I thought there was a lot of debate about whether or not dinosaurs were cold blooded? Most recent studies I've seen show that many of the dinosaurs had feathers, and most likely were closer to ostriches than reptiles. This means they were just as likely to be warm blooded as cold blooded.
Based upon observation of like present day creatues I'm inclined to these argements:
Dinos were cold blooded and lived in a hothouse climate.
Dinos were warm blooded and required high caloric intake.
That some were found to nest suggests more than simply protecting the eggs, they were keeping them warm. These were not buried nests, but on the surface, exposed. How would a cold blooded animal keep an egg warm?
Mammals aren't particularly efficient. In fact it's damned expensive to keep our homeostatic mechanisms in place.
It's worth it of course, active temperature regulation lets us stay awake during the night and has let our neurons become more delicately tuned (and therefore we're smarter than cold blooded critters)....
You have to keep in mind that humans are one of the few bare mammals. Also that as we're mobile and adaptive, we can live as well in the arctic as the equatorial by modifying living habits, clothing and shelter. Mammals in their native habitat are pretty well tuned to survive its extremes.
There have been studies showing that many plants are CO2 limited. When CO2 is increased, plant biomass increases greatly. Conversely, the less CO2 available, the less productive the plants are.
Which, on first look, would seem to cover the extinction of aquatic dinos, too. As their food became less plentiful. Those which adapted to the changing food chain survived. That there were some very large carnivores suggests to me that they prospered on a readily available supply of food.
Actually, "fossil fuels" did not come from plants or dinosaurs.... Nitrifying bacteria consumes rock and the byproduct is tar, oil etc. The bacteria uses the carbon in the soil/atmosphere to facilitate the reaction.
I can't believe they still teach that oil came from Dinos in our schools...
Not dinos, but plant matter, the most prominent example of this process ongoing today are peat-bogs. North of where I lived in Michigan were muskegs, effectively small lakes which eventually filled in with mosses. Assmume this process continues for some time, building up a dense layer of dead moss at the bottom, as new moss continues to grow on top, then a glacier (like the ice age) deposits a cap of sand/gravel/clay on top of it and over successive millenia that layer continues to be overlayed by sediments, etc. Examination of coal often reveals the plant matter it was made from. Consider a 1 meter thick coal seam and the kind of pressure upon it, what was the original dept of this accumulation of plant matter?
I caught this story on the BBC World News, Monday morning, along with the theories of the extinction of Aristide's presidency.
Back when I took astronomy the standard theories were carted out before us for our own inspection and consideration.
I've not been convinced climatic change did them in as most theories seemed predisposed to a direct impact on the dinosaurse themselves. i.e. the earth passed through the tail of a comet and the atmosphere cooled and they died off. I'm more inclined to some environmental change which impacted the low end of the food chain, plants in particular, but it still doesn't explain why aquatic dinos went, too.
I'm looking for a theory that says the earth was a warmer place with most of that fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again, one study observed plants are taking up the extra carbondioxide in the air, what's the long term impact of that?) As the carbon became buried (ever think about how much green stuff it took to make pertroleum deposits or coal seams?) the food changed and those at the bottom of the chain adapted or perished. Perhaps dinosaurs were really hugely inefficient creatures and require large amounts of energy, whereas mammals and birds are quite efficient.
Anyway, that's my two cents. Anyone who can point me toward some theories which follow that logic, as opposed to the big-exciting-asteroid-or-comet theories much appreciated. I think in extinction theories, the ones involving some violent cataclysm get too much press, probably due to the sensational value.
1) I think the number of emails going out to generate the same return is going up as most people are wise to it.
2) The agent (Ralsky as one example) charges for the spam, probably could care less or is simply unable to meter success. All transactions are cash up front.
As the volume needs to increas and blocking comes into play there should be a cap. As my spam volume is still increasing, but the rate of increase is slowing I think we're approaching that cap.
I just wish they would enforce that new law. The federal government took the time to make most harsher state laws moot, and now they arn't even doing anything to enforce their bullshit laws.
As one critic voiced it, on the BBC this morning, the current administration doesn't do anything until it's crisis. I wish that weren't true, maybe they are actually gathering up a pile of this trash and getting ready to haul in about 500 people, which should scare the bejeezus out of most of the rest. If Bush wants votes, this would probably be a good way to demonstrate how much he cares about the average american. [some figure in the news today puts the number of americans on the internet at 150 million, how many of that do you believe think spam is a problem?]
It DOES generate buisness, thats one of the problems. Stupid people are out there on the internet trying to make there "members" larger.
I had some thoughts on the bombardment last week as I was looking at a Junk Fax pinned to the wall. Business must be awful. The spammers must be trying to get to new addresses, but don't cross off old addresses that never generate anything (If I'm Alan Ralsky, I probably don't give a rats butt, I charge per spam wherever it goes.) CWMS or something like that has been pushed for weeks in the Pump and Dump, via Fax and Spam. That it takes them so long to find enough suckers to buy in tells me the impact of the average spam is low and probably getting lower as the volume increases.
If I get another bogus e-mail from "anyone@attbi.com" I'm gonna snap!!! They are no more! Kill it in the registrar...
263.net/263.com bombs me pretty consistently, I think it's chinese. It suggests pretty strongly to me that a lot of this "Chinese censorship" stuff is crap. If you've got the dough, then you can do as you please in the PRC.
Could this probably be because UUNet in my understanding is one of the largest ISP's?
UUNet is now part of MCI (formerly WorldCom^Hn) do you think they care?
"Johnson, why are our revenues down?"
"We kicked off some spammers, in accordance with company policy, Sir."
"Well, put them back on, dammit, we need every cent we can get, it's a tough economy!"
I know not where it comes from, but I know where it goes. About 500 pieces of it each day, most of it filtered. I have to wonder aloud, with such a deluge, do any of these fools pushing junk actually believe such an onslaught will generate business?
Surely this is a classic example of the Manager pattern.
I dunno, I've seen groups where there are 5 managers and one peon. Managers seem to accumulate.
You have a bunch of objects [Avatar] (all alike, at least programmatically:-) who want to perform operations on other objects. If the system has a [GuildManager] class, then access to this distributed network of avatars can be forced through the choke-point of 'can this avatar join this guild'.
Uh. By the time you're an Avatar you shouldn't be joining guilds. You should be heading them. Unless, and I may be mistaken here, Avatar is now an inflated title for someone who's really the assistant to the vice grunt.
As my Econ professor used to say, "Economics is the study of scarcity." So they need a scalable economy engine, right? Compatibility of guilds is another matter.
In 1997 the three cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist
The same could be said for any city. Liberty City was supposed to be a takeoff of NYC, or so I always believed. Ever drive there? It's a traffic nightmare.
Rode in a cab from LaGuardia to Manhattan, I swear the driver was going 70 and weaving in and out of traffic all the time chatting about what I was in town for, etc. During the following days I stood on a sidewalk and watched cars rocketing down 6th and 7th avenues (posted 35 MPH) like it was Indy. Then again that was back in 1988.
These communities are fueling the future economy...one where the corporate media cannot control all of your information. I just wish I could be involved in this in my own city. Multi-megabit pipelines for pennies on the dollar. Everyone needs to support this.
This could be a good thing, this could be a bad thing, one thing it requires is the public pay attention to who runs these things and what decisions (arbitrary or what) they exercise over them.
From the article:
That's struck a nerve among incumbent carriers, like the regional Bell operators, that are serving these areas. Not only do these carriers lose customers when people decide to build networks themselves, but many local governments, municipalities and educational institutions that build networks for their own use wind up selling services as well, thus becoming competitors to the regional operators.
Where the municipality is a competitor... Wasn't this the sort of thing that have some depression era things struck down ERA/WPA/CCC because effectively private companies taxes could be funding the government to compete with them? A shame, really, as some of these structures and works still pay off 70 years later, guess we shouldn't let that happen again.
Running a telecommunications network is not a sure thing, as many private competitive providers have already discovered.
Particularly where executives overstating profit and taking huge compensation are concerned.
Where I worked we were quoted a few times, massive amounts for running a fibre network and finally elected to do it ourselves, despite dire warnings of us not having the properly skilled people and tools to do it ("Too delicate, too sahn-se-tahv") We did it anyway for about 10% what we were quoted and it worked fine.
lastly, I've always favored the municipality putting in these kinds of infrastructre, then leasing it out to the phone/cable/internet/CCTV, what have you. More competitors make for a better market, right? But where I live there's only one company for high speed internet and one company for cable, forget any other choices. Having the public involved, assuming good people are overseeing it (and you don't usually know they aren't good people until it's too late) can guarrantee far better service than the private sector (milk every last cent you can out of that copper, baby!) can really do.
Personally I'm hoping for more of a San Francisco setting myself. Maybe it's just been far too many cop shows, Bullit, Dirty Harry, etc. but San Francisco just seems more right to me. Not to mention the kind of insane stunts you could get on those hills as well as having a great deal more character to it.
All those great chases would hardly happen for more than a block in SF. It may seem thrilling, the prospect of just missing a cable car or MUNI bus, but every block is a light or a stop, 25 MPH speed limits all over the place and grades which would wreck a car over 30 MPH. You could probably tear down a few streets, but eventually you run into some mess. Good for fantasy, sucks for reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Based upon observation of like present day creatues I'm inclined to these argements:
Dinos were cold blooded and lived in a hothouse climate.
Dinos were warm blooded and required high caloric intake.
That some were found to nest suggests more than simply protecting the eggs, they were keeping them warm. These were not buried nests, but on the surface, exposed. How would a cold blooded animal keep an egg warm?
You have to keep in mind that humans are one of the few bare mammals. Also that as we're mobile and adaptive, we can live as well in the arctic as the equatorial by modifying living habits, clothing and shelter. Mammals in their native habitat are pretty well tuned to survive its extremes.
Which, on first look, would seem to cover the extinction of aquatic dinos, too. As their food became less plentiful. Those which adapted to the changing food chain survived. That there were some very large carnivores suggests to me that they prospered on a readily available supply of food.
Not dinos, but plant matter, the most prominent example of this process ongoing today are peat-bogs. North of where I lived in Michigan were muskegs, effectively small lakes which eventually filled in with mosses. Assmume this process continues for some time, building up a dense layer of dead moss at the bottom, as new moss continues to grow on top, then a glacier (like the ice age) deposits a cap of sand/gravel/clay on top of it and over successive millenia that layer continues to be overlayed by sediments, etc. Examination of coal often reveals the plant matter it was made from. Consider a 1 meter thick coal seam and the kind of pressure upon it, what was the original dept of this accumulation of plant matter?
Back when I took astronomy the standard theories were carted out before us for our own inspection and consideration.
I've not been convinced climatic change did them in as most theories seemed predisposed to a direct impact on the dinosaurse themselves. i.e. the earth passed through the tail of a comet and the atmosphere cooled and they died off. I'm more inclined to some environmental change which impacted the low end of the food chain, plants in particular, but it still doesn't explain why aquatic dinos went, too.
I'm looking for a theory that says the earth was a warmer place with most of that fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again, one study observed plants are taking up the extra carbondioxide in the air, what's the long term impact of that?) As the carbon became buried (ever think about how much green stuff it took to make pertroleum deposits or coal seams?) the food changed and those at the bottom of the chain adapted or perished. Perhaps dinosaurs were really hugely inefficient creatures and require large amounts of energy, whereas mammals and birds are quite efficient.
Anyway, that's my two cents. Anyone who can point me toward some theories which follow that logic, as opposed to the big-exciting-asteroid-or-comet theories much appreciated. I think in extinction theories, the ones involving some violent cataclysm get too much press, probably due to the sensational value.
Bill the Cat (yes, that was my plate while I lived in Michigan.)
Sunday: 429 emails, 1 valid. It's not often like that, some days I get as many as 10 valid for about the same overall volume.
1) I think the number of emails going out to generate the same return is going up as most people are wise to it.
2) The agent (Ralsky as one example) charges for the spam, probably could care less or is simply unable to meter success. All transactions are cash up front.
As the volume needs to increas and blocking comes into play there should be a cap. As my spam volume is still increasing, but the rate of increase is slowing I think we're approaching that cap.
As one critic voiced it, on the BBC this morning, the current administration doesn't do anything until it's crisis. I wish that weren't true, maybe they are actually gathering up a pile of this trash and getting ready to haul in about 500 people, which should scare the bejeezus out of most of the rest. If Bush wants votes, this would probably be a good way to demonstrate how much he cares about the average american. [some figure in the news today puts the number of americans on the internet at 150 million, how many of that do you believe think spam is a problem?]
Check again. When WorldCom filed for bankruptcy they changed the name back to MCI.
I had some thoughts on the bombardment last week as I was looking at a Junk Fax pinned to the wall. Business must be awful. The spammers must be trying to get to new addresses, but don't cross off old addresses that never generate anything (If I'm Alan Ralsky, I probably don't give a rats butt, I charge per spam wherever it goes.) CWMS or something like that has been pushed for weeks in the Pump and Dump, via Fax and Spam. That it takes them so long to find enough suckers to buy in tells me the impact of the average spam is low and probably getting lower as the volume increases.
263.net/263.com bombs me pretty consistently, I think it's chinese. It suggests pretty strongly to me that a lot of this "Chinese censorship" stuff is crap. If you've got the dough, then you can do as you please in the PRC.
UUNet is now part of MCI (formerly WorldCom^Hn) do you think they care?
"Johnson, why are our revenues down?"
"We kicked off some spammers, in accordance with company policy, Sir."
"Well, put them back on, dammit, we need every cent we can get, it's a tough economy!"
I know not where it comes from, but I know where it goes. About 500 pieces of it each day, most of it filtered. I have to wonder aloud, with such a deluge, do any of these fools pushing junk actually believe such an onslaught will generate business?
I dunno, I've seen groups where there are 5 managers and one peon. Managers seem to accumulate.
You have a bunch of objects [Avatar] (all alike, at least programmatically :-) who want to perform operations on other objects. If the system has a [GuildManager] class, then access to this distributed network of avatars can be forced through the choke-point of 'can this avatar join this guild'.
Uh. By the time you're an Avatar you shouldn't be joining guilds. You should be heading them. Unless, and I may be mistaken here, Avatar is now an inflated title for someone who's really the assistant to the vice grunt.
As my Econ professor used to say, "Economics is the study of scarcity." So they need a scalable economy engine, right? Compatibility of guilds is another matter.
Slashdot, where information goes to die.
Not yet, anyway. Considering all the big hotels with moats, canals, (Treasure Island with the ship battle) and everything, its only a matter of time.
Rode in a cab from LaGuardia to Manhattan, I swear the driver was going 70 and weaving in and out of traffic all the time chatting about what I was in town for, etc. During the following days I stood on a sidewalk and watched cars rocketing down 6th and 7th avenues (posted 35 MPH) like it was Indy. Then again that was back in 1988.
This could be a good thing, this could be a bad thing, one thing it requires is the public pay attention to who runs these things and what decisions (arbitrary or what) they exercise over them.
From the article:
That's struck a nerve among incumbent carriers, like the regional Bell operators, that are serving these areas. Not only do these carriers lose customers when people decide to build networks themselves, but many local governments, municipalities and educational institutions that build networks for their own use wind up selling services as well, thus becoming competitors to the regional operators.
Where the municipality is a competitor... Wasn't this the sort of thing that have some depression era things struck down ERA/WPA/CCC because effectively private companies taxes could be funding the government to compete with them? A shame, really, as some of these structures and works still pay off 70 years later, guess we shouldn't let that happen again.
Running a telecommunications network is not a sure thing, as many private competitive providers have already discovered.
Particularly where executives overstating profit and taking huge compensation are concerned.
Where I worked we were quoted a few times, massive amounts for running a fibre network and finally elected to do it ourselves, despite dire warnings of us not having the properly skilled people and tools to do it ("Too delicate, too sahn-se-tahv") We did it anyway for about 10% what we were quoted and it worked fine.
lastly, I've always favored the municipality putting in these kinds of infrastructre, then leasing it out to the phone/cable/internet/CCTV, what have you. More competitors make for a better market, right? But where I live there's only one company for high speed internet and one company for cable, forget any other choices. Having the public involved, assuming good people are overseeing it (and you don't usually know they aren't good people until it's too late) can guarrantee far better service than the private sector (milk every last cent you can out of that copper, baby!) can really do.
"SCO - Playing The Chump Card As Long As We Can"
All those great chases would hardly happen for more than a block in SF. It may seem thrilling, the prospect of just missing a cable car or MUNI bus, but every block is a light or a stop, 25 MPH speed limits all over the place and grades which would wreck a car over 30 MPH. You could probably tear down a few streets, but eventually you run into some mess. Good for fantasy, sucks for reality.
I've been to the cities, but never paid attention in the game.
In the retro theme...
Grand Theft Rickshaw: Shanghai
Grand Theft Trabant: East Germany
Wouldn't that be Grand Theft Pope-Mobile?!
"I can see the suspect clearly, but I can't get a good shot at him!"