Sure. I'll grant you many republicans have a 'gun' fetish. We all have our short commings we need to compensate for, live and let live I say. And besides with all these school shootings, we may find that there's truth in the adage that a well armed society is a polite society. But I suspect nothing grabs the attention of republicans like a free lunch (for democrats its $5 erotic massage) but that's for another topic. Anyway, if you sell it as a big government spending program which will contract out all the development to the largest campaign contributers (reguardless of acctually ability or feasability), and, after the infrastructure for this spiffy new energy source is in place, to sell off large blocks of it at a discount to major energy concerns. Why do the right thing when you can have the taxpayers foot the bill for your friends?
Oddly, I don't believe there is a "real" energy crisis (certainly not with petrolium). And if there is, how on earth will shipping oil from a wildlife refuge in the extream reaches of Alaska predominantly to Japan solve our shortages? Maybe I'm not sofistikated enough to understand our President's foreward thinking energy policy, or maybe I was just dazzled by the pretty pictures.
On a totally unrelated note, would you pay a buck to reduce your risk of cancer 1%. President Bush, and Christine Todd Whitman think you may not be worth it. So they'll study arsenic concentrations and its effects at its 1942 level while the rest of the reasonable world moves to a standard 5 times more stringent. more here
But really. Who did people think they were voting for? I know people who voted for Bush, and worse yet I know people who couldn't be convinced to vote at all.
DVD-RAM/RW/etc's? Naw. How much are the blanks? Heh. But CDR's aren't the end all be all, this seems clear. But sony and phillips may have rested on their patents too long. Intel has AMD, Sony and Phillips may have TDK. I love underdogs. Must be all those sports movies I grew up with.
Check out Powell's books (wooo they've got a chunk of change from me!) for a little something written by Y. K. Rao. Now this guy, aside from being such an unforgivable ass that it was EASY to overlook his brilliance, did happen to be pretty freakin smart. It's not that systems even extreamly large systems can't become 'spontaniously' ordered. It is that this is so inconcievibly unlikely that on any meaningful level we say it doesn't happen. Ordered states are usually such a small fraction of the possible states that the numbers involved are all but meaningless (the rest of the states being ones of lesser order). Each state, reguardless of the degree of order has equal likelyhood, so seeing a transition of order to less order is common, while seeing disorder to order is almost magical. Think of a blind man with a rubics cube. There's nothing preventing him from matching all sides, hell if you're lucky you may see him get one or even two, it's just not terribly likely.
BTW you don't want Rao's book on Thermodynamics and Stoichiometry of Metallurgy, it should be one on Statstical Thermodynamics. IIRC, but as I mentioned, he was an ass, so I'm not inclined to look that hard.
Obviously the topic above is grossly simplified, and generalized, but the original prior respondants statements were true, from a certain point of view. In anycase, if you flame me, at least choose an aspect that merits it, like my spelling.
As much of a believer I am in evil corporate greed, even I have a little difficulty swallowing the "self-serving control of language" model of profit growth. It's not that I object in the least with the core of your argument either. But I would humbly submit that perhaps the third, and most recent entry for piracy entered the American lexicon through common use. At one time Escalator used to refer to the product of a company that made elevating staircases, now its moving stairs. Its a happy day though. Without piracy's growth (or its missuse if you prefer) I might never have cause to use or read such a fancy word. And as one might suspect, I like fancy words (I don't read books with Fabio's picture on the cover). Ask yourself, "When was the last time I used 'fancy' in a sentance?" See.
But back to your erstwhile example of "liberate" and its uses. I might be inclinde to note that the larger public during the Vietnam "Police Action"/War did not use the term liberate to denote the razing of villages. This term was limited in use to primarily within the military and almost exclusivly by members of the military. Which would seem to cause this particular use of "liberate" to fall under the heading of jargon, and hence it does not appear in a dictionary. Now an encyclopedia, or book about the Vietnam conflict on the other hand.... Also it might be worth noting that the unpopularity of the War in Vietnam may have something to do with this. "Search and destroy", is now a part of the lexicon, but its Vietnam era replacement "sweep and clear" did not make the cut, and at best could be considered obscure. Or another cause might be it was overshadowed by other contributions from the era such as, PTS (Post Traumatic Stress which replaced shell shock) or Agent Orange et al. Further still, the larger cold war was influencing events on a much larger scale changing art, conventions, and perceptions to shape people by threatening annihilation with the very breath of the cosmos. A small war killing 60,000 americans and 1.5 to 2 million vietnamise thousands of miles away doesn't really rate on the scale with the extiction of our species. (Naturally, I'm simply intergecting the hyperbole prevelent at the time). In the case of piracy, its common use arose at a time very near the end of the cold war, the USSR was soon to be defunct (thanks to Nixon and Kennedy more than anyone else, I'm looking at you reagan era republicans). Piracy's acctual entry into the dictionary may well have come at a time when the cold war was officially canceled for lack of funds and corporations were gaining in prominence. In any case, this whole jag is wholly a matter of semantics, and why I continue to write when sure none continue to read is certainly a more interesting question.:) Bah, if I needed Karma, I'd be a Buddist. But finally, think on this: Merriam-Webster is NOT listed in the producer credits for John Carpenter's "They Live!" (staring Rowdy Roddy Piper), what are they trying not to tell us?:)
In India, salt was the legal intellectual property of the British. Making salt illegally was rightfully illegal under british law. After all the law is the Law. Salt is helpful for life; one might even say they couldn't live without it. Many have made the case better than I might hope, that art is even more fundemental. It has been argued that art is not a tool of life, but a purpose for it. While I might not at all times and in all ways embrace that sentiment, it is certainly worth pondering now and again. I'm not a mindless zealot advocating wholesale slaughter of Morton's Salt girls for their festive rainslickers, but a advocate of moderation. While it benefits us to accept the small inconviences of certain restrictions, we need only accept the reasonable ones. We need not accept useless middlemen who profit from the flow of information/art sole by their position at a choke point. That's a choice. A stupid and immoral choice. But every individuals choice just the same. Any limitation that doesn't benefit the whole of society, should be resisted and ridiculed. And eventually will be. The fact is our little tiny bits of power are what make the world go round. The mightest empire of the industial world had this lesson taught to them by the proverbial 98 pound weakling. A man who would not fight, nor yield showed them the true face of power. We, for all our advances, would seem to have at least a little left to learn.
As an aside to those who remain unmoved, I have only this remark: Unless you live in a banana republic reading slashdot off a wifi network the professor made from a hairpin, coconuts, plam leaves and two of Ginger's sequins, you're enjoying the stolen fruits of someone else's uncompensated labor. Enjoy.
Peter Clark did say, "Look upon what has been wrought. A work of convenience. It shall be known unto man as 'religion'." And all was good. Amen.
I suppose I can see how one might get that impression. But that's not really what the theory is about. It's a spare theory in case we break the current better theory. Sure, you can't drive the The Big Bump faster than 35 mph, or more than 100 miles; but it is better than having to walk to the nearest accredited cosmological institution. Oddly enough, the theory is specific enough in its assumptions, that it should produce quite different predictions that are testable not only through future observations, but even through projects like COBE.
Early results seem to support inflation IIRC, but I'm not a cosmotologist either. While I know you're not one, I was curious as to what you think the future of nail polish for men is? And I'm not talking about just Carson Daley BTW. I kid cause we're good like that.
The truth about the story is much more mundane than CNN tried to make it sound. The primary proponante of this alternative came up with for the sole purpose of having an alternative should the Big Bang theory not work out, and cause he thinks the math involved is fun. The only advantage the Big Bump theory has over its predecessor is that space existed before hand and there is no need for some silly epoch of inflation. The nice thing about this is it attacks the big bang at a point of uncertainty and should make predictions that are quite different. I would think that the two theories would have quite different predictions about what the cosmic background radiation's fine scale structure would look like, for instance. Right or wrong, at least it's a good theory.
Oh boo hoo. The evil military-industrial complex types are subverting our Utopia again?! Are you kidding me. Computers got their start crunching numbers to break codes (so people might be found and killed) and make good artillary tables. The space program, with all that we've now gleaned, was a front to develop a way to mutually assure destruction via efficient delivery of nuclear power to all points on earth. The internet was, in part, built because it showed some promise in resisting efficient delivery of an unconrtolled surplus nuclear power. The first satillite was a proof of concept for intercontinental ballistic missle payload delivery. The second generation had cameras. Even the humble aluminum can is the product of a willingness to kill. Why some might argue that our lanky build owes its shape to the utility of the spear.
This could be a painfully long list, rather than a short, tiresome rant; but to my point, the military has money to burn and likes to invest it in the next generation of consumer goods. The world and all it's fruits are born from the seeds sown in the quest for a better Reaper. It's hard to argue with a formula that provided both the Death Star and 99 Luft ballons.
If you don't like a way a company is behaving there are options. Don't get pissed, get even. Go Gandhi; tear a page from his book and do him proud. The British told him he couldn't make salt. Did he give up? Hell no! He violated the fork out of their intellectual property. And he taught others how to do the same. I think on some level there is an obligation to resist such attempts to control art, expression and information. The record industry wants your money for nothing, and the artists works for free. Steal them. Make it expensive, and difficult for the offending entities to protect their "property". In our world information is nessicary for life; art makes life worth living. We don't have to accept unreasonable restrictions, and many reasonable restrictions come in different flavors of optional. Kenneth J. Harvey knows the score, and he's added a play from his own book. Why fight the system when the system is more than happy to fight itself?
I've seen a cool little toy/tool from the folks at Carnegie Mellon. It's called Alice, and it's a pretty interesting 3d graphics package for the web. Oddly enough I learned about this from a multimedia class. I'm a little more taken with Teddy2 and major props to Takeo Igarashi at the University of Tokyo. Teddy2 is a spiffy little tool for building objects. And as long as I'm plugging 3d graphics tools I like to putter around with, check out Texture Weapons. It is certainly worth checking out some of the demos. This isn't just another way to make 3d widgits...ok well maybe it is, but they are really cool widgits, and sometimes more.
Fisrt off, there are some valid reasons for NASA's hissy fit. Tourists in space certainly won't help NASA's PR problems in the next round of government cutbacks comming soon to a congress near me. And that's what this is about. It's not so much about saftey, or rich puke messing up microgravity experiments; though, these too are valid concerns. It's about a little greasy wad of crumpled millions (10^6 for you brits) putting NASA's billions (10^9) in some fruity faith based astronomy effort. That said...
Nasa won't be flying him anywhere. His flight will be departing from Kazakistan or where ever their space center is. He'll be a Russian carry on. They'll be the ones responsible for his care and feeding. No one disuputes that. Also to be fair, the Russians are living hand to mouth so any money they can't get... Well let's just say that if NASA relents I won't be surprised to see Lenin wake up and do an interview with Larry King. Cause damn, to go from producing technical efforts envied by all the world to begging for hand outs with a gig as the ultimate chauffeur on the side, that's gotta sting a little. I mean, to be one of the people in their program you'd probably have to be fairly adept at choking back the bile.
I would imagine that at 20 km/s, you might see a nice glow. I suppose the ambient light in the day time would probably wash it out, but at night I would think it would be quite a site.
I'm tired of you commie pinkos trying to tell me which guns I can and can't have. "Being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed." --2nd Amendment. So, in short, you soy eating, godless, Church of Satan youth basketball Nite league playing, primitive, reefer smoking, hippy screwheads can just suck my boom stick. I'm going to hunt with whatever the hell I want, as is my God given right (at least if Moses and the NRA have anything to say about it).
Oddly stars that burn out very quickly are the ones that leave black holes.
A star is basically a diffuse cloud of gas that collapses in on itself due to its own gravity right? Fine. Let's just consider the life cycles of stars then. A typical star, such as our sun, will 'live' about 10 billion years. Right now, and for the past 5 billion or so years it's been burning hydrogen, to make helium. This takes a fair amount of energy and in return releases quite a bit. Helium on the other hand releases much more, but also requires a great deal more pressure. When the hydrogen runs out, the sun will then ignite the helium burning phase and pretty much expand to somthing like the orbit of venus and make the earth look not unlike mercury. In a zone surrounding the helium burning core, hydrogen burning will still continue, but now the burning of helium provides most of the star's energy. And where this hydrogen burning phase lasted billions of years, the accumulated helium will last a few hundred million. But our sun is an unremarkable star. After it is done burning helium it will generate a small nova revealing its white hot core and, in time, a beautiful planitary nebula. Let's consider what might happen if we could add more gas to our sun.
With more gas, there would be more gravity, so there would be more pressure over a greater volume so hydrogen burning would be more prolific. Hmmmm, by adding more fuel, we're increasing the rate at which it is consumed. So our billions of years of hydrogen burning might be short a billion. So we'll reach the following phase of helium burning sooner, and it too will proceed more quickly. Now we might be able to go beyond helium burning, and burn carbon. In fact this is what the super large stars do. A star of great mass, like a red super giant might be up to 10 billion km in diameter and would not be unlike an onion with different zones of fusion. And this star would be at the end of a life that progressed very quickly. Some lasting only a hundred million years or so, 1/100th the life span of our sun. But what happens at the end of a stars life? It's the energy from the nuclear fusion that literally holds stars up. Without it they collapse. Some stars collapse on an iron core that is so large, that the pressure inside the core forces some electrons into the interiors of all the protons in the iron core of the star. This produces a super nova, but the core, now a vastly smaller ball of neutrons with a 1 km iron crust is what remains. Even neutrons have their limit. They cannot bear an infinite burden. If the core were to be about 2 to 3 times the mass of the sun, it would be so great as to exceed the ability of neutrons to resist gravitation. So a black hole would be born. At least that's the short course.
Check out Black Holes by Jean-Pierre Luminet from Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521409063.
Small Business owners get an exemption that protects something like 2 million dollars of the business from the death tax. Farmers recive an additional protection beyond that to something like 4 million, and lets not forget the debt load most farms carry. And it should be a simple matter to show that family squables over how best to profit from the labor and death of others is more at fault for tanking small businesses that the IRS. Seems to me plenty of small businesses around the seattle area have survived being handed down to succeeding generation with the "death tax" in place. That's what's so funny, it seems now that the Republicans have a better grasp of how to spin the media than the democrats currently. They do a wonderful job of framing the debate in the language of their choosing. "Those democratic bastards! If they wantin' t' tax me for my death they can move to China and bill my poor, Walton lookin' family for the bullet too." The marrige penalty tax. Come on! Let's give credit where credit is due. I've got to give them props for spinning the media, and still claiming to be the victims of biased reporting. Those per child income credits are sweet. Awww but the children.... Awww. As if anyone has kids to make the world a better place. Please it's an act of egotism. A desire to leave a mark, something of ones self behind, a good desire, but it's far from a magnanimous gift to the world. So you have poor and middle class single childless people subsidising the children of others. A choice mental picture is that of say a dirt poor black kid working part time at McDonald's while s/he goes to high school. In the hope they might just be able to scrape enough together to get to a junior college, because the government programs that put Newt Gingrich through college have been reduced to something like a 1/3 of what they were by the very people who benifited. Now picture that kid looking at the money deducted for taxes, unemployment insurance, social security (which they may well never be able to collect) on their first pay stub. Yeah, a family of four making 72 grand a year does deserve a 2 grand by on taxes. Now I'm not one to buy into 'white guilt', but, at least for me, comparisons to slavery ain't that far off base.
I thought I'd just make an observation. Because if talk like this continues it can only lead to tears.
Sure, the infobaun lends itself to hyperbole, that's it's nature. So a little rhetoric is certainly par for the course, but people are grandstanding like this was a congressional hearing in search of a witch hunt. Not that this is bad, it's certainly been entertaining, but there are no cameras here. This leads me to the following non-assertion which also happens to be a proveable (and maybe proven) fact. If you have ANY sufficently large population of people, that population will mirror the society that spawned it. This means you will find shockingly ignorant people here at slashdot, and you will also find shockingly brilliant people at a Christian Science reading room. Once more you will find them at the same rate you find them in the larger world. There is a slashdot user with an old pickup, with a gun rack, a pair of antlers for a hood orniment, who uses a confederate battle standard as curtains, and cousin he wouldn't mind kissin'.
Everyone has their blind spot. I'm sure everyone has been asked to justify a view point on something, wasn't able to point to supporting evidence, but could hear the little voice that insisted despite how things appear, I AM right. I have my suspicions that the type of people who deny the former are the same people who say they smile at everyone: liars.
New infrastructure costs money and sows the seeds of its own discontent. Anytime a new infrastructure has been built (to my humble recolection) it seems it was done by a highly profitable monopoly which stole from the poor to give to the rich, and was then with much fanfare broken up by the government, or other sufficently powerful force. Literally. You had the finacial infrastructure crafted by J.P. Morgan (who laudably didn't really profiteer as he might have) bringing the U.S. to the stage of the finacial world. Rockafeller with real estate in New York. Carnagie(sp? with steel mills. Hell, there's even a game called railroad tycoon. But this goes all the way back to glory days of the British Empire, and has continued on to the present day with Ma' Bell, and Microsoft. I'm certainly not saying it is right, but without excessivly powerful monopolies bending countries (and sometimes the world) to a common vision the U.S. would not be what it is today. One might make a credible argument of the fact that we would be the poorer if not for them. Now I'm not saying that monopolies enrich the lives of those who suffer them. Clearly, that's a silly assertion. I agree that everyone who suffers monopolies and cartels are probably much worse off. But after the fact, when the powers that were are a relic left to rot in history books and carved into edifices, the lives of the people that use the infrastucture are enriched. If only by the fact that they were built with a common vision. If this particular pattern has stood the test of time, over a period where few things can claim the same, perhaps there is something to it.
The governments case, at least as I understood it, is that a plurality of people might use the information 2600 diseminated to steal the property of others. They might also use it to make a Open DVD authoring suite for linux, or BeOS, but they might use it to steal.
Most people shot with guns die, and its not usually legal. Maybe death seems worse than mabey theft. But I can go into any spy store and buy a set of lock picks so that's not the problem. Everyone who drives cars breaks a traffic law at one time or another, right? I don't think anyone really thinks this is about what's right or wrong. MPAA knows that control of the information at all levels (creation, distribution, and use) is what keeps them in business, and anyone else who interferes with them, be they hobbiest, a satanic penguin molester, or Joe Regular is a threat to their bottom line.
I would imagine event the woman prosecuting the case (Mary Jo White, (212) 637-2741) has a thought process something like this:
Wow! What a coup. MPAA is loaded like a Republican tavel agent at a fund raiser for Enron executives on a nuclear submarine. I bet they'll be plenty happy to bankroll my forthcomming campaign bid. And all this mana from heaven after I got all that good press for bitching about Clinton's pardon of Mark Rich. Oh Santa, I must have have been a good girl, thank you and a God bless everyone. Except of course for those heathen bastards who don't accept Christ as their personal savior and one true God of America (Democrats and commie pinko's); keep religion free!
FIN
If there's any truth to that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" jive, then maybe Clinton deserves some major props for pardoning Rich.
In a way, how can one be surprised by this? Ammused I understand, but surprised? Naw.
However, I am somewhat curious as to exactly when America returned to an Oligarchy (tyranny of the few, the rich)? Government, particularly the American government, is not in place to serve the intrests of a select few. It's job is to serve the people by providing sanctuary for the unfettered exchange of ideas. I fail to see how this action can even pretend to work to that end. FDR was something of a socialist, and did a lot for returning government to the people. I can't see the idealism of the 60's being at fault. The deceite of the 70's, is that when we the people began to give our government away? Was the apathy of the 80's to blame? I'm interested to know when exactly we passed that critical point where we lost the balance of influence.
I suppose I was getting a little loose with the lingo. But in fact the paper you linked doesn't really alter my case. The Chinese, in that article linked to CNN, mearly claim that their 'animal' (can't we all just get along?) isn't the at the base of the branch where birds seperated from dinosaurs. They are however strongly related. The only things we can see evolution in action in during our brief lives are organisms that multiply rapidly. We of course DO see this in bacteria and viruses. We all need a new flu shot each year it mutates so fast. As far as evolution in action, ornotholigists have that one licked. There was a husband and wife team which literally spent their lives following the alteration of a species of seed eating bird in the galapigose islands. Turns out they started evolving bigger stronger beaks because a drought forced them to eat larger seeds due to the reduced food supply. If I'm not mistaken they ended up naming the result a new species. (I watch a lot of TLC PBS and what not). What do you consider macro-scale evidence in the eventual question. Sharks to manta-rays? Plant species? What about different species of bears? It's pretty clear Kodiak bears are grizzlies that evolved tremendous size in isolation. Humming birds and their beaks? Read your own evidence.
"Birds are sisters of dinosaurs rather than direct descendants of them,"
Hou said. "In Jurassic period," Hou said, "the ancient bird evolved into various groups."
Your claim is that birds and dinosaurs are not related in the least, and your evidence says that they are sisters. Furthermore, it is very likely, that in the context of the article, the term dinosaurs is being used to refer only to the species Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis and not to dinosaurs as a whole. Birds and dinosaurs share many skeletal features in common, and in fact what seperates these animals from accutally being direct progenitors of modern birs is a subtle skeletal feature in the skulls. In the case of Archaeopteryx so subtle that no concensus was reached as to whether the animal even expressed the feature at all. The article even goes on to present the conclusion that birds diverged from, and share a common anscestor with, dinosaurs more than 140 million years ago. Is it 30 - 15?
But we don't have to worry about troll bait here. They're all in the rec.slashdot.god.is-dead thread. For the record, while I don't believe in God, I don't chide those who do. Taking scripture as literal truth however....course if a burning bush started talking to me I'd get on board real quick.
Some stuff I read mentioned that embryotic stem cells would divide many times, but stem cells culled from other areas were less cooprative. This Scientific American article seems to bear out yer hypothesis though. This article mentions embryotic stem cells dividing for more than 250 generations, and mentions so medical research.
But back to the immorality part. What I think the first poster was getting at is that this promising research might be stymied by certain political concerns. These concerns would protest the research based on the fact that the knowledge that lives might eventually be saved, may lower the emiotional costs of choosing abortion. This of course is true; stem cell research does have right wing opponants (at least in the US). I pretty much think their premis is a load of bunk (there's a word ya don't see now days). I would imagine that someone looking into abortion would have a lot of bigger fish to fry than, "Maybe some day my babies stem cells will grow up to cure cancer." Further more, I would respectfully submit that anyone that is having that kind of internal monologue is just trying to rationalize the choice they want to make for other more selfish (and practical) reasons. But it's never a choice I'll face, and for that I'm thankful.
Obviously the whole timelapse picture is missing, eys are soft and biodegradable. But there is enough there to make a comic book. Mammals probably didn't start out as eyeless limbless lumps of pulsing fur, or clay near a river for that matter. Some extreamly primitive sea slugs have light sensing cells that give them something more akin to how we 'see' temperature than sight as we know it. But it's a start. Perhaps simple eyes found their way into lizard like precursors to mammals. One may as well ask how did we end up with fur instead of sexy scales. Right about now would be the time that I should be obligated to mention that abscence of evidence is not considered conclusive proof, but why shouldn't I just strike down you argument like an wrathful God at the Sodom/Gammora father son picnic and turkish bath?
And lo' I spoke, and it was so.
No macro evolution. China, recent. Dino-bird found. The dinosaurs live on, and some of them can answer the phone. How's that for anthropomorphism? Scales became feathers, narrow tooth filled maws became beaks, sharp claws stayed that way. I think that a switch from 4 killing machine to a parrot that can answer the phone is macro evolution. That's me though. But really, maybe I'm full of crap and those proto feathers were the result of it being buried in pile of fern fronds by it's sad relatives. Who's to say? Certainly not the paleontologists. It could be an elaborate practical joke by God and only the aliens with the anal probes are in on it. The fact that hair, feathers, scales, nails and claws are made out of very similar material is a coincidence, not a common thread, is certainly a plausable explanation.
You need to ask better questions. A proto eye that could only see large changes in contrast, like some sea slugs, might give a moments more warning and fascillitate escape. The predators get sneakier, stealthier, or faster, and the eye gets better. By your truly disappointing reasoning, any significant change cannot arise at random. But let me get back to something akin to facts. Mammals were around during the reign of the dinosaurs. We were mice, and other very small mammals. Why? Larger niches were filled by the extreamly successful lizards. Then a can of whoopass slams into the Yucatan and kills almost everything over 150 lbs. That's a lot of room. Mammals get large very quickly. Mice to deer. Macro evolution at your door step. Of course my knowledge of Earths geologic past is certainly not that of an expert. But unless God is something of a practical joker, I'd say evolution is fact in general terms and only the details are up for debate.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly, I don't believe there is a "real" energy crisis (certainly not with petrolium). And if there is, how on earth will shipping oil from a wildlife refuge in the extream reaches of Alaska predominantly to Japan solve our shortages? Maybe I'm not sofistikated enough to understand our President's foreward thinking energy policy, or maybe I was just dazzled by the pretty pictures.
On a totally unrelated note, would you pay a buck to reduce your risk of cancer 1%. President Bush, and Christine Todd Whitman think you may not be worth it. So they'll study arsenic concentrations and its effects at its 1942 level while the rest of the reasonable world moves to a standard 5 times more stringent. more here
But really. Who did people think they were voting for? I know people who voted for Bush, and worse yet I know people who couldn't be convinced to vote at all.
www.cdrinfo.com/cebit2001/tdk-1.shtml Write 2GB CDR's are 36x and the SAME price per meg? The hell you say? Well if ya don't buy the sketchy details and pictures of cdrinfo, maybe A more properly formated press clipin from them might help :). And just to be thorough, one from EE Times.
BTW you don't want Rao's book on Thermodynamics and Stoichiometry of Metallurgy, it should be one on Statstical Thermodynamics. IIRC, but as I mentioned, he was an ass, so I'm not inclined to look that hard.
Obviously the topic above is grossly simplified, and generalized, but the original prior respondants statements were true, from a certain point of view. In anycase, if you flame me, at least choose an aspect that merits it, like my spelling.
But back to your erstwhile example of "liberate" and its uses. I might be inclinde to note that the larger public during the Vietnam "Police Action"/War did not use the term liberate to denote the razing of villages. This term was limited in use to primarily within the military and almost exclusivly by members of the military. Which would seem to cause this particular use of "liberate" to fall under the heading of jargon, and hence it does not appear in a dictionary. Now an encyclopedia, or book about the Vietnam conflict on the other hand.... Also it might be worth noting that the unpopularity of the War in Vietnam may have something to do with this. "Search and destroy", is now a part of the lexicon, but its Vietnam era replacement "sweep and clear" did not make the cut, and at best could be considered obscure. Or another cause might be it was overshadowed by other contributions from the era such as, PTS (Post Traumatic Stress which replaced shell shock) or Agent Orange et al. Further still, the larger cold war was influencing events on a much larger scale changing art, conventions, and perceptions to shape people by threatening annihilation with the very breath of the cosmos. A small war killing 60,000 americans and 1.5 to 2 million vietnamise thousands of miles away doesn't really rate on the scale with the extiction of our species. (Naturally, I'm simply intergecting the hyperbole prevelent at the time). In the case of piracy, its common use arose at a time very near the end of the cold war, the USSR was soon to be defunct (thanks to Nixon and Kennedy more than anyone else, I'm looking at you reagan era republicans). Piracy's acctual entry into the dictionary may well have come at a time when the cold war was officially canceled for lack of funds and corporations were gaining in prominence. In any case, this whole jag is wholly a matter of semantics, and why I continue to write when sure none continue to read is certainly a more interesting question. :) Bah, if I needed Karma, I'd be a Buddist. But finally, think on this: Merriam-Webster is NOT listed in the producer credits for John Carpenter's "They Live!" (staring Rowdy Roddy Piper), what are they trying not to tell us? :)
What about the remote control for Sol? Point, click, annihilate.
As an aside to those who remain unmoved, I have only this remark: Unless you live in a banana republic reading slashdot off a wifi network the professor made from a hairpin, coconuts, plam leaves and two of Ginger's sequins, you're enjoying the stolen fruits of someone else's uncompensated labor. Enjoy.
I suppose I can see how one might get that impression. But that's not really what the theory is about. It's a spare theory in case we break the current better theory. Sure, you can't drive the The Big Bump faster than 35 mph, or more than 100 miles; but it is better than having to walk to the nearest accredited cosmological institution. Oddly enough, the theory is specific enough in its assumptions, that it should produce quite different predictions that are testable not only through future observations, but even through projects like COBE.
The COBE homepage
Pictures of the ashes of the fires of creation
Woo early web based learning from MIT (umm Harvard).
Acctual instruction is left as an exercise for the reader.
Early results seem to support inflation IIRC, but I'm not a cosmotologist either. While I know you're not one, I was curious as to what you think the future of nail polish for men is? And I'm not talking about just Carson Daley BTW. I kid cause we're good like that.
The truth about the story is much more mundane than CNN tried to make it sound. The primary proponante of this alternative came up with for the sole purpose of having an alternative should the Big Bang theory not work out, and cause he thinks the math involved is fun. The only advantage the Big Bump theory has over its predecessor is that space existed before hand and there is no need for some silly epoch of inflation. The nice thing about this is it attacks the big bang at a point of uncertainty and should make predictions that are quite different. I would think that the two theories would have quite different predictions about what the cosmic background radiation's fine scale structure would look like, for instance. Right or wrong, at least it's a good theory.
This could be a painfully long list, rather than a short, tiresome rant; but to my point, the military has money to burn and likes to invest it in the next generation of consumer goods. The world and all it's fruits are born from the seeds sown in the quest for a better Reaper. It's hard to argue with a formula that provided both the Death Star and 99 Luft ballons.
If you don't like a way a company is behaving there are options. Don't get pissed, get even. Go Gandhi; tear a page from his book and do him proud. The British told him he couldn't make salt. Did he give up? Hell no! He violated the fork out of their intellectual property. And he taught others how to do the same. I think on some level there is an obligation to resist such attempts to control art, expression and information. The record industry wants your money for nothing, and the artists works for free. Steal them. Make it expensive, and difficult for the offending entities to protect their "property". In our world information is nessicary for life; art makes life worth living. We don't have to accept unreasonable restrictions, and many reasonable restrictions come in different flavors of optional. Kenneth J. Harvey knows the score, and he's added a play from his own book. Why fight the system when the system is more than happy to fight itself?
I've heard Heston repeat that "...a well armed society is a polite society." Give it a few generations, he may be right.
I've seen a cool little toy/tool from the folks at Carnegie Mellon. It's called Alice, and it's a pretty interesting 3d graphics package for the web. Oddly enough I learned about this from a multimedia class. I'm a little more taken with Teddy2 and major props to Takeo Igarashi at the University of Tokyo. Teddy2 is a spiffy little tool for building objects. And as long as I'm plugging 3d graphics tools I like to putter around with, check out Texture Weapons. It is certainly worth checking out some of the demos. This isn't just another way to make 3d widgits...ok well maybe it is, but they are really cool widgits, and sometimes more.
Nasa won't be flying him anywhere. His flight will be departing from Kazakistan or where ever their space center is. He'll be a Russian carry on. They'll be the ones responsible for his care and feeding. No one disuputes that. Also to be fair, the Russians are living hand to mouth so any money they can't get... Well let's just say that if NASA relents I won't be surprised to see Lenin wake up and do an interview with Larry King. Cause damn, to go from producing technical efforts envied by all the world to begging for hand outs with a gig as the ultimate chauffeur on the side, that's gotta sting a little. I mean, to be one of the people in their program you'd probably have to be fairly adept at choking back the bile.
I would imagine that at 20 km/s, you might see a nice glow. I suppose the ambient light in the day time would probably wash it out, but at night I would think it would be quite a site.
I'm tired of you commie pinkos trying to tell me which guns I can and can't have. "Being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to bear arms shall not be infringed." --2nd Amendment. So, in short, you soy eating, godless, Church of Satan youth basketball Nite league playing, primitive, reefer smoking, hippy screwheads can just suck my boom stick. I'm going to hunt with whatever the hell I want, as is my God given right (at least if Moses and the NRA have anything to say about it).
A star is basically a diffuse cloud of gas that collapses in on itself due to its own gravity right? Fine. Let's just consider the life cycles of stars then. A typical star, such as our sun, will 'live' about 10 billion years. Right now, and for the past 5 billion or so years it's been burning hydrogen, to make helium. This takes a fair amount of energy and in return releases quite a bit. Helium on the other hand releases much more, but also requires a great deal more pressure. When the hydrogen runs out, the sun will then ignite the helium burning phase and pretty much expand to somthing like the orbit of venus and make the earth look not unlike mercury. In a zone surrounding the helium burning core, hydrogen burning will still continue, but now the burning of helium provides most of the star's energy. And where this hydrogen burning phase lasted billions of years, the accumulated helium will last a few hundred million. But our sun is an unremarkable star. After it is done burning helium it will generate a small nova revealing its white hot core and, in time, a beautiful planitary nebula. Let's consider what might happen if we could add more gas to our sun.
With more gas, there would be more gravity, so there would be more pressure over a greater volume so hydrogen burning would be more prolific. Hmmmm, by adding more fuel, we're increasing the rate at which it is consumed. So our billions of years of hydrogen burning might be short a billion. So we'll reach the following phase of helium burning sooner, and it too will proceed more quickly. Now we might be able to go beyond helium burning, and burn carbon. In fact this is what the super large stars do. A star of great mass, like a red super giant might be up to 10 billion km in diameter and would not be unlike an onion with different zones of fusion. And this star would be at the end of a life that progressed very quickly. Some lasting only a hundred million years or so, 1/100th the life span of our sun. But what happens at the end of a stars life? It's the energy from the nuclear fusion that literally holds stars up. Without it they collapse. Some stars collapse on an iron core that is so large, that the pressure inside the core forces some electrons into the interiors of all the protons in the iron core of the star. This produces a super nova, but the core, now a vastly smaller ball of neutrons with a 1 km iron crust is what remains. Even neutrons have their limit. They cannot bear an infinite burden. If the core were to be about 2 to 3 times the mass of the sun, it would be so great as to exceed the ability of neutrons to resist gravitation. So a black hole would be born. At least that's the short course.
Check out Black Holes by Jean-Pierre Luminet from Cambridge University Press ISBN 0521409063.
Small Business owners get an exemption that protects something like 2 million dollars of the business from the death tax. Farmers recive an additional protection beyond that to something like 4 million, and lets not forget the debt load most farms carry. And it should be a simple matter to show that family squables over how best to profit from the labor and death of others is more at fault for tanking small businesses that the IRS. Seems to me plenty of small businesses around the seattle area have survived being handed down to succeeding generation with the "death tax" in place. That's what's so funny, it seems now that the Republicans have a better grasp of how to spin the media than the democrats currently. They do a wonderful job of framing the debate in the language of their choosing. "Those democratic bastards! If they wantin' t' tax me for my death they can move to China and bill my poor, Walton lookin' family for the bullet too." The marrige penalty tax. Come on! Let's give credit where credit is due. I've got to give them props for spinning the media, and still claiming to be the victims of biased reporting. Those per child income credits are sweet. Awww but the children.... Awww. As if anyone has kids to make the world a better place. Please it's an act of egotism. A desire to leave a mark, something of ones self behind, a good desire, but it's far from a magnanimous gift to the world. So you have poor and middle class single childless people subsidising the children of others. A choice mental picture is that of say a dirt poor black kid working part time at McDonald's while s/he goes to high school. In the hope they might just be able to scrape enough together to get to a junior college, because the government programs that put Newt Gingrich through college have been reduced to something like a 1/3 of what they were by the very people who benifited. Now picture that kid looking at the money deducted for taxes, unemployment insurance, social security (which they may well never be able to collect) on their first pay stub. Yeah, a family of four making 72 grand a year does deserve a 2 grand by on taxes. Now I'm not one to buy into 'white guilt', but, at least for me, comparisons to slavery ain't that far off base.
Sure, the infobaun lends itself to hyperbole, that's it's nature. So a little rhetoric is certainly par for the course, but people are grandstanding like this was a congressional hearing in search of a witch hunt. Not that this is bad, it's certainly been entertaining, but there are no cameras here. This leads me to the following non-assertion which also happens to be a proveable (and maybe proven) fact. If you have ANY sufficently large population of people, that population will mirror the society that spawned it. This means you will find shockingly ignorant people here at slashdot, and you will also find shockingly brilliant people at a Christian Science reading room. Once more you will find them at the same rate you find them in the larger world. There is a slashdot user with an old pickup, with a gun rack, a pair of antlers for a hood orniment, who uses a confederate battle standard as curtains, and cousin he wouldn't mind kissin'.
Everyone has their blind spot. I'm sure everyone has been asked to justify a view point on something, wasn't able to point to supporting evidence, but could hear the little voice that insisted despite how things appear, I AM right. I have my suspicions that the type of people who deny the former are the same people who say they smile at everyone: liars.
Seattle isn't a third world country. Although Tacoma is pretty close.
New infrastructure costs money and sows the seeds of its own discontent. Anytime a new infrastructure has been built (to my humble recolection) it seems it was done by a highly profitable monopoly which stole from the poor to give to the rich, and was then with much fanfare broken up by the government, or other sufficently powerful force. Literally. You had the finacial infrastructure crafted by J.P. Morgan (who laudably didn't really profiteer as he might have) bringing the U.S. to the stage of the finacial world. Rockafeller with real estate in New York. Carnagie(sp? with steel mills. Hell, there's even a game called railroad tycoon. But this goes all the way back to glory days of the British Empire, and has continued on to the present day with Ma' Bell, and Microsoft. I'm certainly not saying it is right, but without excessivly powerful monopolies bending countries (and sometimes the world) to a common vision the U.S. would not be what it is today. One might make a credible argument of the fact that we would be the poorer if not for them. Now I'm not saying that monopolies enrich the lives of those who suffer them. Clearly, that's a silly assertion. I agree that everyone who suffers monopolies and cartels are probably much worse off. But after the fact, when the powers that were are a relic left to rot in history books and carved into edifices, the lives of the people that use the infrastucture are enriched. If only by the fact that they were built with a common vision. If this particular pattern has stood the test of time, over a period where few things can claim the same, perhaps there is something to it.
Most people shot with guns die, and its not usually legal. Maybe death seems worse than mabey theft. But I can go into any spy store and buy a set of lock picks so that's not the problem. Everyone who drives cars breaks a traffic law at one time or another, right? I don't think anyone really thinks this is about what's right or wrong. MPAA knows that control of the information at all levels (creation, distribution, and use) is what keeps them in business, and anyone else who interferes with them, be they hobbiest, a satanic penguin molester, or Joe Regular is a threat to their bottom line.
I would imagine event the woman prosecuting the case (Mary Jo White, (212) 637-2741) has a thought process something like this:
If there's any truth to that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" jive, then maybe Clinton deserves some major props for pardoning Rich.In a way, how can one be surprised by this? Ammused I understand, but surprised? Naw.
However, I am somewhat curious as to exactly when America returned to an Oligarchy (tyranny of the few, the rich)? Government, particularly the American government, is not in place to serve the intrests of a select few. It's job is to serve the people by providing sanctuary for the unfettered exchange of ideas. I fail to see how this action can even pretend to work to that end. FDR was something of a socialist, and did a lot for returning government to the people. I can't see the idealism of the 60's being at fault. The deceite of the 70's, is that when we the people began to give our government away? Was the apathy of the 80's to blame? I'm interested to know when exactly we passed that critical point where we lost the balance of influence.
Let's not forget about chemosynthese and undersea black smokers.
But we don't have to worry about troll bait here. They're all in the rec.slashdot.god.is-dead thread. For the record, while I don't believe in God, I don't chide those who do. Taking scripture as literal truth however....course if a burning bush started talking to me I'd get on board real quick.
But back to the immorality part. What I think the first poster was getting at is that this promising research might be stymied by certain political concerns. These concerns would protest the research based on the fact that the knowledge that lives might eventually be saved, may lower the emiotional costs of choosing abortion. This of course is true; stem cell research does have right wing opponants (at least in the US). I pretty much think their premis is a load of bunk (there's a word ya don't see now days). I would imagine that someone looking into abortion would have a lot of bigger fish to fry than, "Maybe some day my babies stem cells will grow up to cure cancer." Further more, I would respectfully submit that anyone that is having that kind of internal monologue is just trying to rationalize the choice they want to make for other more selfish (and practical) reasons. But it's never a choice I'll face, and for that I'm thankful.
And lo' I spoke, and it was so.
No macro evolution. China, recent. Dino-bird found. The dinosaurs live on, and some of them can answer the phone. How's that for anthropomorphism? Scales became feathers, narrow tooth filled maws became beaks, sharp claws stayed that way. I think that a switch from 4 killing machine to a parrot that can answer the phone is macro evolution. That's me though. But really, maybe I'm full of crap and those proto feathers were the result of it being buried in pile of fern fronds by it's sad relatives. Who's to say? Certainly not the paleontologists. It could be an elaborate practical joke by God and only the aliens with the anal probes are in on it. The fact that hair, feathers, scales, nails and claws are made out of very similar material is a coincidence, not a common thread, is certainly a plausable explanation.
You need to ask better questions. A proto eye that could only see large changes in contrast, like some sea slugs, might give a moments more warning and fascillitate escape. The predators get sneakier, stealthier, or faster, and the eye gets better. By your truly disappointing reasoning, any significant change cannot arise at random. But let me get back to something akin to facts. Mammals were around during the reign of the dinosaurs. We were mice, and other very small mammals. Why? Larger niches were filled by the extreamly successful lizards. Then a can of whoopass slams into the Yucatan and kills almost everything over 150 lbs. That's a lot of room. Mammals get large very quickly. Mice to deer. Macro evolution at your door step. Of course my knowledge of Earths geologic past is certainly not that of an expert. But unless God is something of a practical joker, I'd say evolution is fact in general terms and only the details are up for debate.