Evolution involves more than just surviving to reproduce. You could say that longer lifetimes are "justified" evolutionarily if after reproducing the parents help out their children to ensure that they live to reproduce. For a species like fruit flies, I doubt there is much that the parents could do to help their young. But for humans, it is vital that the parents stick around.
As another poster noted, we do have resistances to cancer. It is only when these mechanisms are overridden that cancer develops. One could say that medical science is just another mechanism that we have evolved to protect ourselves from cancer and other threats. Medicine is the result of our intellect, an evolution which has done great things for us so far.
It says that it can be firmware updated to handle future formats. I would say it is likely that it could run the Ogg integer decoder, but the chance of them actually providing the firmware update for that seems pretty slim.
It is in fact a second declension noun. However, it never occurs in the plural in any Latin texts. It is also slightly irregular in that it is neuter but has a masculine ending in the nominative case. One of the most consistent rules in Latin is that all neuter nouns end in -a in the nominative, vocative, and accusative plural (the only exceptions to this that I can think of are some pronouns but there is a reason for them breaking this rule). So if virus ever occurred in the plural, one would expect it to be vira. However, I've never seen anyone use this plural so I guess it doesn't really have a chance of winning the "What's the plural of virus?" contest so I say just stick with viruses.
The same could be said of anything CmdrTaco has written that's longer than a paragraph. I have nothing against the guy, but perhaps journalism (of a sort any way) is not the best field for him.
Well sort of. I believe you are thinking of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem. Informally it states that either a system is complete or consistent, never both. Either there are statements which can't be proven or disproven within the system, or there are statements which can be both proven and disproven.
However, when defining a system you have to start with a set of primitive concepts and axioms which govern them. You could say that these primitive concepts are "outside" the system, but really they are the core of the system.
For example, arithmetic on the natural numbers is usually defined in terms of Peano's axioms:
Zero is a number.
If a is a number. The successor of a is a number.
Zero is not the successor of a number.
Two numbers of which the successors are equal are themselves equal.
If a set S contains zero and the successor of every number in S, then every number is in S.
You can apply these axioms without actually knowing what a number or a successor is (although these can be defined in terms of set theory, but set theory just boils down to some primitive concepts and axioms). Using the concept of a successor you can define addition. With addition you can define multiplication and subtraction. With those you can define the rational numbers and the negative numbers and so on.
The important thing to remember is that in order to apply logic, you must first have some axioms which are assumed to be true. You can make whatever axioms you like, but it usually helps if they are consistent and are actually relevent to something.
I've got to say that it looks FAR better than it did when I first stumbled upon it. I also like the icon for RPG games. Personally I think the "spoony bard" line was better after translation.
I believe my information theory professor said a good cut-off to decide whether a sequence of results from 100 coin tosses was produced by experiment or by a human is to check if one result occurs six or more times in a row. If such a repetition is there, it wasn't likely to be generated by a human, unless they know about this criterion of course.
From what I've been told this isn't a serious problem. The free neutrons hit the wall of the reactor and get absorbed. This does make the reactor walls unstable until they decay to get rid of that extra neutron, however, the radiation produced when this happens isn't as serious as that involved in fission and fission byproducts. The half-lives of the unstable elements involved are much shorter and so used reactor walls can be kept in storage until they are "clean" again.
I'm not sure if I've got all of that right, but I think it's more or less accurate.
The Japanese have a fondness for making utterly incomprehensible names. I'm convinced that the Japanese should not be allowed to come up with names for things they create, in order to ensure the safety of the world.
It's not that simple. Apparently some time ago someone proved that if neutrinos can change types, they must have mass. The experiment that showed that neutrinos have mass detected neutrinos changing type.
Neutrinos were originally theorized to explain a reaction which had to produce an extra particle with no mass (but with its other properties such as spin non-zero). I believe it was something along the lines of a particle decaying into other particles with the sum of the masses of the non-neutrino particles being equal to the mass of the original particle. However, it would seem that since neutrinos have mass, the other particles didn't sum to the total mass, it just seemed that way due to the inaccuracy of our measurements. You could say that the neutrino was assumed to have zero mass because of an underflow error.
I hope I've made all of that accurate enough to satisfy the people who are better informed on physics than I am. I'm just a math student.
Well I shouldn't have said poorest. People at the very lowest end of the spectrum pay little to no taxes. I think tax cuts should be targetted towards upper lower class and lower middle class. I think small businesses are also deserving of tax cuts moreso than large ones. It seems to me that giving a little extra money to a large number of people will do more to increase demand for goods (and ultimately demand for labor) than giving more extra money to a smaller number of people.
Hmmm... Have you ever worked for someone who made less than you.
I haven't.
SOmething to think about with this trickle down bashing.
Nonsense. If you want to add wealth to the economy and insure that it circulates the most it makes the most sense to add it to the bottom. The wealthiest people are more likely to save a larger portion of their money or to invest it overseas.
You can't give 1 million dollars to the rich and expect all of it to end up in the hands of the less wealthy at some point in time. But it is much safer to assume that if you give 1 million to the poor it will trickle up.
My information theory text book does in fact say that the Kolmogorov complexity of the Mandelbrot set is "nearly zero." However the Mandelbrot set doesn't seem like the ideal case for something like gzip to me either. I think most of the people here are thinking of fractals such as the Koch snowflake in which the repetition is more immediately apparent.
I think this point needs a little clarification. If you were to ask me to try to draw a picture of a person's face without my knowing anything about the person I can at least get reasonably close. My picture will have lips, eyes, and a nose and in all likelihood so will the person's actual face. But if you ask me to predict what string of bytes will be given by a random number generator (assuming I know nothing about how it works which might give me some insight), I cannot come up with any guess which will be any more accurate than any other guess. Finding out that a person has a nose is not particularly informative but finding out that the first byte of the string is 183 is. The easier it is to predict what something will be like, the less information it will contain.
Slashdot Mirror
As another poster noted, we do have resistances to cancer. It is only when these mechanisms are overridden that cancer develops. One could say that medical science is just another mechanism that we have evolved to protect ourselves from cancer and other threats. Medicine is the result of our intellect, an evolution which has done great things for us so far.
It says that it can be firmware updated to handle future formats. I would say it is likely that it could run the Ogg integer decoder, but the chance of them actually providing the firmware update for that seems pretty slim.
Yeah, it first came around in SC2000.
It is in fact a second declension noun. However, it never occurs in the plural in any Latin texts. It is also slightly irregular in that it is neuter but has a masculine ending in the nominative case. One of the most consistent rules in Latin is that all neuter nouns end in -a in the nominative, vocative, and accusative plural (the only exceptions to this that I can think of are some pronouns but there is a reason for them breaking this rule). So if virus ever occurred in the plural, one would expect it to be vira. However, I've never seen anyone use this plural so I guess it doesn't really have a chance of winning the "What's the plural of virus?" contest so I say just stick with viruses.
I liked it because of all of the cheesiness. It was at the same time a celebration and parody of the detective story.
Actually I believe SCO Openserver is what used to be known as Caldera.
I don't think I ever saw any Caldera fans in the first place and now I don't think I ever will.
I have to say that I really like the name Webmangler.
The same could be said of anything CmdrTaco has written that's longer than a paragraph. I have nothing against the guy, but perhaps journalism (of a sort any way) is not the best field for him.
This is in fact what Novell intends to do. Netware 7.0 will have a Linux version and a traditional Netware version.
You, sir, have won the analogy contest.
However, when defining a system you have to start with a set of primitive concepts and axioms which govern them. You could say that these primitive concepts are "outside" the system, but really they are the core of the system.
For example, arithmetic on the natural numbers is usually defined in terms of Peano's axioms:
You can apply these axioms without actually knowing what a number or a successor is (although these can be defined in terms of set theory, but set theory just boils down to some primitive concepts and axioms). Using the concept of a successor you can define addition. With addition you can define multiplication and subtraction. With those you can define the rational numbers and the negative numbers and so on.
The important thing to remember is that in order to apply logic, you must first have some axioms which are assumed to be true. You can make whatever axioms you like, but it usually helps if they are consistent and are actually relevent to something.
I've got to say that it looks FAR better than it did when I first stumbled upon it. I also like the icon for RPG games. Personally I think the "spoony bard" line was better after translation.
Why the hell did this get modded up so much? I didn't know that much about what I was talking about!
I believe my information theory professor said a good cut-off to decide whether a sequence of results from 100 coin tosses was produced by experiment or by a human is to check if one result occurs six or more times in a row. If such a repetition is there, it wasn't likely to be generated by a human, unless they know about this criterion of course.
I'm not sure if I've got all of that right, but I think it's more or less accurate.
There is never a fine time to move to LA.
The Japanese have a fondness for making utterly incomprehensible names. I'm convinced that the Japanese should not be allowed to come up with names for things they create, in order to ensure the safety of the world.
That's an interesting analogy. I'll have to use that the next time I make fun of physicists.
Neutrinos were originally theorized to explain a reaction which had to produce an extra particle with no mass (but with its other properties such as spin non-zero). I believe it was something along the lines of a particle decaying into other particles with the sum of the masses of the non-neutrino particles being equal to the mass of the original particle. However, it would seem that since neutrinos have mass, the other particles didn't sum to the total mass, it just seemed that way due to the inaccuracy of our measurements. You could say that the neutrino was assumed to have zero mass because of an underflow error.
I hope I've made all of that accurate enough to satisfy the people who are better informed on physics than I am. I'm just a math student.
Some time ago an experiment showed that they do have mass. However, this mass is so small that we cannot detect it.
Well I shouldn't have said poorest. People at the very lowest end of the spectrum pay little to no taxes. I think tax cuts should be targetted towards upper lower class and lower middle class. I think small businesses are also deserving of tax cuts moreso than large ones. It seems to me that giving a little extra money to a large number of people will do more to increase demand for goods (and ultimately demand for labor) than giving more extra money to a smaller number of people.
Nonsense. If you want to add wealth to the economy and insure that it circulates the most it makes the most sense to add it to the bottom. The wealthiest people are more likely to save a larger portion of their money or to invest it overseas.
You can't give 1 million dollars to the rich and expect all of it to end up in the hands of the less wealthy at some point in time. But it is much safer to assume that if you give 1 million to the poor it will trickle up.
I found him, but I'm still looking for all of the things on the checklist. I can't find the drunken mime anywhere.
My information theory text book does in fact say that the Kolmogorov complexity of the Mandelbrot set is "nearly zero." However the Mandelbrot set doesn't seem like the ideal case for something like gzip to me either. I think most of the people here are thinking of fractals such as the Koch snowflake in which the repetition is more immediately apparent.
I think this point needs a little clarification. If you were to ask me to try to draw a picture of a person's face without my knowing anything about the person I can at least get reasonably close. My picture will have lips, eyes, and a nose and in all likelihood so will the person's actual face. But if you ask me to predict what string of bytes will be given by a random number generator (assuming I know nothing about how it works which might give me some insight), I cannot come up with any guess which will be any more accurate than any other guess. Finding out that a person has a nose is not particularly informative but finding out that the first byte of the string is 183 is. The easier it is to predict what something will be like, the less information it will contain.