Yahoo did a stock split earlier this year, so it would be more like $70 - which is a great recovery from around 5-7$ per share (split adjusted) a year and a half ago. (ObDisclaimer: I own Yahoo shares. Got mine at $35 pre-split, or $17.5 per current share I hold split adjusted)
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, the graph is adjusted for splits.
2 billion * 1/4 (one quarter) * 5% (much more than you can get through safe investments) = $25 million.
IANAA[0] but, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund has averaged about 12% annually[1]. Some market indices have been remarkably stable in the long term, and the overhead for a mutual fund tracking an indice is rather low, due to the simplicity of the fund. However, while such a habit of investing has been relatively safe in the long term (say, 20 years down the road), in the short term the returns are relatively unpredictable.
The problem with "safe" investments is that, in the event of massive inflation, the actual return isn't so "safe". Imagine what the inflation of the '70s did to "profits" from bonds.
[0] I am not an accountant (and thus this is not investment advice)
[1] Past performance, of course, is no guarentee of future performance.
Note how that linked graph is logrithmic -- if you bought Yahoo at the top (say, around $120/share), your investment would have declined to just over $35/share.
Two questions you might want to ask yourself is how risky is google's long term future, and if you are investing for the short term, can you predict google's peak and get out near enough to it to justify the investment? [Remember there are broker fees out there if you are buying in small quantities!]
I expect people to get rich quickly off of the GOOG stock. But I also expect people to lose their shirts in GOOG.
The material is made of carbon atoms. I don't think you'll find many people allergic to carbon, since most everyone I've met has been "carbon-based".
However, if this material breaks down into tiny, airborne pieces, it could by-pass the lung's filtering system and lodge itself in the tissue.
Black lung disease is caused by coal dust, and coal is nothing more then carbon and hydrocarbons, both basic biological building blocks for life on earth. Its just that the coal dust gets lodged in the lungs, and the body can't remove it. The irritation then causes problems.
Within a few generations, inbreeding related problems would be their downfall.
From your most recent post:
So yeah, I think I stand by what I said in my OP. I don't think I'd call it bad science. Your examples are interesting but don't matter because a) they either talk about animals other than humans, or b) suggest that humans could have evolved from a population of around 20k individuals -- rather more than a couple, which is the idea I'm trying to refute, at least in its literal interpretation.
Basically, I agree with you -- there is no compelling evidence to a literal interpretation of Noah's Ark.
OTOH, inbreeding would not have been their "downfall", to use your words. Sure, humans aren't golden hamsters or wisent bison. But I cannot think of any difference between us and these animals which would cause a tiny population of humans to die out due to inbreeding. Noah's ark, according to the bible, had 8 people on board, including 3 breeding pairs of adults. That is more genetic diversity then hamsters.
(Btw, we know that the wisent are decended from 12 individuals and that most golden hamsters are decended from one because of historical records. Its the lack of genetic diversity that indicates human population bottlenecks, for example.)
Now, if you were arguing that there is too much genetic diversity in humans for a literal interpretation of Noah's ark, you'd have a valid point.
But if you argued that a small group of people couldn't survive due to genetic diversity, any learned individual will disagree because your point is invalid.
Well, the Adam and Eve issue (as someone else pointed out) is that we don't have enough genetic diversity in one couple to produce all of humanity. Just consider the inbreeding problems that the royalty of Europe had a few hundred years ago due to intermarriage. If you wanted to populate the moon, for example, you could not just send one couple. Within a few generations, inbreeding related problems would be their downfall.
Bad example -- the Eve Hypothesis seems to indicate that all of humanity is decended from a relatively "small" population of humans (where "small" is defined as less then 20k).
In science, tiny populations can give rise to large populations (Founder's Effect), although sometimes there are side-effects.
Wisent (European Bison) are all decended from twelve individuals. Wisent bulls suffer from some lack of diversity, only having two distinct Y-chromosomes in their genetic pool, but there are only limited effects from interbreeding.
Golden Hamsters tend to be all decended from one litter found in Syria in 1930.
IIRC, Noah was supposed to have several people on the Ark -- himself, his children, and his children's spouses. Although clearly not an optimal setup, it would probably be enough to prevent the species from dying out.
I wouldn't be surprised if some islands in the world started out with roughly the same population.
Don't get the wrong impression -- I'm not arguing for Creationism or literal interpretations of the bible. I just don't want to see bad science being repeated.
No. Not until it's proven. As long as someone could come up with another theory that predicts the exact same results, in a different way, which is not disproven, it's still a theory.
For example, I could say "My theory includes everything in General Relativity, except for a small sphere four miles wide in the center of Andromeda, where light travels twice as fast."
You joke, but interestingly enough, something like that has happened. Newton came up with a set of "laws" for the physical universe, and that set of laws worked out remarkably well, until back in the 1900s, the planet Mercury's observed position was different from where it should have been.
Many people were searching for a tenth planet between Mercury and the sun (planet Vulcan), until Einstein came along with relativity and showed why we weren't seeing Mercury in the right spot.
Now, for many, many common tasks, Newtonian physics works just fine. An engineer will use it every day for the rest of his life without having any problems.
But for very precise measurements, extremely high speeds, extremely large masses, etc, Newtonian physics will give the wrong answer.
In short, Newtonian physics acts like a subset of Relativity.
Shot of a thin gaunt man dressed in an old jacket hawking CD's with Cyrillic lettering in the rain. The rooftop of an Orthodox Russian Church can be seen in the background.
Announcer: This is Boris, a hardworking Russian music pirate. Every day he is on the streets, twelve, fourteen, or even fifteen hours, hawking his burned CDs of the latest hit albums from the US. He even has created his own mixes with high-quality jacket art that caters to the Russian market.
Shot of a fat man driving a Ford SUV and eating from a bag of McDonald's food. In the interior of the SUV, an in-dash satellite radio and GPS system can be seen. In the back is an in-car DVD player.
Announcer (cont.): This is John, an American music producer. Unlike Boris, he has a steady job, including health, vacation, and retirement. He only works a measily 8 hour day, and lives in a 3000 sq ft home, with central heat and air. Unlike Boris, who owns no vehicles, John owns a late-model SUV, which he parks in his own private three-stall garage.
Shot of a typical upscale gated community in the US.
Announcer (cont.): If you buy legitimate music, you are throwing your money to rich Americans who already have the good life.
Shot of a Moscow slum.
Announcer (cont.) But if you buy the latest songs from the Russian pirates on the street, your money stays in the Russian economy, benefitting many more people than just the pirate.
Yeah, its nice if you can afford to have two monitors (and the hardware to support it).
Used 15" Monitor : They tend to run $20-30 at the local used computer shop and thrift stores.
PCI Video Card : $5 - 15. (Probably could find one free if you scrounged, $15 should pay for cost + S&H off Ebay.)
Electricity per month : < $2 (According to another slashdot poster.)
If your job would be improved by dual monitors, I don't see cost being an issue.
Of course, in my case, I tend to feel that my job would be improved by one 80x25 terminal window, no multi-tasking, but that's only on my cynical days.;)
If the ISP requires authentication, then the person with the infected machine will be easy to find after a spam complaint and shut down for a few days till they clean up their machine.
I just grabbed the statistics for one A/V vendor's top virus alert today (http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/defa ult5.asp?VName=PE_FUNLOVE.4099&VSect=S)
Roughly 10 million infected.
Imagine that having trojan capabilities. If it took one minute to shut off a trojaned, infected computer, that would result in roughly 100 days of spamming (if my back-of-the-napkin calculations are correct).
But that is a rather crude way of doing it. If I was evil enough to do it, I'd write up a little virus that would send itself out with the address book over time, to escape detection, then spam the address book, then die.
While there are global settings blocking common ports, network access must also assigned to individual programs before they are allowed to access the network, otherwise they are blocked! Plus there are port controls on the individual programs themselves should I so wish it, and wish it I do.
Nitpick:
If it is a software firewall on the same machine, there are ways to circumvent it. I don't know of any spywhere that does so at this moment, but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. What happens when most people start using a version of windows with a strong firewall by default? Spyware will evolve.
I use my firewall as a snitch. Not only do plenty of apps phone home but so many of them that do still work perfectly well despite being blockaded from the internet. I do however get quite annoyed by applications that you configure to not use the internet that then still go ahead and try to access the internet.
App: Time to phone scumsuckingspywhere.com at port 12231
Firewall: Sorry, I can't let you do that. *writes log message*
App: How about phoning scumsuckingspywhere.com at port 80?
Firewall: HTTP traffic is okay. I'll let you through...
You:*Viewing logs* Ah, another spywhere program blocked!
I would think the really important thing about this is that Google is respected in the internet industry and that others will certainly follow suit. If enough big players make the effort to ensure email from their domain names is authenticated, email clients could eventually offer the option to only accept emails from proven senders.
At which point, I predict a lot more trojaned machines sending spam out through the users ISP.
*sigh* having more market share is not an excuse. Just look at Apache vs. IIS and you'll see that more market share does not automatically equal more security holes.
There are two problems:
1) Security of the default install. Microsoft isn't too bad in this department, but OS software tends to be better.
2) Technical capability of the users. OS wins, hands down, in this department. If OS ever replaced MS for the masses, I'm sure we'd have many viruses running around. Window VB viruses don't even need a security hole -- there are enough ignorant people out there who will happily run as root and click on executable attachments. Speaking of security holes, there are many more users that will happily run a box unpatched.
#2 is a valid excuse, and I don't fault Microsoft for mentioning it.
As for #1, does the average user want a secure OS? MacOS X, another OS-for-the-masses, appears to be able to impliment some security features (auto-updates, root password prompt) without confusing non-technical users, which indicates room for growth, but to be honest, the same marketing decision behind many other poor-security decisions is active in Windows.
This indicates that a extreme amount of dust and ash must've been airborne for many years, blocking much of the sunlight that would normally enable plant life to flourish. While it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were in decline prior to this time, the event that killed them is the same one that ultimately created the K-T.
Oddly enough though, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish survived...
Yet both the bird-hipped and regular-hipped dinosaurs died, pterodactyls were wiped out, and the marine dinosaurs also died.
The meteor probably had a large influence, but I think the actual story is more complicated than "the meteor hit the earth and all of dinosauria decided to die, along with a few related species"
What happens if, in the above hypothetical vehicle accident, you pull a "drunk" driver out from one of the vehicles, seemingly okay, who later goes into a diabetic coma and dies?
Sometimes I think that activists are under the impression that if the meat and leather industries halted, farmers would continue to rear cattle and just let them lead full lives, all the while paying out for feeding them and getting no profit in return.
Sometimes I think that activists are under the impression that if the meat and leather industries halted, farmers would continue to rear cattle and just let them lead full lives, all the while paying out for feeding them and getting no profit in return.
As a vegan, I'm well aware that my choices, if adopted by everyone, would lead to a drastic reduction in the number of "farm animals" alive.
Outside of zoos and special breeders, they would be extinct.
However, the food "wasted" by feeding it to farm animals would be eliminated, perhaps leading to lower food prices and helping the less fortunate (right now, world hunger is a logistics problem, the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, but much of that food is fed to feed animals).
In addition, some of the extra land being used for feed grains would probably return to the wild, which is a small bonus.
Food production would require less water, and would result in less pollution. Factory farms produce large amounts of waste which has environmental consequences.
There is also the problems of antibiotics being fed to animals, some of the same animals (poultry) which are the source for some human diseases (flu).
Meat is horribly inefficient. It requires more land, more water, and more energy to produce. The reason I'm a vegan isn't to ensure a large cow population, but for the health of humans and the suffering of animals.
Yes, I hate hearing cellphones in cinemas etc. But when I'm in such a place and I have a babysitter, I always have the cellphone on, and on silent/vibrate. That way, if something needs dealing with, I can go out and call them back.
Other people have not mastered that skill. If people would keep their cellphones on quiet and leave the theatre to check them, there wouldn't be this problem.
However, even with jammers, its easy to give the babysitter the number at the theatre in case there is an emergency.
Classic era science fiction (Heinlein, Asimov, etc.) was notably more humanistic and positivistic in tone.
Wasn't there a bunch of Heinlein short stories and a few novels about the nastier side of the future?
I'm dredging up memories of "If This Goes On", the crazy-years period, the theocracy, media censorship in "Methusalah's Children", etc.
Asimov had his own fears -- look at Earth in the "Caves of Steel" and the apathy of the spacers in "The Naked Sun", as well as the isolation of the solarians. Heck, even in his early work, the future isn't always shown in a rosy picture -- in "Pebble in the Sky", futuristic earth is mostly radioactive wastelands under the control of a decaying galactic empire.
I thought it was really interesting in Snow Crash how Juanita (a Catholic) doesn't believe the story of Jesus's resurrection. She claims that it was the Church's attempt to wrest back control of the religion. I'm not Christian but the very idea is really intriguing. Was there a particular source or research for this theory? What about your perspective on religion in general?
Interestingly, Stephenson doesn't seem to bash religion in general -- Enoch is/was a priest, Juanita was a Catholic, the Neo-Victorians were presumably Anglican, etc. In places, the religious people are presented in a superior light -- In Cryptonomicon, the inhabitants of the ivory tower all bash Randy's desertion of Charlene, except for a closet-Christian couple.
I stumbled across a mention of a NYT article where Stephenson mentions he was attending church again since his move to Seattle. Perhaps he considers himself a Christian.
Please give us some more details about Enoch Root. He's quite an amazong character, but you leave us really guessing about him. Is he the same person throughout the years? Is he the embodiment of the biblical Enoch?
In both of the prequals, there is some interesting information about Enoch.
In "Quicksilver", Enoch demonstrates anachronistic knowledge of blood iron. Enoch is also quite old in the books -- he's a grown man when Isaac Newton was a boy, and he's still alive when Isaac is an old man.
In "The Confusion", it is revealed that Enoch has faked his death to hide his unusually long life.
When evolving marketplace dynamics make the RIAA business model unprofitable, that's just fine with slashdotters.
When evolcing marketplace dynamics make it unprofitable to hire programmers in the U.S., slashdotters are up in arms, demanding government intervention.
Hmm, I wonder why the discrepancy?
While some of it is self-interest, small details such as companies receiving tax breaks for outsourcing is a problem.
The RIAA in its current incarnation is going to die. Its just going to thrash and scream and maul a few people in the process. Since its behind such wonderful ideas such as "lets get the feds to pay for our civil lawsuits" and "lets break CD-compatibility in the name of copy protection without telling the customer", most of Slashdot appears to be cheering any forecasted death of this abomination.
As for outsourcing, certain Asian countries are going to grow into programming behemoths. This doesn't mean that the US will lose all of its programming jobs, its not a zero-sum game. But if the US gives more benefits for investing overseas, then there is a huge problem -- tax-wise, its no longer a level playing field[1]. Hence the hordes of slashdotters with torches and pitchforks, storming the castles of corporate America and burning CEO's in effigy.
[1] I'm curious -- can an economics major play devil's advocate and tell me why increased corporate profits from outsourcing is better for the US then decreased corporate profits and better jobs?
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo did a stock split earlier this year, so it would be more like $70 - which is a great recovery from around 5-7$ per share (split adjusted) a year and a half ago. (ObDisclaimer: I own Yahoo shares. Got mine at $35 pre-split, or $17.5 per current share I hold split adjusted)
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, the graph is adjusted for splits.
2 billion * 1/4 (one quarter) * 5% (much more than you can get through safe investments) = $25 million.
IANAA[0] but, the Vanguard 500 Index Fund has averaged about 12% annually[1]. Some market indices have been remarkably stable in the long term, and the overhead for a mutual fund tracking an indice is rather low, due to the simplicity of the fund. However, while such a habit of investing has been relatively safe in the long term (say, 20 years down the road), in the short term the returns are relatively unpredictable.
The problem with "safe" investments is that, in the event of massive inflation, the actual return isn't so "safe". Imagine what the inflation of the '70s did to "profits" from bonds.
[0] I am not an accountant (and thus this is not investment advice)
[1] Past performance, of course, is no guarentee of future performance.
Google has potential, but at the same time, there is nothing to prevent the share price greatly declining in value after the peak.
Note how that linked graph is logrithmic -- if you bought Yahoo at the top (say, around $120/share), your investment would have declined to just over $35/share.
Two questions you might want to ask yourself is how risky is google's long term future, and if you are investing for the short term, can you predict google's peak and get out near enough to it to justify the investment? [Remember there are broker fees out there if you are buying in small quantities!]
I expect people to get rich quickly off of the GOOG stock. But I also expect people to lose their shirts in GOOG.
The material is made of carbon atoms. I don't think you'll find many people allergic to carbon, since most everyone I've met has been "carbon-based".
However, if this material breaks down into tiny, airborne pieces, it could by-pass the lung's filtering system and lodge itself in the tissue.
Black lung disease is caused by coal dust, and coal is nothing more then carbon and hydrocarbons, both basic biological building blocks for life on earth. Its just that the coal dust gets lodged in the lungs, and the body can't remove it. The irritation then causes problems.
From your original post:
Within a few generations, inbreeding related problems would be their downfall.
From your most recent post:
So yeah, I think I stand by what I said in my OP. I don't think I'd call it bad science. Your examples are interesting but don't matter because a) they either talk about animals other than humans, or b) suggest that humans could have evolved from a population of around 20k individuals -- rather more than a couple, which is the idea I'm trying to refute, at least in its literal interpretation.Basically, I agree with you -- there is no compelling evidence to a literal interpretation of Noah's Ark.
OTOH, inbreeding would not have been their "downfall", to use your words. Sure, humans aren't golden hamsters or wisent bison. But I cannot think of any difference between us and these animals which would cause a tiny population of humans to die out due to inbreeding. Noah's ark, according to the bible, had 8 people on board, including 3 breeding pairs of adults. That is more genetic diversity then hamsters.
(Btw, we know that the wisent are decended from 12 individuals and that most golden hamsters are decended from one because of historical records. Its the lack of genetic diversity that indicates human population bottlenecks, for example.)
Now, if you were arguing that there is too much genetic diversity in humans for a literal interpretation of Noah's ark, you'd have a valid point.
But if you argued that a small group of people couldn't survive due to genetic diversity, any learned individual will disagree because your point is invalid.
Well, the Adam and Eve issue (as someone else pointed out) is that we don't have enough genetic diversity in one couple to produce all of humanity. Just consider the inbreeding problems that the royalty of Europe had a few hundred years ago due to intermarriage. If you wanted to populate the moon, for example, you could not just send one couple. Within a few generations, inbreeding related problems would be their downfall.
Bad example -- the Eve Hypothesis seems to indicate that all of humanity is decended from a relatively "small" population of humans (where "small" is defined as less then 20k).
There is also a corresponding Adam Hypothesis
In science, tiny populations can give rise to large populations (Founder's Effect), although sometimes there are side-effects.
Wisent (European Bison) are all decended from twelve individuals. Wisent bulls suffer from some lack of diversity, only having two distinct Y-chromosomes in their genetic pool, but there are only limited effects from interbreeding.
Golden Hamsters tend to be all decended from one litter found in Syria in 1930.
IIRC, Noah was supposed to have several people on the Ark -- himself, his children, and his children's spouses. Although clearly not an optimal setup, it would probably be enough to prevent the species from dying out.
I wouldn't be surprised if some islands in the world started out with roughly the same population.
Don't get the wrong impression -- I'm not arguing for Creationism or literal interpretations of the bible. I just don't want to see bad science being repeated.
No. Not until it's proven. As long as someone could come up with another theory that predicts the exact same results, in a different way, which is not disproven, it's still a theory.
For example, I could say "My theory includes everything in General Relativity, except for a small sphere four miles wide in the center of Andromeda, where light travels twice as fast."
You joke, but interestingly enough, something like that has happened. Newton came up with a set of "laws" for the physical universe, and that set of laws worked out remarkably well, until back in the 1900s, the planet Mercury's observed position was different from where it should have been.
Many people were searching for a tenth planet between Mercury and the sun (planet Vulcan), until Einstein came along with relativity and showed why we weren't seeing Mercury in the right spot.
Now, for many, many common tasks, Newtonian physics works just fine. An engineer will use it every day for the rest of his life without having any problems.
But for very precise measurements, extremely high speeds, extremely large masses, etc, Newtonian physics will give the wrong answer.
In short, Newtonian physics acts like a subset of Relativity.
Shot of a thin gaunt man dressed in an old jacket hawking CD's with Cyrillic lettering in the rain. The rooftop of an Orthodox Russian Church can be seen in the background.
Announcer: This is Boris, a hardworking Russian music pirate. Every day he is on the streets, twelve, fourteen, or even fifteen hours, hawking his burned CDs of the latest hit albums from the US. He even has created his own mixes with high-quality jacket art that caters to the Russian market.
Shot of a fat man driving a Ford SUV and eating from a bag of McDonald's food. In the interior of the SUV, an in-dash satellite radio and GPS system can be seen. In the back is an in-car DVD player.
Announcer (cont.): This is John, an American music producer. Unlike Boris, he has a steady job, including health, vacation, and retirement. He only works a measily 8 hour day, and lives in a 3000 sq ft home, with central heat and air. Unlike Boris, who owns no vehicles, John owns a late-model SUV, which he parks in his own private three-stall garage.
Shot of a typical upscale gated community in the US.
Announcer (cont.): If you buy legitimate music, you are throwing your money to rich Americans who already have the good life.
Shot of a Moscow slum.
Announcer (cont.) But if you buy the latest songs from the Russian pirates on the street, your money stays in the Russian economy, benefitting many more people than just the pirate.
Announcer (cont.): Please buy locally.
A related application is called synergy allows two machines to share a single mouse/keyboard.
Not as useful (you can't move windows between the machines) but it works on Macs, Windows, and any machine with XFree86.
I find that its a great app if your desk tends to share a desktop computer with a laptop.
Yeah, its nice if you can afford to have two monitors (and the hardware to support it).
Used 15" Monitor : They tend to run $20-30 at the local used computer shop and thrift stores.
PCI Video Card : $5 - 15. (Probably could find one free if you scrounged, $15 should pay for cost + S&H off Ebay.)
Electricity per month : < $2 (According to another slashdot poster.)
If your job would be improved by dual monitors, I don't see cost being an issue.
Of course, in my case, I tend to feel that my job would be improved by one 80x25 terminal window, no multi-tasking, but that's only on my cynical days. ;)
If the ISP requires authentication, then the person with the infected machine will be easy to find after a spam complaint and shut down for a few days till they clean up their machine.
I just grabbed the statistics for one A/V vendor's top virus alert today (http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/virusencyclo/defa ult5.asp?VName=PE_FUNLOVE.4099&VSect=S)
Roughly 10 million infected.
Imagine that having trojan capabilities. If it took one minute to shut off a trojaned, infected computer, that would result in roughly 100 days of spamming (if my back-of-the-napkin calculations are correct).
But that is a rather crude way of doing it. If I was evil enough to do it, I'd write up a little virus that would send itself out with the address book over time, to escape detection, then spam the address book, then die.
While there are global settings blocking common ports, network access must also assigned to individual programs before they are allowed to access the network, otherwise they are blocked! Plus there are port controls on the individual programs themselves should I so wish it, and wish it I do.
Nitpick:
If it is a software firewall on the same machine, there are ways to circumvent it. I don't know of any spywhere that does so at this moment, but that doesn't mean it will stay that way. What happens when most people start using a version of windows with a strong firewall by default? Spyware will evolve.
In short, spyware sucks. :(
I use my firewall as a snitch. Not only do plenty of apps phone home but so many of them that do still work perfectly well despite being blockaded from the internet. I do however get quite annoyed by applications that you configure to not use the internet that then still go ahead and try to access the internet.
App: Time to phone scumsuckingspywhere.com at port 12231
Firewall: Sorry, I can't let you do that. *writes log message*
App: How about phoning scumsuckingspywhere.com at port 80?
Firewall: HTTP traffic is okay. I'll let you through...
You: *Viewing logs* Ah, another spywhere program blocked!
I would think the really important thing about this is that Google is respected in the internet industry and that others will certainly follow suit. If enough big players make the effort to ensure email from their domain names is authenticated, email clients could eventually offer the option to only accept emails from proven senders.
At which point, I predict a lot more trojaned machines sending spam out through the users ISP.
I think that the survival thing largely comes down to "dinosaurs big, other critters small" rather than being anything very complicated.
The smallest sized dinosaur was chicken-sized, that we know of. A quick google search indicates that a larger crocodile survived the big extinction.
*sigh* having more market share is not an excuse. Just look at Apache vs. IIS and you'll see that more market share does not automatically equal more security holes.
There are two problems:
1) Security of the default install. Microsoft isn't too bad in this department, but OS software tends to be better.
2) Technical capability of the users. OS wins, hands down, in this department. If OS ever replaced MS for the masses, I'm sure we'd have many viruses running around. Window VB viruses don't even need a security hole -- there are enough ignorant people out there who will happily run as root and click on executable attachments. Speaking of security holes, there are many more users that will happily run a box unpatched.
#2 is a valid excuse, and I don't fault Microsoft for mentioning it.
As for #1, does the average user want a secure OS? MacOS X, another OS-for-the-masses, appears to be able to impliment some security features (auto-updates, root password prompt) without confusing non-technical users, which indicates room for growth, but to be honest, the same marketing decision behind many other poor-security decisions is active in Windows.
This indicates that a extreme amount of dust and ash must've been airborne for many years, blocking much of the sunlight that would normally enable plant life to flourish. While it is entirely feasible that dinosaurs were in decline prior to this time, the event that killed them is the same one that ultimately created the K-T.
Oddly enough though, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish survived...
Yet both the bird-hipped and regular-hipped dinosaurs died, pterodactyls were wiped out, and the marine dinosaurs also died.
The meteor probably had a large influence, but I think the actual story is more complicated than "the meteor hit the earth and all of dinosauria decided to die, along with a few related species"
What happens if, in the above hypothetical vehicle accident, you pull a "drunk" driver out from one of the vehicles, seemingly okay, who later goes into a diabetic coma and dies?
The movie is rated R - your kids can only see it if YOU take them.
Judging from prior movies, I expect the theatre to be full of 7-9 year olds and parents too cheap to hire a sitter.
Sometimes I think that activists are under the impression that if the meat and leather industries halted, farmers would continue to rear cattle and just let them lead full lives, all the while paying out for feeding them and getting no profit in return.
Sometimes I think that activists are under the impression that if the meat and leather industries halted, farmers would continue to rear cattle and just let them lead full lives, all the while paying out for feeding them and getting no profit in return.
As a vegan, I'm well aware that my choices, if adopted by everyone, would lead to a drastic reduction in the number of "farm animals" alive. Outside of zoos and special breeders, they would be extinct.
However, the food "wasted" by feeding it to farm animals would be eliminated, perhaps leading to lower food prices and helping the less fortunate (right now, world hunger is a logistics problem, the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, but much of that food is fed to feed animals).
In addition, some of the extra land being used for feed grains would probably return to the wild, which is a small bonus.
Food production would require less water, and would result in less pollution. Factory farms produce large amounts of waste which has environmental consequences.
There is also the problems of antibiotics being fed to animals, some of the same animals (poultry) which are the source for some human diseases (flu).
Meat is horribly inefficient. It requires more land, more water, and more energy to produce. The reason I'm a vegan isn't to ensure a large cow population, but for the health of humans and the suffering of animals.
Yes, I hate hearing cellphones in cinemas etc. But when I'm in such a place and I have a babysitter, I always have the cellphone on, and on silent/vibrate. That way, if something needs dealing with, I can go out and call them back.
Other people have not mastered that skill. If people would keep their cellphones on quiet and leave the theatre to check them, there wouldn't be this problem.
However, even with jammers, its easy to give the babysitter the number at the theatre in case there is an emergency.
Classic era science fiction (Heinlein, Asimov, etc.) was notably more humanistic and positivistic in tone.
Wasn't there a bunch of Heinlein short stories and a few novels about the nastier side of the future?
I'm dredging up memories of "If This Goes On", the crazy-years period, the theocracy, media censorship in "Methusalah's Children", etc.
Asimov had his own fears -- look at Earth in the "Caves of Steel" and the apathy of the spacers in "The Naked Sun", as well as the isolation of the solarians. Heck, even in his early work, the future isn't always shown in a rosy picture -- in "Pebble in the Sky", futuristic earth is mostly radioactive wastelands under the control of a decaying galactic empire.
I thought it was really interesting in Snow Crash how Juanita (a Catholic) doesn't believe the story of Jesus's resurrection. She claims that it was the Church's attempt to wrest back control of the religion. I'm not Christian but the very idea is really intriguing. Was there a particular source or research for this theory? What about your perspective on religion in general?
Interestingly, Stephenson doesn't seem to bash religion in general -- Enoch is/was a priest, Juanita was a Catholic, the Neo-Victorians were presumably Anglican, etc. In places, the religious people are presented in a superior light -- In Cryptonomicon, the inhabitants of the ivory tower all bash Randy's desertion of Charlene, except for a closet-Christian couple.
I stumbled across a mention of a NYT article where Stephenson mentions he was attending church again since his move to Seattle. Perhaps he considers himself a Christian.
Please give us some more details about Enoch Root. He's quite an amazong character, but you leave us really guessing about him. Is he the same person throughout the years? Is he the embodiment of the biblical Enoch?
In both of the prequals, there is some interesting information about Enoch.
In "Quicksilver", Enoch demonstrates anachronistic knowledge of blood iron. Enoch is also quite old in the books -- he's a grown man when Isaac Newton was a boy, and he's still alive when Isaac is an old man.
In "The Confusion", it is revealed that Enoch has faked his death to hide his unusually long life.
When evolving marketplace dynamics make the RIAA business model unprofitable, that's just fine with slashdotters.
When evolcing marketplace dynamics make it unprofitable to hire programmers in the U.S., slashdotters are up in arms, demanding government intervention.
Hmm, I wonder why the discrepancy?
While some of it is self-interest, small details such as companies receiving tax breaks for outsourcing is a problem.
The RIAA in its current incarnation is going to die. Its just going to thrash and scream and maul a few people in the process. Since its behind such wonderful ideas such as "lets get the feds to pay for our civil lawsuits" and "lets break CD-compatibility in the name of copy protection without telling the customer", most of Slashdot appears to be cheering any forecasted death of this abomination.
As for outsourcing, certain Asian countries are going to grow into programming behemoths. This doesn't mean that the US will lose all of its programming jobs, its not a zero-sum game. But if the US gives more benefits for investing overseas, then there is a huge problem -- tax-wise, its no longer a level playing field[1]. Hence the hordes of slashdotters with torches and pitchforks, storming the castles of corporate America and burning CEO's in effigy.