I want to see graphical representations of the simulation. Why? Because a nuclear explosion is one of the coolest-looking things around, and since we don't throw nukes at Pacific Islanders anymore, there's no new footage to stare at.
That's well and good, but keep in mind that Kazaa is not a gnutella client; the problems your describing are pretty much universal with gnutella (at least, in my experiences with it). Of the Gnutella clients, Gnucleus does seem to be the best of the bunch.
There's a GPL'd gnutella client called Gnucleus (the same one that Morpheus "borrowed" and promptly broke). Gnucleus does what you're talking about. In addition it usually connects to 3-6 other clients in the first 15 seconds of operation, and fills up my limit of 12 within a minute. It's a Windows program but I've had very good luck running it with WINE.
The Windows Media Player EULA already forbids using it without owning a Windows license. Of course, it also refers to WMP as "OS components". Still, it's not that big a stretch to think they'll change the Office EULA to one that requires the software to only be run on Windows itself.
Nice to have someone bring up "Embrace and Extinguish " in a court of law. Now, at least, people other than geeks and techies know about it and can see it for what it is.
Find a copy of Sacrifice (should be easy to find in the bargain bins at Best Buy) and buy it. Play it, and find out that RTS may not be as dead as you think. Unfortunately, the dismal failure of Sacrifice (which is a fantastic game) pretty much proved that Joe Gamer doesn't want RTS, he wants build/rush games.
Gentry did rule out long half-life isomers of polonium as a cause of the halos. However, his theory was supplanted in 1989 (Odom, L.A., and Rink; "Giant Radiation-Induced Color Halos in Quartz: Solution to a Riddle" Science 246: 107-109). This new theory completely accounts for all apparent violation of physical laws in a logical manner; thus, it in no way provides evidence for a near-instantaneous creation. Gentry has yet to publish a rebuttal, more than a decade after these new findings came to light. As for his "challenge", it has not appeared in any peer-reviewed scientific literature, which may account for no one bothering to rise to it.
More information on this subject may be found here.
Of course, I've made no mention here of Gentry's notoriously sloppy methods and faulty assumptions (nice summary of these, with references, here), as I wouldn't want you to think I'm attacking him personally, rather than his conclusions.
As for the helium, a creationist named Roger Lenard recently re-presented this tired old argument. Unfortunately, he, like most creation "scientists", presented no evidence for this theory. He did state that "a prestigious university" found that the amount of hydrogen in biotite is "too high", but no one ever comes clear on what "too high" is. Nor will he tell anyone where these measurements were performed, the name of the university, or even provide the data he cites as his sole reference. The paper many creationists look to for support here is actually by our good friend Gentry; however, even his statements do more to prove that the levels of helium currently present are exactly right for an evolutionary timescale. The "too-much-helium" argument has been discredited for years. Science cannot help it if creationists choose to ignore this.
However, none of this has anything to do with my original post. You've employed another common Creationist trick, which is to dodge the question by supplying more "proof" that other unrelated evolutionary methods/theories are faulty. So allow me to get back to the subject at hand...
You use inaccuracies in dating Hawaiian volcanic rock as proof that all radiometric dating is flawed. And you are absolutely correct, I find, in stating that wildly inaccurate dates are determined from potassium-argon analysis of this rock. However, you've neglected to mention that geologists already thought that rocks formed under those particular conditions would give unreliable K-Ar ages because they would trap argon before it could escape. The studies in question were performed to confirm this under controlled conditions, and thus to confirm to the scientific community that this particular type of rock (and, by extension, most rock of seabed origin) is unsuitable for radiometric dating.
Oops.
In addition, I'd like to know how this disproves the accuracy of other dating methods (uranium-lead and rubidium-strontium, for example), since these methods will all produce the same results in rocks with well-understood geological context. Confidence in radiometric dating techniques comes from years of careful comparisons to other radiometric techniques and to relative age determinations from biostratigraphy (fossils in layered rocks). In some cases, there are multiple isotope systems that may be analyzed in the same sample. Since these different systems react differently to the processes that disturb age recording, if the systems disagree with one another the age significance of the data is suspect. If they all agree, then there is phenomal evidence for the accuracy of the dating.
As for the accuracy potassium-argon dating having any bearing on carbon-14 dating (the kind used to date organic artifacts up to 50,000 years old), this is ludicrous. The two methods have very little in common, and carbon-14 dating is known to depend on variations in atmospheric conditions.
So where's the leap of faith? The only one I've seen so far is the one that leads to your ghetto of scientific illiteracy.
For more references, information, and general illumination, read this very helpful document: The General Anti-Creationism FAQ Here are rebuttals, with evidence and references, to all of the arguments you've thus far presented, as well as all of the other major creationist arguments.
No, it won't, because you'll be arrested and held for months without trial for possession of a circumvention device under the DMCA.
That would be kind of neat, though. A non-electronic device that could copy media, just to piss off the corporations. How the hell would you devise such a thing? Hand crank? A microscope to examine the pits on a CD, write them down by hand and use a mechanical calculator to perform the decoding?
Actually, I guess all of those things would be labeled as circumvention devices and outlawed. Ah well.
Let's see the independantly-verified study on Mt. St. Helens lava. You know what's interesting? After a fairly exhaustive search (after a creationist that I know brought up this very point) both online and in the real world, I could find nothing on this study anywhere EXCEPT within Creationist writings. Nowhere in any of them were sources cited (other than unqualified fellow creationists). This is the most common rule of Creationism: Anything a fellow creationist comes up with, that fits what you want to believe, is accepted as fact without question.
Now, I'm willing to accept that qualifications aren't everything. If you'd like to claim that earning a Masters of Archeology prejudices a person to believe in radiocarbon dating's accuracy, fine. It doesn't matter to me who presents the proof. Proof is proof. Perform a double-blind test here; publish your results.
The advantage to science is this; the biggest way to make a name for yourself is to disprove or enhance a long-standing theory. If you can prove that radiocarbon dating is inaccurate, you may not be popular at first, but you will be famous. But if you and your fellow creationists wish to be taken seriously, present proof based on facts. Speeches by other creationists (one of Kent Hovind's favorite sources) and "the bible says so" does not count as fact.
15 seconds of Google research will tell you that the pole reversal is thought to take 1000 years or so to complete. So it's not like you'll wake up some morning and magnetic North will suddenly be South.
The quality of HP products has already plummeted; tried to install one of their scanners lately? Under ANY OS? Even under the sole OS they claim support for, there are problems.
NOTE: If you do not have a validly licensed copy of any version or edition of Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millenum Edition, Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system or any Microsoft operating system that is a successor to any of those operating systems (each an "os product"), you are not authorized to install, copy or otherwise use the os components and you have no rights under this supplemental EULA.
I had that problem, too, but it turned out I had merely neglected to install the Mozilla PSM stuff. Installing that fixed all my HTTPS problems under Galeon.
That's what I would consider to be a Bad Thing. The chance of his getting a good position after the potential AOL/TW purchase may very well be slim, but if he leaves without sticking around to see, then that chance is 0. I'm not Alan Cox, and no, I haven't ever worked for AOL/TW (Deere & Company is the biggest I've worked for, and yes, the management is full of morons), but I'll take slim odds over no odds at all.
If he does leave, he loses his chance to put the resources of an enormous company like AOL/TW behind the development and acceptance of Linux. To me this doesn't seem like the smartest move he could make.
There's plenty of time for him to leave afterwards if it looks like AOL/TW is going to do a Bad Thing, but up to and until that time, I think it's in his best interests, and Linux's best interests, to take advantage of the possible benefits of being backed by one of the largest, richest companies on the planet.
Intel gets a cut of every AMD cpu that's sold, because AMD is licensing the i386 instruction set. They are not "license-free".
Why do you think Intel hasn't made more of an effort to really squash AMD? AMD is a revenue source for Intel, plus it keeps Intel from having to worry about Microsoft-ish anti-trust issues.
That's a question I had, as well... isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere? The appearance of one may prompt the appearance of others. It may not confuse us, but corporates looking at Linux may be stumped by the sudden availability of several different "versions" of the 2.4 kernel. And it's the exact sort of thing that Microsoft loves to make fun of Linux for (I recall a German magazine ad directed against Linux. It showed the same animal 4 times, but each time it had a different head. The gist of the ad was "Code forking is bad, Linux can be forked, so ignore the Win9x/WinNT thing and use Microsoft.").
I think the terminology here should be used very carefully; these are patches to the official 2.4 kernel. Not kernel branches. Branches indicate disagreement between programmers (remember, corporate viewpoint here). Patches are just additions by independant groups, which is far more acceptable to the corporate mindset. I wouldn't make such a big deal of this, but this is a very delicate time for Linux. A lot of people are truly beginning to take it very seriously, and the one thing the Linux community needs to do is present a united front to the people inspecting it. Any indication, real or perceived, of internal turmoil will drive businesses (and individual users) away.
As the poster of the parent note implies, once a Director has a mind to do things, like canning someone, they usually find a way to do it.
This is no joke. I worked for a large corporation (hint: they make big green tractors) as second-level tech support. Basically I oversaw the users in a zone and was responsible for ALL of that zone's IT needs. Just after I set up the systems and such for an international conference with 180 attendees (and got a commendation for it), I was fired without any reason given. They didn't even tell me right away; my security card wouldn't let me leave the building and some guy had to use his to let me out.
Upon being notified the next workday that my contract had been terminated, I called a friend working inside to see if I could find out what was going on. Apparently the inside story was that I'd been using company resources to "hack a server in north Korea" (which wasn't remotely true). But nobody had seen any logs or any other evidence. This was purely on the word of the IT director. I was 19 at the time and all the others in my position were 25+. Of course, I was a contract employee, so I had no legal recourse, but if I had ever heard anything about that story outside of that company, I'd sue. I mean, firing me for being too young is one thing, but making up some bogus bullshit story to blame it on?
Slashdot Mirror
I want to see graphical representations of the simulation. Why? Because a nuclear explosion is one of the coolest-looking things around, and since we don't throw nukes at Pacific Islanders anymore, there's no new footage to stare at.
You forgot to put "petrified" in there.
Betcha he finished it on December 21st, 2012.
That's well and good, but keep in mind that Kazaa is not a gnutella client; the problems your describing are pretty much universal with gnutella (at least, in my experiences with it). Of the Gnutella clients, Gnucleus does seem to be the best of the bunch.
There's a GPL'd gnutella client called Gnucleus (the same one that Morpheus "borrowed" and promptly broke). Gnucleus does what you're talking about. In addition it usually connects to 3-6 other clients in the first 15 seconds of operation, and fills up my limit of 12 within a minute. It's a Windows program but I've had very good luck running it with WINE.
There needs to be a +1 *Zing* mod for posts like that.
It has one.
The Windows Media Player EULA already forbids using it without owning a Windows license. Of course, it also refers to WMP as "OS components". Still, it's not that big a stretch to think they'll change the Office EULA to one that requires the software to only be run on Windows itself.
Nice to have someone bring up "Embrace and Extinguish " in a court of law. Now, at least, people other than geeks and techies know about it and can see it for what it is.
Find a copy of Sacrifice (should be easy to find in the bargain bins at Best Buy) and buy it. Play it, and find out that RTS may not be as dead as you think. Unfortunately, the dismal failure of Sacrifice (which is a fantastic game) pretty much proved that Joe Gamer doesn't want RTS, he wants build/rush games.
Gentry did rule out long half-life isomers of polonium as a cause of the halos. However, his theory was supplanted in 1989 (Odom, L.A., and Rink; "Giant Radiation-Induced Color Halos in Quartz: Solution to a Riddle" Science 246: 107-109). This new theory completely accounts for all apparent violation of physical laws in a logical manner; thus, it in no way provides evidence for a near-instantaneous creation. Gentry has yet to publish a rebuttal, more than a decade after these new findings came to light. As for his "challenge", it has not appeared in any peer-reviewed scientific literature, which may account for no one bothering to rise to it. More information on this subject may be found here.
Of course, I've made no mention here of Gentry's notoriously sloppy methods and faulty assumptions (nice summary of these, with references, here), as I wouldn't want you to think I'm attacking him personally, rather than his conclusions.
As for the helium, a creationist named Roger Lenard recently re-presented this tired old argument. Unfortunately, he, like most creation "scientists", presented no evidence for this theory. He did state that "a prestigious university" found that the amount of hydrogen in biotite is "too high", but no one ever comes clear on what "too high" is. Nor will he tell anyone where these measurements were performed, the name of the university, or even provide the data he cites as his sole reference. The paper many creationists look to for support here is actually by our good friend Gentry; however, even his statements do more to prove that the levels of helium currently present are exactly right for an evolutionary timescale. The "too-much-helium" argument has been discredited for years. Science cannot help it if creationists choose to ignore this.
However, none of this has anything to do with my original post. You've employed another common Creationist trick, which is to dodge the question by supplying more "proof" that other unrelated evolutionary methods/theories are faulty. So allow me to get back to the subject at hand...
You use inaccuracies in dating Hawaiian volcanic rock as proof that all radiometric dating is flawed. And you are absolutely correct, I find, in stating that wildly inaccurate dates are determined from potassium-argon analysis of this rock. However, you've neglected to mention that geologists already thought that rocks formed under those particular conditions would give unreliable K-Ar ages because they would trap argon before it could escape. The studies in question were performed to confirm this under controlled conditions, and thus to confirm to the scientific community that this particular type of rock (and, by extension, most rock of seabed origin) is unsuitable for radiometric dating.
Oops.
In addition, I'd like to know how this disproves the accuracy of other dating methods (uranium-lead and rubidium-strontium, for example), since these methods will all produce the same results in rocks with well-understood geological context. Confidence in radiometric dating techniques comes from years of careful comparisons to other radiometric techniques and to relative age determinations from biostratigraphy (fossils in layered rocks). In some cases, there are multiple isotope systems that may be analyzed in the same sample. Since these different systems react differently to the processes that disturb age recording, if the systems disagree with one another the age significance of the data is suspect. If they all agree, then there is phenomal evidence for the accuracy of the dating.
As for the accuracy potassium-argon dating having any bearing on carbon-14 dating (the kind used to date organic artifacts up to 50,000 years old), this is ludicrous. The two methods have very little in common, and carbon-14 dating is known to depend on variations in atmospheric conditions.
So where's the leap of faith? The only one I've seen so far is the one that leads to your ghetto of scientific illiteracy.
For more references, information, and general illumination, read this very helpful document: The General Anti-Creationism FAQ
Here are rebuttals, with evidence and references, to all of the arguments you've thus far presented, as well as all of the other major creationist arguments.
No, it won't, because you'll be arrested and held for months without trial for possession of a circumvention device under the DMCA.
That would be kind of neat, though. A non-electronic device that could copy media, just to piss off the corporations. How the hell would you devise such a thing? Hand crank? A microscope to examine the pits on a CD, write them down by hand and use a mechanical calculator to perform the decoding?
Actually, I guess all of those things would be labeled as circumvention devices and outlawed. Ah well.
Let's see the independantly-verified study on Mt. St. Helens lava. You know what's interesting? After a fairly exhaustive search (after a creationist that I know brought up this very point) both online and in the real world, I could find nothing on this study anywhere EXCEPT within Creationist writings. Nowhere in any of them were sources cited (other than unqualified fellow creationists). This is the most common rule of Creationism: Anything a fellow creationist comes up with, that fits what you want to believe, is accepted as fact without question.
Now, I'm willing to accept that qualifications aren't everything. If you'd like to claim that earning a Masters of Archeology prejudices a person to believe in radiocarbon dating's accuracy, fine. It doesn't matter to me who presents the proof. Proof is proof. Perform a double-blind test here; publish your results.
The advantage to science is this; the biggest way to make a name for yourself is to disprove or enhance a long-standing theory. If you can prove that radiocarbon dating is inaccurate, you may not be popular at first, but you will be famous. But if you and your fellow creationists wish to be taken seriously, present proof based on facts. Speeches by other creationists (one of Kent Hovind's favorite sources) and "the bible says so" does not count as fact.
15 seconds of Google research will tell you that the pole reversal is thought to take 1000 years or so to complete. So it's not like you'll wake up some morning and magnetic North will suddenly be South.
The quality of HP products has already plummeted; tried to install one of their scanners lately? Under ANY OS? Even under the sole OS they claim support for, there are problems.
Actually, my bigger concern here would this:
From the Windows Media Player EULA:
NOTE: If you do not have a validly licensed copy of any version or edition of Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows Millenum Edition, Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system or any Microsoft operating system that is a successor to any of those operating systems (each an "os product"), you are not authorized to install, copy or otherwise use the os components and you have no rights under this supplemental EULA.
Oops.
More like The Dance of Horrendous Space Kablooie...
I had that problem, too, but it turned out I had merely neglected to install the Mozilla PSM stuff. Installing that fixed all my HTTPS problems under Galeon.
And for that matter, maybe even just as many Saturns and Neptunes. Uranus is probably rarer due to its bizarre axial tilt.
What copy protection? I tape PPV movies all the time.
That's what I would consider to be a Bad Thing. The chance of his getting a good position after the potential AOL/TW purchase may very well be slim, but if he leaves without sticking around to see, then that chance is 0. I'm not Alan Cox, and no, I haven't ever worked for AOL/TW (Deere & Company is the biggest I've worked for, and yes, the management is full of morons), but I'll take slim odds over no odds at all.
If he does leave, he loses his chance to put the resources of an enormous company like AOL/TW behind the development and acceptance of Linux. To me this doesn't seem like the smartest move he could make.
There's plenty of time for him to leave afterwards if it looks like AOL/TW is going to do a Bad Thing, but up to and until that time, I think it's in his best interests, and Linux's best interests, to take advantage of the possible benefits of being backed by one of the largest, richest companies on the planet.
Intel gets a cut of every AMD cpu that's sold, because AMD is licensing the i386 instruction set. They are not "license-free".
Why do you think Intel hasn't made more of an effort to really squash AMD? AMD is a revenue source for Intel, plus it keeps Intel from having to worry about Microsoft-ish anti-trust issues.
That's a question I had, as well... isn't one of the big "selling points" about Linux the fact that there aren't branches and forks everywhere? The appearance of one may prompt the appearance of others. It may not confuse us, but corporates looking at Linux may be stumped by the sudden availability of several different "versions" of the 2.4 kernel. And it's the exact sort of thing that Microsoft loves to make fun of Linux for (I recall a German magazine ad directed against Linux. It showed the same animal 4 times, but each time it had a different head. The gist of the ad was "Code forking is bad, Linux can be forked, so ignore the Win9x/WinNT thing and use Microsoft.").
I think the terminology here should be used very carefully; these are patches to the official 2.4 kernel. Not kernel branches. Branches indicate disagreement between programmers (remember, corporate viewpoint here). Patches are just additions by independant groups, which is far more acceptable to the corporate mindset. I wouldn't make such a big deal of this, but this is a very delicate time for Linux. A lot of people are truly beginning to take it very seriously, and the one thing the Linux community needs to do is present a united front to the people inspecting it. Any indication, real or perceived, of internal turmoil will drive businesses (and individual users) away.
As the poster of the parent note implies, once a Director has a mind to do things, like canning someone, they usually find a way to do it.
This is no joke. I worked for a large corporation (hint: they make big green tractors) as second-level tech support. Basically I oversaw the users in a zone and was responsible for ALL of that zone's IT needs. Just after I set up the systems and such for an international conference with 180 attendees (and got a commendation for it), I was fired without any reason given. They didn't even tell me right away; my security card wouldn't let me leave the building and some guy had to use his to let me out.
Upon being notified the next workday that my contract had been terminated, I called a friend working inside to see if I could find out what was going on. Apparently the inside story was that I'd been using company resources to "hack a server in north Korea" (which wasn't remotely true). But nobody had seen any logs or any other evidence. This was purely on the word of the IT director. I was 19 at the time and all the others in my position were 25+. Of course, I was a contract employee, so I had no legal recourse, but if I had ever heard anything about that story outside of that company, I'd sue. I mean, firing me for being too young is one thing, but making up some bogus bullshit story to blame it on?