(A person who keeps the 10 Commandments, for instance, cannot be a hindu or a buddist, since the first commandment rules out worshipping any other gods, and those religions are polytheistic.) Incorrect, at least where Buddhism is concerned. Buddhism is actually non-theistic. While I'm an athiest Buddhist, I know of several people who are either Christians or Jews who also are Buddhist practicioners. One is Father Robert Kennedy, who is both a Zen sensei and a Roman Catholic priest. Another is Sylvia Boorstein, who wrote a book about being a Buddhist and an observant Jew titled "Funny, You Don't Look Buddhist".
Actually, 'mule' can refer to any hybrid animal that can't reproduce. The reason horse-donkey hybrids can't reproduce is because its parent species have different numbers of chromosomes.
Not all hybrids animals are mules. For instance, any species in the Camelid family (dromedaries, Bactrian camels, llamas, alpacas, guanacoes and vicunas) can interbreed and have fertile offspring. There's even a name for the llama-alpaca crosses -- 'huarizo'. There was quite a bit of cross-breeding after the Spanish scattered the Native American herds during the conquest.
Well, space.com had an
article several weeks ago about the oldest known planet -- 12.7 billion years old, nearly three times older than our solar system and much older than astronomers thought possible. A quote from the article:
"If there were gas giants around at 12.7 billion years ago, I would think that there could be a few terrestrial-like planets too," Boss said in an e-mail interview. "Presumably some of them [would have] experienced a more gentle history than this poor world, and so some might have experienced some sort of flirtation with life, if not something much more serious."
They also ran another
article a few years back which described research that said just the opposite of this current article -- that the presence of a lot of gas giants in the universe would strongly suggest the existence of a lot of potential Earth-like planets.
Personally, I think it's way too early in the game; the lack of evidence means nothing more than we're not advanced enough technologically to decide the matter. Only when we're able to detect Earth-sized planets will it be settled.
Not just members of your own species, actually. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (aka mad cow disease) is thought to have been introduced via ground-up organs (including brains) from sheep infected with scrapie. Scrapie is a wasting disease in sheep that was first described several centuries ago but that has never been known to have been passed on to humans. Once the condition made the jump from sheep to cattle, it also became transmissible to people.
Yes, now the ethanol is ultimately dependent on fossil fuel machines. This development, though, makes it possible to change that, so that eventually, the diesel machines can be changed over to hydrogen-fuel-cell machines. Currently, one of the major obstacles to switching over to a hydrogen economy has been the high cost of getting hydrogen, with the cheapest source being natural gas. This has the potential to change that.
> 1) Multiple account-by-account security systems
There is one of VMS's security features I'm a little divided on: the ability to specify privileges on an account-by-account basis. It makes it easier to tailor each account's abilities, but it also makes it harder to track who has "rootly" powers. You can create a lot of accounts that have all privileges enabled, and the file that this info is stored in is a binary one. Not ideal, IMHO.
> 3) DCL scripting language was pretty good for its type (better then sh)
I don't care for it much. I just spent a day last week trying to emulate a Unix shell pipe in DCL. I couldn't (Yes, I know about the DCL PIPE command...). I was trying to capture the output of a DIRECTORY listing, so I could use COPY/RCP. (And another thing, why does COPY have a/SINCE=YESTERDAY option, but COPY/RCP does not?)
>5) Good on-line help that was nested. You didn't have to eyeball pages of "man" output. > >6) Uptime reliabiity that Unix has only recently started to approach.
I'll grant you both points. The help pages are really well-structured and end in a page or two of examples. The reliability is really up there, too. Where I work we have an old Alpha that needed a firmware upgrade; one of my fellow admins put off the work a few days so he could see the uptime hit 1000 days.
> 8) I'll take EDT or LSE over vi any day!
I'd take ANYTHING over vi any day, up to and including shouting and gesturing at the screen...
Or, intelligent beings on a goodly number of different planets could be first. In other words, there could be a lot of other ET civilizations that are at the same stage in their development as we are, aware enough to look beyond our home planet but not advanced enough to leave it.
It took a long time after the big bang for heavy elements like carbon and oxygen to form, and longer for smaller, slower-burning stars with planets to form, and then longer for life to evolve here. It seems as likely to me that if there are other intelligent civilizations in the universe, they're not at the space-faring stage yet.
Hopefully, they're as noisy as we are and eventually we'll find them with SETI.
> The thing is though, the elections in Zimbabwe were extremely questionable.
I didn't say they weren't, only that seeing the beneficiary of a screwed-up election commenting on them was ironic.
> Everything MS says about Unix is at least 95% true.
No, everything they said in that advert was 100% opinion. A great many people, including me, have those same opinions about MS operating systems. Hence the irony.
> Just because its MS saying it doesn't make it untrue.
No argument there. But because a big business with a history of lying and spreading FUD is saying it, it bears listening to with some skepticism.
MS is trying to win converts by saying Unix "ties you to an inflexible system", "requires you to pay for expensive experts", and "makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."? Dudes, wake up and smell the irony!
This is a lot like President Dubya complaining that the elections in Zimbabwe were questionable...
No, actually, a true Vernam cipher really is unbreakable. Check out the description of it in Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography". The 'one-time pad' that was mentioned is a string of random numbers as long as the message that you want to send that is XORed with the message. Since XORing is a symmetric process (do it twice and you get back your original message), if you've got the random pad you can decrypt it easily.
That being said, the process they described in the article is not a Vernam cipher. It sounds like a variation on the Kerberos protocol, where the client and server machines exchange encrypted session keys.
There are also problems with the design, if you ask me. It looks like they are using the client computer to generate "random" numbers, which is a definite no-no. It also says that the keys are exchanged "through a secure process known only to Prescient". Sorry, but unless they have some sort of review by an independent party that proves it's secure, it's an empty claim. Basically, this sounds like a lot of PR-hype that won't hold up to its promises.
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cotodoso
Not just members of your own species, actually. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (aka mad cow disease) is thought to have been introduced via ground-up organs (including brains) from sheep infected with scrapie. Scrapie is a wasting disease in sheep that was first described several centuries ago but that has never been known to have been passed on to humans. Once the condition made the jump from sheep to cattle, it also became transmissible to people.
cotodoso
Yes, now the ethanol is ultimately dependent on fossil fuel machines. This development, though, makes it possible to change that, so that eventually, the diesel machines can be changed over to hydrogen-fuel-cell machines. Currently, one of the major obstacles to switching over to a hydrogen economy has been the high cost of getting hydrogen, with the cheapest source being natural gas. This has the potential to change that.
cotodoso
They did, in the next paragraphs -- VxWorks by Wind River. It's a real-time OS that gets used quite a lot for this type of work.
I've worked with it once or twice. I didn't really care for it -- it seemed like some wierd hybrid of a Unix CLI and DOS.
sjanich on Saturday August 31, @10:30PM wrote:
/SINCE=YESTERDAY option, but COPY/RCP does not?)
> 1) Multiple account-by-account security systems
There is one of VMS's security features I'm a little divided on: the ability to specify privileges on an account-by-account basis. It makes it easier to tailor each account's abilities, but it also makes it harder to track who has "rootly" powers. You can create a lot of accounts that have all privileges enabled, and the file that this info is stored in is a binary one. Not ideal, IMHO.
> 3) DCL scripting language was pretty good for its type (better then sh)
I don't care for it much. I just spent a day last week trying to emulate a Unix shell pipe in DCL. I couldn't (Yes, I know about the DCL PIPE command...). I was trying to capture the output of a DIRECTORY listing, so I could use COPY/RCP. (And another thing, why does COPY have a
>5) Good on-line help that was nested. You didn't have to eyeball pages of "man" output.
>
>6) Uptime reliabiity that Unix has only recently started to approach.
I'll grant you both points. The help pages are really well-structured and end in a page or two of examples. The reliability is really up there, too. Where I work we have an old Alpha that needed a firmware upgrade; one of my fellow admins put off the work a few days so he could see the uptime hit 1000 days.
> 8) I'll take EDT or LSE over vi any day!
I'd take ANYTHING over vi any day, up to and including shouting and gesturing at the screen...
cotodoso
(Solaris/Linux/OpenVMS admin)
> Therefore a "near miss" is a miss that happens to be near its target.
Actually, a "near miss" is what you call a transexual before his sex-change operation...
cotodoso
Or, intelligent beings on a goodly number of different planets could be first. In other words, there could be a lot of other ET civilizations that are at the same stage in their development as we are, aware enough to look beyond our home planet but not advanced enough to leave it.
It took a long time after the big bang for heavy elements like carbon and oxygen to form, and longer for smaller, slower-burning stars with planets to form, and then longer for life to evolve here. It seems as likely to me that if there are other intelligent civilizations in the universe, they're not at the space-faring stage yet.
Hopefully, they're as noisy as we are and eventually we'll find them with SETI.
cotodoso
> The thing is though, the elections in Zimbabwe were extremely questionable.
I didn't say they weren't, only that seeing the beneficiary of a screwed-up election commenting on them was ironic.
> Everything MS says about Unix is at least 95% true.
No, everything they said in that advert was 100% opinion. A great many people, including me, have those same opinions about MS operating systems. Hence the irony.
> Just because its MS saying it doesn't make it untrue.
No argument there. But because a big business with a history of lying and spreading FUD is saying it, it bears listening to with some skepticism.
cotodoso
MS is trying to win converts by saying Unix "ties you to an inflexible system", "requires you to pay for expensive experts", and "makes you struggle daily with a server environment that's more complex than ever."? Dudes, wake up and smell the irony!
This is a lot like President Dubya complaining that the elections in Zimbabwe were questionable...
cotodoso
No, actually, a true Vernam cipher really is unbreakable. Check out the description of it in Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography". The 'one-time pad' that was mentioned is a string of random numbers as long as the message that you want to send that is XORed with the message. Since XORing is a symmetric process (do it twice and you get back your original message), if you've got the random pad you can decrypt it easily.
That being said, the process they described in the article is not a Vernam cipher. It sounds like a variation on the Kerberos protocol, where the client and server machines exchange encrypted session keys.
There are also problems with the design, if you ask me. It looks like they are using the client computer to generate "random" numbers, which is a definite no-no. It also says that the keys are exchanged "through a secure process known only to Prescient". Sorry, but unless they have some sort of review by an independent party that proves it's
secure, it's an empty claim. Basically, this sounds like a lot of PR-hype that won't hold up to its promises.
cotodoso