Fischer Found
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think that it's the extremism that the "US rails against." It's the actions taken by those extremists.
Every now and again, a "fundamentalist Christian" extremist will shoot an abortion doctor, or keep a harem of 30 wives in a compound in Texas. The railing against Muslim extremists really ramped up when they killed several thousand people a couple of years ago in New York.
I'd go out on a limb and venture that there would be similar railing if Linux zealots started bombing Fortune 1000 companies that employ Microsoft OS fileservers.
Current IDE drive prices are not quite competitive with DVD storage, on a cost per GB basis.
My last IDE drive purchase was last month - 250GB IDE for $169 (CompUSA, instant rebate.) This is about $0.68 per GB, compared with a marginal cost of about $0.25 for DVD (4.6GB variety).
ACG is the "Annual Compound Growth" in my sample - the rate at which the GB/$ is growing annually.
Assuming an annual growth of just 1.50 (50%) is maintained, in ten years $150 will buy a 10TB drive. That's over 1000 9GB DVDs.
I think that to assume ANY storage technology currently in use today will still be in use in 10 years is a bad assumption. My analysis is therefore flawed as well; for $150 we'll probably be able to buy 100TB of ultra-fast holographic or biomechanical memory in ten years.
In ten years, the only people buying IDE drives will be the Amiga enthusiasts.
I was a HoTMaiL user before Microsoft acquired it. It was a fast, easy-to-use service back then.
I was deeply disappointed when it was acquired, but couldn't complain too loudly because it was, after all, free. But I vowed right then and there to NEVER rely on a free service for vital communication again. I learned enough *nix system administration to set up a mail server and register my own domain. I still maintain the Hotmail account as my "junk" account; it's convenient to have, but I wouldn't cry if they took it away.
I know now that my email preferred address will never change, and that the provider will never be acquired.
As of about ten years ago, air travelers in the US were informed that we were to leave our privacy behind at the security checkpoint. After presenting proof of id, submitting all bags for inspection, and stepping through a detector, the traveler knew that the "authorities" had a record of who they were, where they were going, and what they were (and weren't) carrying.
Face it. If you want privacy in your travel, you have two choices: avoid airports, or develop a very good false identity.
Given that I've left my privacy behind at the security checkpoint, anything that makes it easier for the airlines/airports to handle and transport my bags back to me at my final destination can't be seen as anything but a positive development.
How long do you really think it would take to reverse engineer a BIOS?
If Microsoft were to be successful in implementing deals with the BIOS makers to require their "trusted" BIOS, the whole system would be dependent on some sort authentication call. It seems to me it would be trivial to discover those calls, and hard-code the "trusted" response into the open BIOS. If it's a true hash calculation on the revised BIOS, that makes it trickier, but finding the right "extra bits" to come up with the same hash would be an interesting distributed computing problem.
It's axiomatic that any software designed to limit freedom of information will be circumvented sooner rather than later. This one just seems particularly easy.
Censorship refers (I assume, in your context) to the actions of a (governmental) body to limit the freedom of speech. If a free market chooses not to purchase or endorse a film, that's the market at work.
It's perfectly legal for Moore to produce, market, and show off his film. No governmental body is stopping him. Disney initially thought that they couldn't sell it, or that it disagreed with their philosophy, or whatever... it doesn't matter what their reasoning is -- they didn't want to distribute it. They're under no obligation to.
Disney is in business to make money. They felt that Moore's film would not help them do that. They've since changed their mind. I can't imagine that all of the free publicity the film's gotten from the (liberal?) media had anything to do with the projected profitability.
I wish Moore well. He's a successful filmmaker. His typical message is a deliberate argument against the conservative philosophy, party, and elected officials. This is the opposite of censorship at work. Just as it's Moore's right and obligation to present this message, it's the right and obligation of the right wing to trash talk it. To portray Moore as a victim of censorship by the right wing is highly disingenuous.
Here in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul Minnesota) we have one internet grocer, SimonDelivers competing in a particularly tight grocery market. Here's my findings after a year of internet groceries: (We're a family of five, including three kids age 5. 5. and 4.)
Cost: on a per item basis, significantly higher. I estimate that we spend 5% more, on average, per item than if we were shopping brick and mortar. We'd be spending even more if we weren't watching for sale items - it still pays off to "stock up" on pantry items when they go on sale.
True cost on a weekly basis, significantly lower. Purchasing from my desk at work or at home in the office, I only buy what we need. We don't buy junk food any more. We get really good produce, with little wasted, as we tend to buy less each week. (I don't know why this is... It's as though you feel pressured to buy more in the brick and mortar grocery store. Is it because of the effective visual marketing, or because of the desire to eliminate a return trip next week? I hope I never find out.) Traditional grocery shopping used to be 3x per month, at $185 per trip. (Thanks for the stats, Quicken.) Simon Delivers is 1x per week (every Thursday night) for $80. Meet the $80 minimum, and delivery is only $5.00. We usually have to buy a few canned goods to get it up to $80. Where did all that extra money go? We used to buy junk food. And we used to throw out a lot of produce. Now, our refrigerator looks bare, but there's always enough quality food in there for the week.
Time no brainer here. We spend about 1/10th the time grocery shopping that we used to. After a couple of months, everything you're ever going to order, you've already ordered. It's on your "favorites" list. Just browse down your favorites list, noticing items on sale for stock-ups, and click to add to the shopping cart. Literally, ten minutes later, you're done.
Delivery Simon Delivers brings the groceries out in big totes, with both refrigerated and freezer versions. They'll leave the delivery if we're not home. Cold/Frozen foods stay that way for about six hours in those totes. The following week, they pick up last week's totes. Couldn't be easier.
I can't imagine going back to traditional grocery shopping. I've seen the light - and I'd gladly pay an additional 10% to keep buying my groceries online.
Is very near that one - I don't know why it struck my fancy, but it's one of the first things that springs to my mind when I think of H2G2:
The large yellow ships hung in the sky in exactly the same way that bricks don't
Who visualizes like this? And how obvious is it, once stated, that that's exactly the right visual simile? Douglas Adams had a command of the English language both forwards and backwards. It's a shame we won't be getting any new material in this lifetime.
Did anyone else notice that the orientation of each graph was different than the preceding one? Was this done to deliberately make it harder to compare results?
I can't see what possible motivation there was in this decision. I'm also having a hard time imagining how much more WORK it was to arrange the graphs so.
Sorry for the rant. I honestly didn't mean it as a personal against your honor.
I just get sick and tired of people latching onto the tired (and incorrect) catch-phrases that the media applies to anything which fits in the category of "not endorsed by Ted Kennedy."
There's a world of facts out there. It would be a better country if more of us would take the effort to check up on the accuracy of what the press is feeding us these days.
April employment stats released this morning reveal 625K new nonfarm jobs the last two months.
And with unemployment currently at 5.6%, that's lower than it's been the last 30 years, excluding the dot-com bubble 1996-2001. (You'd be hard-pressed to find an economist who would indicate that unemployment of 4.2%, as we had in 1999, is good for the economy, much less sustainable.
If your friend can't find a job, perhaps he needs to switch location, career, or both. It's quite possible there aren't a lot of open positions for Unix gurus in Southern California these days.
Why does it take 20 minutes to copy a 14 meg file on my OS X machine
I'm not flaming here -- just curious -- have you honestly waited 20 minutes to move 24 MB? That's just under than 100 Kb/s. Was this over a slow network?
There's no compelling reason to upgrade -- as in, you are not compelled to upgrade. Apps I used to use under 10.1 work under 10.2, work under 10.3. I'd still be perfectly productive using 10.1 -- I just wouldn't be grinning quite as broadly.
I like the improvements Apple has made in its iLife suite. Along with Safari and Mail.app, they've become consumers of the vast majority of my CPU cycles. The most recent versions of iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto require 10.3 -- and the improvements are worth the price. Don't want these upgrades? Don't buy Panther.
Now I've got to start working on upgrading the hardware. I'm starting to see the limits to which one can push a G4/350...
Slashdot Mirror
From the quoted article:
(3) Only one major system-level change of function, and four minor shifts of function, need be invoked to explain the origin of the flagellum; this involves five subsystem-level cooption events.
Only four minor shifts of function - all in the correct order, and only after all the requisite pieces have been evolved into place. Doesn't that sound statistically implausible? Doesn't that sound at all like constructing a remotely possible chain of events after the fact to fit the observed end state?
I call on Occam's Razor, and deduce that it's much more likely that the flagellum was created in place, rather than evolved through a bizarre sequence of highly improbable random events.
You are free to draw your own conclusions as to the nature of the creator.
I've got to start reading the submitter's name more often. Every time I click through on a story Roland's submitted, I feel I've been duped. You're welcome, RP.
Is there any way I can configure my slash options to ignore his stories altogether?
Google is currently a corporation, with shareholders, and a fixed number of shares. About 24.6 million of those shares are sitting in Google's treasury waiting to be sold in the IPO. I'm guessing a number of shares will remain in the treasury, and know that there are significant outside ownership positions already. AOL and Yahoo together own 13 million shares, and the founders together own about 87 million shares. The current market value of the company ($36 Billion, according to the Yahoo! story) is based on total of about 268M shares at $135 each.
It would be possible to do a 10-for-one split, which would produce 2.68 Billion shares, each valued at $10 to $13. But it's unneccessary and expensive for the company to do so. Google will be able to sell its 24.6 million IPO shares at a "fair" value, which should allow current shareholders to acheive a handsome profit.
Don't be surprised if, within the year, there are some splits - just don't expect it before an IPO.
I don't think that it's the extremism that the "US rails against." It's the actions taken by those extremists.
Every now and again, a "fundamentalist Christian" extremist will shoot an abortion doctor, or keep a harem of 30 wives in a compound in Texas. The railing against Muslim extremists really ramped up when they killed several thousand people a couple of years ago in New York.
I'd go out on a limb and venture that there would be similar railing if Linux zealots started bombing Fortune 1000 companies that employ Microsoft OS fileservers.
I stand corrected. I guess it's obvious I'm not an amiga enthusiast.
My last IDE drive purchase was last month - 250GB IDE for $169 (CompUSA, instant rebate.) This is about $0.68 per GB, compared with a marginal cost of about $0.25 for DVD (4.6GB variety).
But look at my hard drive purchase history:ACG is the "Annual Compound Growth" in my sample - the rate at which the GB/$ is growing annually.
Assuming an annual growth of just 1.50 (50%) is maintained, in ten years $150 will buy a 10TB drive. That's over 1000 9GB DVDs.
I think that to assume ANY storage technology currently in use today will still be in use in 10 years is a bad assumption. My analysis is therefore flawed as well; for $150 we'll probably be able to buy 100TB of ultra-fast holographic or biomechanical memory in ten years.
In ten years, the only people buying IDE drives will be the Amiga enthusiasts.
I was a HoTMaiL user before Microsoft acquired it. It was a fast, easy-to-use service back then.
I was deeply disappointed when it was acquired, but couldn't complain too loudly because it was, after all, free. But I vowed right then and there to NEVER rely on a free service for vital communication again. I learned enough *nix system administration to set up a mail server and register my own domain. I still maintain the Hotmail account as my "junk" account; it's convenient to have, but I wouldn't cry if they took it away.
I know now that my email preferred address will never change, and that the provider will never be acquired.
As of about ten years ago, air travelers in the US were informed that we were to leave our privacy behind at the security checkpoint. After presenting proof of id, submitting all bags for inspection, and stepping through a detector, the traveler knew that the "authorities" had a record of who they were, where they were going, and what they were (and weren't) carrying.
Face it. If you want privacy in your travel, you have two choices: avoid airports, or develop a very good false identity.
Given that I've left my privacy behind at the security checkpoint, anything that makes it easier for the airlines/airports to handle and transport my bags back to me at my final destination can't be seen as anything but a positive development.
How long do you really think it would take to reverse engineer a BIOS?
If Microsoft were to be successful in implementing deals with the BIOS makers to require their "trusted" BIOS, the whole system would be dependent on some sort authentication call. It seems to me it would be trivial to discover those calls, and hard-code the "trusted" response into the open BIOS. If it's a true hash calculation on the revised BIOS, that makes it trickier, but finding the right "extra bits" to come up with the same hash would be an interesting distributed computing problem.
It's axiomatic that any software designed to limit freedom of information will be circumvented sooner rather than later. This one just seems particularly easy.
Censorship refers (I assume, in your context) to the actions of a (governmental) body to limit the freedom of speech. If a free market chooses not to purchase or endorse a film, that's the market at work.
It's perfectly legal for Moore to produce, market, and show off his film. No governmental body is stopping him. Disney initially thought that they couldn't sell it, or that it disagreed with their philosophy, or whatever... it doesn't matter what their reasoning is -- they didn't want to distribute it. They're under no obligation to.
Disney is in business to make money. They felt that Moore's film would not help them do that. They've since changed their mind. I can't imagine that all of the free publicity the film's gotten from the (liberal?) media had anything to do with the projected profitability.
I wish Moore well. He's a successful filmmaker. His typical message is a deliberate argument against the conservative philosophy, party, and elected officials. This is the opposite of censorship at work. Just as it's Moore's right and obligation to present this message, it's the right and obligation of the right wing to trash talk it. To portray Moore as a victim of censorship by the right wing is highly disingenuous.
Bret
This looks like a job for cheap manual labor. Try India. Or an unpaid intern.
Don't you dare moderate this as a troll. You know as well as I do that this is probably the only viable solution.
Bret
(We're a family of five, including three kids age 5. 5. and 4.)
I can't imagine going back to traditional grocery shopping. I've seen the light - and I'd gladly pay an additional 10% to keep buying my groceries online.
Who visualizes like this? And how obvious is it, once stated, that that's exactly the right visual simile? Douglas Adams had a command of the English language both forwards and backwards. It's a shame we won't be getting any new material in this lifetime.
Sub-groups here are 3-digit, 4-5 digit, low 6 digit IDs
Low 6-digit IDs? Are you referring to an actual conversation that took place in the real world, or are you revealing a personal insecurity?
Does anyone use the "New User Modifier"? If so, do you find it useful?
See Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Did anyone else notice that the orientation of each graph was different than the preceding one? Was this done to deliberately make it harder to compare results?
I can't see what possible motivation there was in this decision. I'm also having a hard time imagining how much more WORK it was to arrange the graphs so.
I think that he could use a refresher with Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information-- quite possibly the best book on graph theory every written.
I thought it was "Whoa to hice".
"I know that politics bore you, and I feel like a hypocrite talking to you, and your racist friends."
(?)
or was it "This is where the party ends" ?
Sorry for the rant. I honestly didn't mean it as a personal against your honor.
I just get sick and tired of people latching onto the tired (and incorrect) catch-phrases that the media applies to anything which fits in the category of "not endorsed by Ted Kennedy."
There's a world of facts out there. It would be a better country if more of us would take the effort to check up on the accuracy of what the press is feeding us these days.
Bret
Jobless recovery my ass
April employment stats released this morning reveal 625K new nonfarm jobs the last two months.
And with unemployment currently at 5.6%, that's lower than it's been the last 30 years, excluding the dot-com bubble 1996-2001. (You'd be hard-pressed to find an economist who would indicate that unemployment of 4.2%, as we had in 1999, is good for the economy, much less sustainable.
If your friend can't find a job, perhaps he needs to switch location, career, or both. It's quite possible there aren't a lot of open positions for Unix gurus in Southern California these days.
Thanks, fahrvergnugen -- this is my new all-time favorite /. post. You've concisely stated in one page exactly why I hate the RIAA as much as I do.
I've bookmarked your post, and will refer others often.
Thanks again.
Why does it take 20 minutes to copy a 14 meg file on my OS X machine
I'm not flaming here -- just curious -- have you honestly waited 20 minutes to move 24 MB? That's just under than 100 Kb/s. Was this over a slow network?
I'm flabbergasted by that statement.
Kind of like Linux kernel development, with even and odd reversed...
Here, Here!
There's no compelling reason to upgrade -- as in, you are not compelled to upgrade. Apps I used to use under 10.1 work under 10.2, work under 10.3. I'd still be perfectly productive using 10.1 -- I just wouldn't be grinning quite as broadly.
I like the improvements Apple has made in its iLife suite. Along with Safari and Mail.app, they've become consumers of the vast majority of my CPU cycles. The most recent versions of iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto require 10.3 -- and the improvements are worth the price. Don't want these upgrades? Don't buy Panther.
Now I've got to start working on upgrading the hardware. I'm starting to see the limits to which one can push a G4/350...
Much better would be to use a Grid-type approach that lets Weta call on processing power where-ever it is and when it needs it.
I'm sure that it's obvious, but so is every other great idea I've ever had. So, here's the business plan: