I'm not a marine biologist, but what do you suppose giant squid need to bite through that is "as strong as a steel cable?"
Well, any good design has some margin of safety. You wouldn't want the squid to only barely be able to bite through its food, or its beak wouldn't last long. That said, I imagine you need a good deal of force to break open something like a chambered nautilus (the shellfish, not the submarine).
There were some Apache 2.0 RPMS in the Contribs directory a while back, but they're gone now, at least on the mirror I'm looking at. It's hard to believe Mandrake is willing to go out on a limb with Gnome 2.0 but not Apache 2.0 - that's certainly the opposite of what my intuition tells me will be the more stable of the two packages.
It's the same situation that Windows users find themselves in all the time, but this time it happens in the Linux world and we wonder what the fix is....
Really? There are programs compiled for Windows 3.1 that still work perfectly on XP. And Windows users certainly don't end up with incompatible software every time Microsoft updates VisualC++/C#Studio6.5.NET (or whatever the hell they call it nowadays).
Incidentally, could someone who understands the issues a bit better explain why every upgrade of GCC breaks binary compatibility? And, more importantly, will I be able to run Quake III on Mdk9.0?
You're right, I don't have a TiVo. I have a similar device, known as a VCR, which records television programming without being plugged into a phone line, downloading my viewing habits to a third party, and charging a monthly fee. That doesn't change the fact that there's precious little on TV worth watching, let alone going to the trouble of setting a timer to record.
Well, the particular section of US Code which states that the "under God" version of the pledge is the official version could be considered unconstitutional, because "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". However, this does not make that version of the pledge illegal or unconstitutional to recite, so the Congresscritters were not in any way violating the Constitution by saying it. They were, as the previous poster pointed out, acting very immature, but that's par for the course in D.C.
I never saw Part III all the way through. In retrospect, it was pretty obvious even in the first one that the gasoline engine was still powering the vehicle on the ground. But, there's no logical reason why you couldn't put an electric motor in the car and power it completely with the Mr. Fusion. After all, you've got at least 1.21 gigawatts at your disposal.
Call me weird, but I've watched a couple episodes of "King of Queens" lately and it's actually half-decent. But the ratio of watchable shows to mindless drivel has dropped precipitously recently. Not too long ago, it was a Sunday night ritual for us to watch The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Futurama, and X-Files. At least we still have The Simpsons.
It does seem like the only new shows are mindless reality TV and extreme game shows. I guess the networks didn't want to pay script writers any more.
You may be making the grave mistake of underestimating the stupidity of people in large groups. I hope you're right though. Not only is he failing his constituents, he's endangering the freedoms of the entire country. I guess he's too senile to remember the oath he took to uphold the Constitution?
Bullshit. Itanium is as compatible with x86 as my Athlon is compatible with the processors used in the NES, Nintendo 64, Atari 2600, Game Boy, Sega, and Commodore 64.
Untrue. Your Athlon cannot emulate the 68000, Z80, or 6502 chips (what's in the N64?) without additional software. The Itanium has x86 emulation built-in. Thus, it is false to say the Itanium has no backwards compatibility with x86. The fact that it performs emulation is irrelevant to the discussion. In fact, most of the modern x86 chips could in a very real sense be said to be emulating x86, as they translate x86 instructions to a more RISC-like instruction set internally.
Not to knock the Doozie, but note that many cars today will reach 120mph with about 1/3 the engine displacement. Not to mention they probably produce 1/10 the pollution and are immeasurably safer. So, see kids, the automobile industry is capable of making progress.
Also, needless to say, your car uses far more power than one of these probes. But once electric and/or fuel-cell cars start becoming popular, we may wind up building more nuclear power plants, so the dream of a nuclear car might not be far off.
My best guess, though, is we won't have a Mr. Fusion in the trunk anytime soon.
To some extent. But, that light would be going into the sky regardless of whether the light was aimed at the object reflecting, or the light was coming from a 360 degree illumination source.
Think about a 100W bare bulb vs. a 50W reflectorized bulb. Both will provide roughly the same light on the object you're trying to illuminate. The object will reflect roughly the same miniscule amount of light into the sky from either setup. But the bare bulb is in addition wasting 50% of its power pumping light into the sky, where it does no good and obscures the night sky.
Another thing the poster to which you're responding fails to recognize is that CO2 is not a major factor in air pollution, at least the sort of air pollution that would obstruct astronomy.
Incidentally,though, the steps which one would logically take to lessen the problem of light pollution would also greatly lower electrical consumption and thus CO2 emissions and other forms of air pollution. Some examples: lower light output to the minimum needed to illuminate an area or object, use reflectors to prevent light escaping into the sky, turn off unnecessary lights after the end of the business day.
Right. Do you also believe in UFOs, astral projection, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trans-mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?
If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.
I can't possibly be the only one who caught the reference....
Far be it for anybody to defend Microsoft on slashdot but this is an impossible requirement that no other OS vendor delivers - Not other Unices - Not even Linux.
Agreed, although as another poster mentioned the BSDs come close. Also, if you do a default install of the more recent Linux distributions they won't be running too many services. I can't remember if RedHat or Mandrake turn on Apache by default, as I've never done a default install of either.
If you dare to draw a paycheck you SHOULD be a Professional. It's up to you to learn how a professional operates.
Again, Joe Home User who gets his shiny new Windows machine and hooks it up to his cable modem out the house shouldn't have to be a professional. He doesn't know about servers and firewalls and ports (oh my). He expects it to be plug-n-play, so it seems that Microsoft has a responsiblity to make sure unwanted things don't start playing when the machine gets plugged (the Unix vendors have this same responsibility, to be sure).
You also shouldn't expect Joe User to use the custom install and deselect IIS - you probably shouldn't expect him to know what IIS is. You can expect a sysadmin to know how to select IIS to be installed if he needs it. So the default obviously needs to be not installing IIS. Or Apache, for the Unices.
Did it occur to you that maybe you should connect the box to the Internet as the LAST STEP? - AFTER the server is configured and PATCHED?
Perhaps that should be obvious to an experienced sysadmin, but most installers of Windows 2000 won't have a clue about such precautions. The intelligent thing for Microsoft to have done is not had IIS turned on by default. This is especially obvious when you consider how many of the Code Red hits you get come from people who obviously don't even use the IIS that's running on their box.
Since Microsoft is aiming their software at clueless users who can't be bothered to secure their machines, Microsoft needs to ensure that their software is secure out of the box.
Since no one else on slashdot is contributing to the discussion, if you'd like to continue it in email feel free. My address is bsmith3 at charter dot net.
Anyway...
Tell me why I should expect an atheist scientist to give credence to creationist theories if they had supporting evidence? Everyone has biases, and a discussion of origins is inherently philosophical and will include people's biases.
Well, not all scientists are atheists. They come from all religious backgrounds and have beliefs as varied as anyone else. You might find a slightly higher proportion of atheists among scientists than the population at large, because science and atheism both tend to attract people with strict, logical minds.
This also seems like a convenient place to point out that Pope JP II has gone on record as saying the theory of evolution is not necessarily in conflict with Catholic theology. Not knowing your faith more than that you are Christian, I have to hope you're not one of the sort who refer to the Pope as the Great Satan of Rome, otherwise you won't give a whit about that.
About the dating methods mentioned on creationscience.com, I'm going to do more reading on some of them. The primarily geological ones (sediments, volcanic debris, continental erosion) don't seem to account for the massive geological changes that the Earth has gone through in its lifespan. The continents weren't always where they are now, many things which used to be sediments a few million years ago are mountaintops now, and so forth. Obviously, if you reject an age > 6000 years for Earth in the first place, those aren't good explanations. But if you're going to try to find inconsistencies in geology, you have to make sure that the theories already there don't easily explain away your evidence. Some of the other stuff there isn't so easy to dismiss, so I'll be doing some more reading later on.
Question: is there any mechanism known (and I am ignorant) by which molecules may be created initially in order to form amino acids?
Well, if you've got carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, you've got all the building blocks in place. Stuff like methane, ammonia, and of course carbon dioxide and water can form naturally, and these can form the amino acids.
You demonstrated that some amino acids form naturally, but what about the molecules they are formed from - do all 20 amino acids naturally form, or only some?
There are now 22 known amino acids actually. As far as I know, not all of them have been shown to form outside of biological processes. That, of course, doesn't constitute proof that they can't form naturally.
Really? Some questions for evolution: * Why do humans shun rape as a sickening act? * Why do humans practice self-sacrifice for the love of another that is not necessarily their own offspring? * Why do humans sometimes feel prone to compassion towards the weak and unpriviliged?
Three quick guesses that might not necessarily be all that great....
Rape: Females should tend to seek the fittest mate, having another forced on them goes against their genetic best interests. The males don't want to see it happen because that female might have chosen them as a mate instead. Incidentally, the male's genetic prerogative is to fertilize as many females as possible. This might explain why men don't appear as sympathetic to rape victims as other women, and also why you almost never hear of a man being raped (or at least, you don't hear them complain). These different approaches to reproduction can also be used to explain the different attitudes of men and women towards consent - the "men are pigs" phenomenon, you might call it.:)
Self sacrifice: Say you have two groups of bunnies. One bunny stands up to the marauding fox and saves his mate and cubs at the cost of his life. Another bunny runs away and his cubs are eaten. The first bunny has passed the test of natural selection and his offspring have a chance. The second bunny has not. He's survived to try again, but any number of things may stand in his way. The first bunny's offspring aren't guaranteed survival, but they're obviously more likely than the dead ones.
Compassion: This one is harder. Compassion is in general beneficial to the species as a whole, but it's harder to specifically state why.
Note that none of these three traits is confined only to humans. Plenty of animals want to choose their own mating partners and become plenty upset when another attempts mating with them. Animals risk, and often lose, their lives all the time providing for their own offspring or protecting a flock/herd/what-have-you.
Of course, the words "love" and "compassion" indicate emotions, and suggest that a purely scientific analysis isn't what you're after. And I don't think science alone can explain them either. I'm just pointing out that those emotions don't necessarily run counter to what evolution might suggest.
And why would God use one method to create His masterpiece (murder, rape, greed, selfishness, cruelty, etc) and then later declare these attributes to be sickening and morally wrong? It is obvious that those things happened and were necessary for natural selection, yet under evolution you must presume that they were natural and good processes (Genesis 1:31).
Obviously God has higher expectations of us than of the animals. There has never been a revelation to even the chimpanzees or dolphins, who appear to have very similar physical capacities for thought. God calls his whole creation good; we have to assume that includes carnivores which must kill for food. Or were they all herbivorous before sin entered the world? That's not meant to be trite or insulting; I honestly don't know the consensus among literalists about what the carnivores ate before Adam and Eve sinned and brought death to the world.
I think that evolutionists don't fully comprehend the creation theory and consider it. When reading creation information they must think with the mind of a creationist so they can see how everything fits together. I have to think like an evolutionist to fully appreciate their arguments when I read their websites - and I feel that evolutionists often miss this.
I agree. Here, I was going to write a bit about the biblical story, with some questions and some insights about my point of view as a decidedly non-atheist person who believes evolution is a valid scientific theory. But I quickly realized it would get too long. So, I'll finish it up later and, if you choose to continue the conversation, I've love to have your opinions and views on it. Again, bsmith3 at charter dot net.
A spokeswoman for the company, which bills the game as a "journey to the Deathside", said: "It's a dark, gory type of game and we thought it was appropriate to raise advertising to a new level."
I agree with her that it's a new level, but I don't think they'd be raising it to that new level.
Actually, I think it's called Dances With Wolves syndrome nowadays. Your point is well taken, though.
The post you're replying to did have one good point: the inter-tribal wars were bloody affairs, but they weren't wars of annihilation. This is one of the reasons the Native people were never able to get organized and defend themselves; they always assumed the whites would fight with them for a while and then come to terms and live in peace like other tribes. They didn't realize until it was too late that the 'settlers' weren't going to settle for less than the entire continent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a marine biologist, but what do you suppose giant squid need to bite through that is "as strong as a steel cable?"
Well, any good design has some margin of safety. You wouldn't want the squid to only barely be able to bite through its food, or its beak wouldn't last long. That said, I imagine you need a good deal of force to break open something like a chambered nautilus (the shellfish, not the submarine).
There were some Apache 2.0 RPMS in the Contribs directory a while back, but they're gone now, at least on the mirror I'm looking at. It's hard to believe Mandrake is willing to go out on a limb with Gnome 2.0 but not Apache 2.0 - that's certainly the opposite of what my intuition tells me will be the more stable of the two packages.
It's the same situation that Windows users find themselves in all the time, but this time it happens in the Linux world and we wonder what the fix is....
Really? There are programs compiled for Windows 3.1 that still work perfectly on XP. And Windows users certainly don't end up with incompatible software every time Microsoft updates VisualC++/C#Studio6.5.NET (or whatever the hell they call it nowadays).
Incidentally, could someone who understands the issues a bit better explain why every upgrade of GCC breaks binary compatibility? And, more importantly, will I be able to run Quake III on Mdk9.0?
Hey, don't worry about it. Thanks to the /. effect, you wouldn't be able to download it until you got back anyway.
You're right, I don't have a TiVo. I have a similar device, known as a VCR, which records television programming without being plugged into a phone line, downloading my viewing habits to a third party, and charging a monthly fee. That doesn't change the fact that there's precious little on TV worth watching, let alone going to the trouble of setting a timer to record.
Well, the particular section of US Code which states that the "under God" version of the pledge is the official version could be considered unconstitutional, because "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". However, this does not make that version of the pledge illegal or unconstitutional to recite, so the Congresscritters were not in any way violating the Constitution by saying it. They were, as the previous poster pointed out, acting very immature, but that's par for the course in D.C.
I never saw Part III all the way through. In retrospect, it was pretty obvious even in the first one that the gasoline engine was still powering the vehicle on the ground. But, there's no logical reason why you couldn't put an electric motor in the car and power it completely with the Mr. Fusion. After all, you've got at least 1.21 gigawatts at your disposal.
Call me weird, but I've watched a couple episodes of "King of Queens" lately and it's actually half-decent. But the ratio of watchable shows to mindless drivel has dropped precipitously recently. Not too long ago, it was a Sunday night ritual for us to watch The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Futurama, and X-Files. At least we still have The Simpsons.
It does seem like the only new shows are mindless reality TV and extreme game shows. I guess the networks didn't want to pay script writers any more.
That's handy to know. Can you still get blank tapes? (this is not a flame, it's a legit quesion)
You may be making the grave mistake of underestimating the stupidity of people in large groups. I hope you're right though. Not only is he failing his constituents, he's endangering the freedoms of the entire country. I guess he's too senile to remember the oath he took to uphold the Constitution?
Bullshit. Itanium is as compatible with x86 as my Athlon is compatible with the processors used in the NES, Nintendo 64, Atari 2600, Game Boy, Sega, and Commodore 64.
Untrue. Your Athlon cannot emulate the 68000, Z80, or 6502 chips (what's in the N64?) without additional software. The Itanium has x86 emulation built-in. Thus, it is false to say the Itanium has no backwards compatibility with x86. The fact that it performs emulation is irrelevant to the discussion. In fact, most of the modern x86 chips could in a very real sense be said to be emulating x86, as they translate x86 instructions to a more RISC-like instruction set internally.
Not to knock the Doozie, but note that many cars today will reach 120mph with about 1/3 the engine displacement. Not to mention they probably produce 1/10 the pollution and are immeasurably safer. So, see kids, the automobile industry is capable of making progress.
Also, needless to say, your car uses far more power than one of these probes. But once electric and/or fuel-cell cars start becoming popular, we may wind up building more nuclear power plants, so the dream of a nuclear car might not be far off.
My best guess, though, is we won't have a Mr. Fusion in the trunk anytime soon.
To some extent. But, that light would be going into the sky regardless of whether the light was aimed at the object reflecting, or the light was coming from a 360 degree illumination source.
Think about a 100W bare bulb vs. a 50W reflectorized bulb. Both will provide roughly the same light on the object you're trying to illuminate. The object will reflect roughly the same miniscule amount of light into the sky from either setup. But the bare bulb is in addition wasting 50% of its power pumping light into the sky, where it does no good and obscures the night sky.
Another thing the poster to which you're responding fails to recognize is that CO2 is not a major factor in air pollution, at least the sort of air pollution that would obstruct astronomy.
Incidentally,though, the steps which one would logically take to lessen the problem of light pollution would also greatly lower electrical consumption and thus CO2 emissions and other forms of air pollution. Some examples: lower light output to the minimum needed to illuminate an area or object, use reflectors to prevent light escaping into the sky, turn off unnecessary lights after the end of the business day.
Right. Do you also believe in UFOs, astral projection, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trans-mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?
If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say.
I can't possibly be the only one who caught the reference....
No, the apocalypse comes when GNU/Hurd 1.0 is released.
Americanizing it would make it Lye-nucks, and he sure didn't say it like that in the audio clip I heard.
Yeah, this new Debian release kicks ass! Now the Debian users can have all the great software that was in RedHat 2 versions ago. Whee!!
Far be it for anybody to defend Microsoft on slashdot but this is an impossible requirement that no other OS vendor delivers - Not other Unices - Not even Linux.
Agreed, although as another poster mentioned the BSDs come close. Also, if you do a default install of the more recent Linux distributions they won't be running too many services. I can't remember if RedHat or Mandrake turn on Apache by default, as I've never done a default install of either.
If you dare to draw a paycheck you SHOULD be a Professional. It's up to you to learn how a professional operates.
Again, Joe Home User who gets his shiny new Windows machine and hooks it up to his cable modem out the house shouldn't have to be a professional. He doesn't know about servers and firewalls and ports (oh my). He expects it to be plug-n-play, so it seems that Microsoft has a responsiblity to make sure unwanted things don't start playing when the machine gets plugged (the Unix vendors have this same responsibility, to be sure).
You also shouldn't expect Joe User to use the custom install and deselect IIS - you probably shouldn't expect him to know what IIS is. You can expect a sysadmin to know how to select IIS to be installed if he needs it. So the default obviously needs to be not installing IIS. Or Apache, for the Unices.
...and it was quite a bit of fun riding skateboards around the corporate HQ at 2:30am in the morning...
As opposed to 2:30am in the afternoon?
Did it occur to you that maybe you should connect the box to the Internet as the LAST STEP? - AFTER the server is configured and PATCHED?
Perhaps that should be obvious to an experienced sysadmin, but most installers of Windows 2000 won't have a clue about such precautions. The intelligent thing for Microsoft to have done is not had IIS turned on by default. This is especially obvious when you consider how many of the Code Red hits you get come from people who obviously don't even use the IIS that's running on their box.
Since Microsoft is aiming their software at clueless users who can't be bothered to secure their machines, Microsoft needs to ensure that their software is secure out of the box.
Since no one else on slashdot is contributing to the discussion, if you'd like to continue it in email feel free. My address is bsmith3 at charter dot net.
:)
Anyway...
Tell me why I should expect an atheist scientist to give credence to creationist theories if they had supporting evidence? Everyone has biases, and a discussion of origins is inherently philosophical and will include people's biases.
Well, not all scientists are atheists. They come from all religious backgrounds and have beliefs as varied as anyone else. You might find a slightly higher proportion of atheists among scientists than the population at large, because science and atheism both tend to attract people with strict, logical minds.
This also seems like a convenient place to point out that Pope JP II has gone on record as saying the theory of evolution is not necessarily in conflict with Catholic theology. Not knowing your faith more than that you are Christian, I have to hope you're not one of the sort who refer to the Pope as the Great Satan of Rome, otherwise you won't give a whit about that.
About the dating methods mentioned on creationscience.com, I'm going to do more reading on some of them. The primarily geological ones (sediments, volcanic debris, continental erosion) don't seem to account for the massive geological changes that the Earth has gone through in its lifespan. The continents weren't always where they are now, many things which used to be sediments a few million years ago are mountaintops now, and so forth. Obviously, if you reject an age > 6000 years for Earth in the first place, those aren't good explanations. But if you're going to try to find inconsistencies in geology, you have to make sure that the theories already there don't easily explain away your evidence. Some of the other stuff there isn't so easy to dismiss, so I'll be doing some more reading later on.
Question: is there any mechanism known (and I am ignorant) by which molecules may be created initially in order to form amino acids?
Well, if you've got carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, you've got all the building blocks in place. Stuff like methane, ammonia, and of course carbon dioxide and water can form naturally, and these can form the amino acids.
You demonstrated that some amino acids form naturally, but what about the molecules they are formed from - do all 20 amino acids naturally form, or only some?
There are now 22 known amino acids actually. As far as I know, not all of them have been shown to form outside of biological processes. That, of course, doesn't constitute proof that they can't form naturally.
Really? Some questions for evolution:
* Why do humans shun rape as a sickening act?
* Why do humans practice self-sacrifice for the love of another that is not necessarily their own offspring?
* Why do humans sometimes feel prone to compassion towards the weak and unpriviliged?
Three quick guesses that might not necessarily be all that great....
Rape: Females should tend to seek the fittest mate, having another forced on them goes against their genetic best interests. The males don't want to see it happen because that female might have chosen them as a mate instead. Incidentally, the male's genetic prerogative is to fertilize as many females as possible. This might explain why men don't appear as sympathetic to rape victims as other women, and also why you almost never hear of a man being raped (or at least, you don't hear them complain). These different approaches to reproduction can also be used to explain the different attitudes of men and women towards consent - the "men are pigs" phenomenon, you might call it.
Self sacrifice: Say you have two groups of bunnies. One bunny stands up to the marauding fox and saves his mate and cubs at the cost of his life. Another bunny runs away and his cubs are eaten. The first bunny has passed the test of natural selection and his offspring have a chance. The second bunny has not. He's survived to try again, but any number of things may stand in his way. The first bunny's offspring aren't guaranteed survival, but they're obviously more likely than the dead ones.
Compassion: This one is harder. Compassion is in general beneficial to the species as a whole, but it's harder to specifically state why.
Note that none of these three traits is confined only to humans. Plenty of animals want to choose their own mating partners and become plenty upset when another attempts mating with them. Animals risk, and often lose, their lives all the time providing for their own offspring or protecting a flock/herd/what-have-you.
Of course, the words "love" and "compassion" indicate emotions, and suggest that a purely scientific analysis isn't what you're after. And I don't think science alone can explain them either. I'm just pointing out that those emotions don't necessarily run counter to what evolution might suggest.
And why would God use one method to create His masterpiece (murder, rape, greed, selfishness, cruelty, etc) and then later declare these attributes to be sickening and morally wrong? It is obvious that those things happened and were necessary for natural selection, yet under evolution you must presume that they were natural and good processes (Genesis 1:31).
Obviously God has higher expectations of us than of the animals. There has never been a revelation to even the chimpanzees or dolphins, who appear to have very similar physical capacities for thought. God calls his whole creation good; we have to assume that includes carnivores which must kill for food. Or were they all herbivorous before sin entered the world? That's not meant to be trite or insulting; I honestly don't know the consensus among literalists about what the carnivores ate before Adam and Eve sinned and brought death to the world.
I think that evolutionists don't fully comprehend the creation theory and consider it. When reading creation information they must think with the mind of a creationist so they can see how everything fits together. I have to think like an evolutionist to fully appreciate their arguments when I read their websites - and I feel that evolutionists often miss this.
I agree. Here, I was going to write a bit about the biblical story, with some questions and some insights about my point of view as a decidedly non-atheist person who believes evolution is a valid scientific theory. But I quickly realized it would get too long. So, I'll finish it up later and, if you choose to continue the conversation, I've love to have your opinions and views on it. Again, bsmith3 at charter dot net.
A spokeswoman for the company, which bills the game as a "journey to the Deathside", said: "It's a dark, gory type of game and we thought it was appropriate to raise advertising to a new level."
I agree with her that it's a new level, but I don't think they'd be raising it to that new level.
Actually, I think it's called Dances With Wolves syndrome nowadays. Your point is well taken, though.
The post you're replying to did have one good point: the inter-tribal wars were bloody affairs, but they weren't wars of annihilation. This is one of the reasons the Native people were never able to get organized and defend themselves; they always assumed the whites would fight with them for a while and then come to terms and live in peace like other tribes. They didn't realize until it was too late that the 'settlers' weren't going to settle for less than the entire continent.