Why hasen't this tidal lock synchronized any of the planets rotation with their revolution about the sun, mercury for example.
Actually Mercury is in the final stages of becoming tidally locked; it has already lost most of its rotational energy and its day is now synchronized to its year in a 2/3 harmony.
Solar tides are less powerful than Earth's lunar tides because, while the Sun is a lot bigger than the Moon, it is one hell of a lot further away.
Most of the moons of the gas giant planets are tidally locked just as Earth's moon is, and for the same reason.
1. The far side isn't "dark," it's "far." The entire moon experiences a 28-day light/dark cycle, but the near side has the Earth hanging in the sky at a relatively fixed point.
2. We actually can see more than 50% of the moon's surface from the Earth -- IIRC about 58%. This is because the moon wobbles a bit around its lock point. This wobble is called "libration." As the moon retreats, changing the length of the month, the tides tend to keep the moon's rotation synchronized.
Not with telescopes we can't. To see Martian surface features smaller than continents you have to send orbiters.
That being said, another way to put the issue to rest would be to go back. We've gotten very good at remote controlled probes. (Clementine, alas, wasn't quite good enough to image the landing sites either.) Unfortunately, there's an attitude that the moon isn't going to change much since it's geologically dead, so there's no point in sending orbiters which will basically be echoing information we already gathered in the 60's.
Hubble's detectors were designed for long-term integration of faint objects. They would be damaged by being pointed at the sunlit Earth or Moon.
The NSA does have some Hubble-class telescopes designed for imaging the Earth (some of this technology was borrowed for Hubble itself), but even diffraction limited optics on that scale won't quite do the job. Theoretical resolution at lunar distance is still more than a meter, which is not good enough to tell you anything useful.
The guy that worked on the cameras as well as the NASA guy on the program said that they crosshairs were etched into the camera so that they would be on every shot in the same place. They were not put on after they were developed. So the crosshairs would HAVE to be in front of any object.
OK, the cameras weren't standard Hasselblad issue, NASA made some mods. Others have addressed the crosshair thing. It was also probably necessary to change some of the lubricants and mechanical stuff for proper operation in a vacuum.
BTW you can see the cameras in many of the moon images. They were not custom-designed from the ground up, they look just like the ones used to shoot Vogue.
Even if you build a self-replicating machine, and even if you make it small, you cannot make it replicate itself smaller and repeat the process ad infitum. The square-cube law will stop you even before your assembly processes break down.
1. Genuine coincidence. In the ancient past the moon was closer and appeared bigger and there were no annular solar eclipses; in the distant future it will be further away and there will be no total solar eclipses.
Coincidences do happen; hang around in a casino long enough and you will see a surprisingly large number of them.
2. Tides. Even today the Moon is trading Earth's rotational angular momentum for its own momentum of revolution, getting further away as Earth's day slows down. (See #1.) It takes energy to make the sea go up and down with the tides; this is where that energy comes from.
Since the Moon is smaller than the Earth and had a lot less angular momentum of rotation to lose, its day eventually slowed to become equivalent to its orbital period. This is called "tidal lock."
Armstrong claimed that he said "One small step for a man," and that the a was garbled in transmission. (This would certainly make more sense.)
The conflict is over whether Armstrong's A was swallowed by the radio or he forgot to say it. The tapes have not been edited, they faithfully play back the less sensible version everyone heard and which you quoted accurately.
Re:The movie wanked on the ending.
on
Hannibal's Return
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· Score: 5
Think about it. There are really a limited number of ways that Harris could have ended the novel, most of them boring and predictable:
#1 and #2 are what everyone expected (the question after the book was released was "do they catch him?"). For this very reason Harris wouldn't have done either. People would have hated #3 even more than what he actually did. Really, given Harris' history the book ends in just about the only way possible.
Harris does not write about nice people. The "tooth fairy" in Red Dragon chose his victims because they were happy, well-adjusted families and he wanted to end their happiness as horrifically as possible (and Harris describes his methods in great detail). The villain of silence is building himself a girl suit out of real girls. Mason Verger was a pervert and psycho before he ever met Hannibal Lecter.
In Dragon and Silence Lecter was like a force of nature, the higher power of which the other villains could only be a subset. In Hannibal Harris had to make Lecter human. This was bound to be a disappointment, but without a background and a vulnerability Harris would have had no story. What he did was actually very clever, and not nearly so unbelievable as people seem to think.
Ultimately, Hannibal is no more about Lecter than the other two books; it is about Clarice Starling. She has gone beyond not hearing the lambs, through a cauldron of betrayal that has enabled her to become the butcher. Lecter merely gives her a well-timed push to complete the process. It's really similar to his role in the other two stories, and one of the few ways Harris could have surprised us at all.
Perhaps you can explain how the radiation in space didnt screw up the film, in the way a few seconds exposure to the security machines in airports used to?
Radiation gradually fogs film. There isn't that much radiation in space, if there was the astronauts would have been dead.
Slow film is also less susceptible to radiation than fast film (just as it is less susceptible to light), and the standard for journalism at the time was Kodachrome 25 or 64. As there is plenty of light on the daylit moon I'd be surprised if they used anything else. If you are carrying a camera loaded with K25 and the film gets fogged, you are going to soon be puking your guts out from radiation sickness.
There are cosmic events (especially solar flares) which can increase the level of radiation, and it is higher in certain places. James Michener fictionalizes a disaster based on this in his novel Space.
I gotta say that fox really blew it when they said "the only way to know for sure it to look for the leftover equipment on the moon, but no telescope exists that is powerfull enough". thats gotta be bullshit. The moon ain't that far away.
The moon is pretty damn far away. Go look at it sometime. About the size of a dime held at arm's length, it is really about the same size as the entire continental United States.
We can in fact detect reflections form the very carefully machined retroreflectors left behind by the astronauts, but even the best telescopes ever built would not be capable of resolving the LEM as a distinct object, much less resolving the other junk left up there by NASA.
1. The lack of any dust on the landing feet of the lunar lander. (It would seem to me a landing like that would kick up quite a bit of dust, some of which would setttle on the landing feet)
Dust does not "kick up" in a vacuum. It follows the same trajectory as a rock. Dust blown away from the lander during its descent would not land on the lander.
2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon.
The astronauts used standard Hasselblad 2-1/4 inch film cameras and TV cameras. These cameras do not put "crosshairs" on the film. Those would have been added later. I haven't seen the show or the pix you are referring to, but I do know that some pix I have seen on the Web have clearly been tampered with -- not by NASA but by someone else out to make "unbelievable" moon photos.
3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)
The moon's surface isn't entirely dust and sand, it is also rock. Again, there is no atmosphere; only particles big enough to be directly moved by the blast force will be moved at all, and they will follow a parabolic trajectory away from the lander. They will hit the ground long before the hatch is opened as there is no atmosphere to suspend them.
4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?
Not really. The LEM didn't need a lot of thrust to lift off (1/6 gravity), and there was no atmosphere to carry the blast sound back to the lander. The lander's engine noise might have been comparable to the hiss of gas escaping under pressure from a container -- a high frequency not readily picked up by low-frequency mikes and not readily transmitted through the frame of the lander.
Teflon was not invented for heat shields. (It would perform poorly as one.) It was invented for the Manhattan Project, where it was used to create grease-free seals in the miles of pumps and piping in the Y-12 gaseous diffusion U235 separation plant.
Hannibal was a truly fantastic novel, despite what the reviews said, and the movie ruined what was best about it.
Why did it take Harris 10 years to write a sequel to Lambs, do you suppose? Let me take a guess: He doesn't like to be predictable or do the same thing twice. He writes dark, twisted, malevolent morality plays, and he likes to surprise and horrify you while he makes you think of things that strike you as new.
Red Dragon (from whence the movie Manhunter) was about becoming what you hunt. Silence was about finding what you hunt is already within you. Where to go from there? Hannibal is about being seduced by what you hunt.
In the book, the final triumph of Lecter is his seduction of Starling and her active participation in the brain-eating ritual (with a more appropriate victim, too, the boss whose boot had been atop her head since the ending of Silence). The movie was ruined because it makes no sense without this final twist, the revelation that Lecter and Starling are literally the only human and likeable characters in the story.
We also lost some of my favorite lines (oddly, the movie takes lines uttered by different people in different scenes and throws them together in a kind of hodge podge). Starling: "Ask me if I sound like Oliver Twist when I ask for MORE!" Lecter: "Listen to the sound of this stringed instrument. Its sound is the sound of your freedom..." The instrument being the crossbow which administers the coup de grace to Starling's brain-depleted boss. Starling, in reply: "Yes, the D below middle C, isn't it?"
The movie was pretty good, a faithful rendition of the story with forgivable nips and tucks to the plot (though I missed Verger's sister, who kills him in the book), right up to the final pulled punch. Starling was seduced by Hannibal, because only Hannibal was straight with her, only Hannibal could be trusted, and every force in her life pushed her into Hannibal's arms. Hannibal himself had believable reasons in the book (nipped from the movie) for taking her under his wing rather than making her into dinner. This could have been a great movie, but instead it sold out to squeamishness.
...and it didn't take cloning to create it, only advanced medical intervention.
We have gotten so good at correcting problems which would once have been crippling or deadly that these traits are propagating rather than being culled. Probably the most interesting of these is infertility.
In the past if you were blind, prone to disease, or infertile, you tended not to reproduce. Now you can get Lasik, take antibiotics, and launch the entire might of modern medical science against your low sperm count and leave plenty of offspring with your exact same problems.
I'm not saying this is bad, just that cloning adds nothing new to the mix. Within another hundred years humans probably won't be able to reproduce without massive technological intervention. Cloning will be just one set of pliers in the toolset that makes it possible.
Technically nothing can happen without God (who is all powerful) permitting it to happen.
Of course, this means God is directly responsible for all the evil and horror extant in the world. Which means God must either be evil, or be capable of evil, which negates God's omnibenevolence.
Of course, this is regarded as a terrible heresy by the Catholic Church, precisely because it makes so much sense.
Despite persecution which at times crossed the line into genocide (the Cathars, anyone?) Gnosticism was a recurring heresy until the time of the Renaissance, when the even more compelling heresy of rationalism took its place.
Really, the implications of cloning are being waaaaaay overblown. Is an identical twin somehow "less" of an individual because he is a twin? Of course not. We would have a better perspective on this if we weren't so quick to attribute every little personality quirk to genetic causes (so convenient for those who believe in eugenics).
The simple fact is, as you allude to, writing something in 100% assembly is, for the most part, foolish - you cut down on stability and development time for a small gain in speed.
Well, I write a lot of stuff in assembly or in other higher level languages over assembly, and this is just wrong.
Writing something in 100% assembly increases stability once you've got it working, increases development time (because, as you point out, it's harder to get it working), but trades off for an enormous increase in speed.
IME badly written assembly (that is, quick without a lot of optimization, but by someone who keeps his references straight and doesn't put values in the wrong places) is always noticeably faster than any higher level language no matter how smart the compiler.
I have reverse-engineered some code in the controller I mentioned and it consistently dereferences things it uses in high speed interrupts by 2 or more levels -- that's a 50% or more speed hit no matter how you cut it, and more than that if you judiciously use a few register-level variables. This is the cost of OO languages which must use a lot of dereferencing to achieve their high level of abstraction. A 50% hit may not sound like much until you make the mistake of using it in an instrument with a 6-level interrupt system.
OK, for free you get to listen a few times or for a few days. We all know how easy it is to break a system like that, and they are counting on most people being to lazy or computer-illiterate to bother. Maybe they're even right.
For a fee, which will have to be reasonable (and they seem pretty smart about this part) you get to burn CD's or download to your Rio, but not to email the unencrypted file to your friends. Anybody see the problem here? A CD is the unencrypted file. The most clueless newbie can take this CD, re-rip it, and walla, one unencrypted.mp3 goes right back onto Napster.
The job is even easier if the fee-paying member downloads it to his Rio, because chances are his Rio requires an unencrypted.mp3 (and they must realize, as they seem to realize re: CD's, that users will not accept a system that requires them to buy new hardware).
Then of course there are the spoofing and ID problems mentioned by others. Napster cannot use watermarks or music-recognition software because, remember, Napster itself never sees the music file. The music goes straight from my 'puter to yours, without passing through their server, so if I named the file "medieval - king's singers - greensleeves" but it actually plays Jennifer Lopez, how are they supposed to figure that out?
I don't expect the forces arrayed against Napster to accept their proposal because, clueless as they are, they are smart enough to see how easy this system will be to circumvent. No crypto system has ever lasted long with millions of messages being passed, and it won't be long before someone will build an easy to use bypass and distribute it to 50 million of their closest friends.
Today, our systems rock, but I'm still wistful when I think of the hardware hackers: they were men like us. Who will remember their beautiful designs except us that killed them?
I remember them every day, because their designs worked which is something you often can't say of more modern stuff, even when it does run at 1 GHz.
There is also an exponential increase in bloat which usually isn't noticed because the exponent is so very close to 1, just a bit over, and the modern CPUs are so fast. But when you take all the modern lessons in design and try to apply them to a 20 MHz 80186, as one manufacturer I know of has done, and you end up with an interpreter that can only parse a few hundred instructions per second, you might actually think this is normal and somehow reflects a defect in the processor instead of your bloated OO code.
You're a liar like everyone else who uses Napster. You download all the music you want, and never renumerate the Artist. You wouldn't need to use napster if you had the CD now would you? Therefore you: download, listen, think about paying the artist, decide not to, indulge in music theft.
Napster has its place. In its current form that place might be right below a fee-based service which serves quality-assured product, but not all Napster use is infringing.
I have downloaded about 1400 songs since getting broadband. (I regard MP3 exchanging as less than useless without broadband.) These fall into 3 categories:
1. Songs I never would have bought, about 200
OK, not "never;" if downloads were a reasonable price (say $0.50/song) I'd have probably paid willingly for this little collection. But no way would I have bought CD's totalling over $1,000 or, what is it, four bucks a song that one site wants to charge? Given the current distribution models, I think this was entirely fair. It isn't like I downloaded every song I ever heard; I used some discretion here.
2. Songs I already own, about 1000.
Before I got DSL, I spent almost a year recording a very large collection of LP's onto CD's. Naturally the ones I listen to most were in the worst shape. I have gradually reconstructed these reconstructed CD's using better quality MP3's from Napster. I regard this as a quality improvement comparable to the one I made when I ran the original vinyl through DC-ART. Why should I pay twice for something because it was originally sold on technologically inferior media?
3. Money lying around in the road, 200 songs.
All right, I have ID'ed someone who has a very fast connection and there is an entire Bob Dylan album there I don't have, I can Do The Right Thing (tm) and leave it be or select tracks 1-12 and hit Get Selected Music. It's not like I went hunting for it, but I was looking for something legit and There It Was, so I did the human thing.
In similar news it has happened a few times that drug couriers running payments up and down I-12 near here have had blowouts on tires stuffed with money. If you passed such a scene would you drive by or stop and pick up a few bills? There is only one answer I would really believe.
I don't know what the final answer should be w/r/t things like Napster. I want artists to be paid but I don't want dagummint's nose up my butt every time I download a file either. I don't think anybody is being very reasonable in the whole debate.
I stop writing the code, I stop getting paid. Musician writes cool songs, gets paid. These days, he stops writing, and can keep getting paid. See my problem with the system here?
Yeah, you're jealous. The solution isn't to impoverish musicians but to reward people who create information proportionately to the good they provide.
There is a ridiculous assumption hidden between the lines here that musicians, authors, and inventors somehow aren't doing "real work" like manufacturers and printers. This is stupid, because without the musicians, authors, and inventors the manufacturers and printers wouldn't have anything to manufacture or print. They are the real architects of our economy, our culture, and our technology, and it makes sense they should be massively compensated if their ideas take hold on a massive scale.
Unfortunately, there seem to be no sane voices on this issue. One side wants to be able to steal freely from the creators of information, the other wants a fascist state. Surely there is another way.
The airconditioning must not only lower the temperature of the cave, but must also remove these metabolic wastes, particularly the water vapour.
Air conditioning tends to do this anyway. When the air is cooled moisture is removed, which is why air conditioners drip water.
Also, while selenite is not the most durable of minerals neither is it the most fragile in this sense. The much smaller selenites in my personal collection are unharmed after ~ 10 years despite being kept in open cabinets in New Orleans, LA which is not exactly a low-humidity environment.
In fact, the air conditioning would probably help to preserve the crystals, since the introduction of outside air cannot be undone. By making that outside air cooler and drier any damage to the crystals will be slowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Mercury is in the final stages of becoming tidally locked; it has already lost most of its rotational energy and its day is now synchronized to its year in a 2/3 harmony.
Solar tides are less powerful than Earth's lunar tides because, while the Sun is a lot bigger than the Moon, it is one hell of a lot further away.
Most of the moons of the gas giant planets are tidally locked just as Earth's moon is, and for the same reason.
2. We actually can see more than 50% of the moon's surface from the Earth -- IIRC about 58%. This is because the moon wobbles a bit around its lock point. This wobble is called "libration." As the moon retreats, changing the length of the month, the tides tend to keep the moon's rotation synchronized.
Not with telescopes we can't. To see Martian surface features smaller than continents you have to send orbiters.
That being said, another way to put the issue to rest would be to go back. We've gotten very good at remote controlled probes. (Clementine, alas, wasn't quite good enough to image the landing sites either.) Unfortunately, there's an attitude that the moon isn't going to change much since it's geologically dead, so there's no point in sending orbiters which will basically be echoing information we already gathered in the 60's.
The NSA does have some Hubble-class telescopes designed for imaging the Earth (some of this technology was borrowed for Hubble itself), but even diffraction limited optics on that scale won't quite do the job. Theoretical resolution at lunar distance is still more than a meter, which is not good enough to tell you anything useful.
OK, the cameras weren't standard Hasselblad issue, NASA made some mods. Others have addressed the crosshair thing. It was also probably necessary to change some of the lubricants and mechanical stuff for proper operation in a vacuum.
BTW you can see the cameras in many of the moon images. They were not custom-designed from the ground up, they look just like the ones used to shoot Vogue.
Even if you build a self-replicating machine, and even if you make it small, you cannot make it replicate itself smaller and repeat the process ad infitum. The square-cube law will stop you even before your assembly processes break down.
Coincidences do happen; hang around in a casino long enough and you will see a surprisingly large number of them.
2. Tides. Even today the Moon is trading Earth's rotational angular momentum for its own momentum of revolution, getting further away as Earth's day slows down. (See #1.) It takes energy to make the sea go up and down with the tides; this is where that energy comes from.
Since the Moon is smaller than the Earth and had a lot less angular momentum of rotation to lose, its day eventually slowed to become equivalent to its orbital period. This is called "tidal lock."
The conflict is over whether Armstrong's A was swallowed by the radio or he forgot to say it. The tapes have not been edited, they faithfully play back the less sensible version everyone heard and which you quoted accurately.
1. Starling catches Lecter.
2. Starling fails to catch Lecter (movie version).
3. Lecter catches starling, eats her.
4. Lecter catches starling (book version).
#1 and #2 are what everyone expected (the question after the book was released was "do they catch him?"). For this very reason Harris wouldn't have done either. People would have hated #3 even more than what he actually did. Really, given Harris' history the book ends in just about the only way possible.
Harris does not write about nice people. The "tooth fairy" in Red Dragon chose his victims because they were happy, well-adjusted families and he wanted to end their happiness as horrifically as possible (and Harris describes his methods in great detail). The villain of silence is building himself a girl suit out of real girls. Mason Verger was a pervert and psycho before he ever met Hannibal Lecter.
In Dragon and Silence Lecter was like a force of nature, the higher power of which the other villains could only be a subset. In Hannibal Harris had to make Lecter human. This was bound to be a disappointment, but without a background and a vulnerability Harris would have had no story. What he did was actually very clever, and not nearly so unbelievable as people seem to think.
Ultimately, Hannibal is no more about Lecter than the other two books; it is about Clarice Starling. She has gone beyond not hearing the lambs, through a cauldron of betrayal that has enabled her to become the butcher. Lecter merely gives her a well-timed push to complete the process. It's really similar to his role in the other two stories, and one of the few ways Harris could have surprised us at all.
Radiation gradually fogs film. There isn't that much radiation in space, if there was the astronauts would have been dead.
Slow film is also less susceptible to radiation than fast film (just as it is less susceptible to light), and the standard for journalism at the time was Kodachrome 25 or 64. As there is plenty of light on the daylit moon I'd be surprised if they used anything else. If you are carrying a camera loaded with K25 and the film gets fogged, you are going to soon be puking your guts out from radiation sickness.
There are cosmic events (especially solar flares) which can increase the level of radiation, and it is higher in certain places. James Michener fictionalizes a disaster based on this in his novel Space.
The moon is pretty damn far away. Go look at it sometime. About the size of a dime held at arm's length, it is really about the same size as the entire continental United States.
We can in fact detect reflections form the very carefully machined retroreflectors left behind by the astronauts, but even the best telescopes ever built would not be capable of resolving the LEM as a distinct object, much less resolving the other junk left up there by NASA.
More tortoises. And before you ask, it's tortoises all the way down.
Dust does not "kick up" in a vacuum. It follows the same trajectory as a rock. Dust blown away from the lander during its descent would not land on the lander.
2. The cameras the astronauts had crosshairs permanantly in the frames. In some moon photos the crosshairs are BEHIND objects on the moon.
The astronauts used standard Hasselblad 2-1/4 inch film cameras and TV cameras. These cameras do not put "crosshairs" on the film. Those would have been added later. I haven't seen the show or the pix you are referring to, but I do know that some pix I have seen on the Web have clearly been tampered with -- not by NASA but by someone else out to make "unbelievable" moon photos.
3. The lack of a blast crater. (This one was partial explained, an expert said that the lander didn't need much actual blast force to land... however i would have thought in the lower gravity of space, it would have made an indentation because of how the entire surface seemed to be just a dust or sand.)
The moon's surface isn't entirely dust and sand, it is also rock. Again, there is no atmosphere; only particles big enough to be directly moved by the blast force will be moved at all, and they will follow a parabolic trajectory away from the lander. They will hit the ground long before the hatch is opened as there is no atmosphere to suspend them.
4. There is no engine noise on the tape during the landing. Wouldn't there be a lot of engine noise?
Not really. The LEM didn't need a lot of thrust to lift off (1/6 gravity), and there was no atmosphere to carry the blast sound back to the lander. The lander's engine noise might have been comparable to the hiss of gas escaping under pressure from a container -- a high frequency not readily picked up by low-frequency mikes and not readily transmitted through the frame of the lander.
Teflon was not invented for heat shields. (It would perform poorly as one.) It was invented for the Manhattan Project, where it was used to create grease-free seals in the miles of pumps and piping in the Y-12 gaseous diffusion U235 separation plant.
Later: Is Clinton more evil then Hannibal Lecter?
Why did it take Harris 10 years to write a sequel to Lambs, do you suppose? Let me take a guess: He doesn't like to be predictable or do the same thing twice. He writes dark, twisted, malevolent morality plays, and he likes to surprise and horrify you while he makes you think of things that strike you as new.
Red Dragon (from whence the movie Manhunter) was about becoming what you hunt. Silence was about finding what you hunt is already within you. Where to go from there? Hannibal is about being seduced by what you hunt.
In the book, the final triumph of Lecter is his seduction of Starling and her active participation in the brain-eating ritual (with a more appropriate victim, too, the boss whose boot had been atop her head since the ending of Silence). The movie was ruined because it makes no sense without this final twist, the revelation that Lecter and Starling are literally the only human and likeable characters in the story.
We also lost some of my favorite lines (oddly, the movie takes lines uttered by different people in different scenes and throws them together in a kind of hodge podge). Starling: "Ask me if I sound like Oliver Twist when I ask for MORE !" Lecter: "Listen to the sound of this stringed instrument. Its sound is the sound of your freedom..." The instrument being the crossbow which administers the coup de grace to Starling's brain-depleted boss. Starling, in reply: "Yes, the D below middle C, isn't it?"
The movie was pretty good, a faithful rendition of the story with forgivable nips and tucks to the plot (though I missed Verger's sister, who kills him in the book), right up to the final pulled punch. Starling was seduced by Hannibal, because only Hannibal was straight with her, only Hannibal could be trusted, and every force in her life pushed her into Hannibal's arms. Hannibal himself had believable reasons in the book (nipped from the movie) for taking her under his wing rather than making her into dinner. This could have been a great movie, but instead it sold out to squeamishness.
We have gotten so good at correcting problems which would once have been crippling or deadly that these traits are propagating rather than being culled. Probably the most interesting of these is infertility.
In the past if you were blind, prone to disease, or infertile, you tended not to reproduce. Now you can get Lasik, take antibiotics, and launch the entire might of modern medical science against your low sperm count and leave plenty of offspring with your exact same problems.
I'm not saying this is bad, just that cloning adds nothing new to the mix. Within another hundred years humans probably won't be able to reproduce without massive technological intervention. Cloning will be just one set of pliers in the toolset that makes it possible.
Technically nothing can happen without God (who is all powerful) permitting it to happen.
Of course, this means God is directly responsible for all the evil and horror extant in the world. Which means God must either be evil, or be capable of evil, which negates God's omnibenevolence.
Of course, this is regarded as a terrible heresy by the Catholic Church, precisely because it makes so much sense.
Despite persecution which at times crossed the line into genocide (the Cathars, anyone?) Gnosticism was a recurring heresy until the time of the Renaissance, when the even more compelling heresy of rationalism took its place.
Really, the implications of cloning are being waaaaaay overblown. Is an identical twin somehow "less" of an individual because he is a twin? Of course not. We would have a better perspective on this if we weren't so quick to attribute every little personality quirk to genetic causes (so convenient for those who believe in eugenics).
Well, I write a lot of stuff in assembly or in other higher level languages over assembly, and this is just wrong.
Writing something in 100% assembly increases stability once you've got it working, increases development time (because, as you point out, it's harder to get it working), but trades off for an enormous increase in speed.
IME badly written assembly (that is, quick without a lot of optimization, but by someone who keeps his references straight and doesn't put values in the wrong places) is always noticeably faster than any higher level language no matter how smart the compiler.
I have reverse-engineered some code in the controller I mentioned and it consistently dereferences things it uses in high speed interrupts by 2 or more levels -- that's a 50% or more speed hit no matter how you cut it, and more than that if you judiciously use a few register-level variables. This is the cost of OO languages which must use a lot of dereferencing to achieve their high level of abstraction. A 50% hit may not sound like much until you make the mistake of using it in an instrument with a 6-level interrupt system.
For a fee, which will have to be reasonable (and they seem pretty smart about this part) you get to burn CD's or download to your Rio, but not to email the unencrypted file to your friends. Anybody see the problem here? A CD is the unencrypted file. The most clueless newbie can take this CD, re-rip it, and walla, one unencrypted .mp3 goes right back onto Napster.
The job is even easier if the fee-paying member downloads it to his Rio, because chances are his Rio requires an unencrypted .mp3 (and they must realize, as they seem to realize re: CD's, that users will not accept a system that requires them to buy new hardware).
Then of course there are the spoofing and ID problems mentioned by others. Napster cannot use watermarks or music-recognition software because, remember, Napster itself never sees the music file. The music goes straight from my 'puter to yours, without passing through their server, so if I named the file "medieval - king's singers - greensleeves" but it actually plays Jennifer Lopez, how are they supposed to figure that out?
I don't expect the forces arrayed against Napster to accept their proposal because, clueless as they are, they are smart enough to see how easy this system will be to circumvent. No crypto system has ever lasted long with millions of messages being passed, and it won't be long before someone will build an easy to use bypass and distribute it to 50 million of their closest friends.
I remember them every day, because their designs worked which is something you often can't say of more modern stuff, even when it does run at 1 GHz.
There is also an exponential increase in bloat which usually isn't noticed because the exponent is so very close to 1, just a bit over, and the modern CPUs are so fast. But when you take all the modern lessons in design and try to apply them to a 20 MHz 80186, as one manufacturer I know of has done, and you end up with an interpreter that can only parse a few hundred instructions per second, you might actually think this is normal and somehow reflects a defect in the processor instead of your bloated OO code.
Napster has its place. In its current form that place might be right below a fee-based service which serves quality-assured product, but not all Napster use is infringing.
I have downloaded about 1400 songs since getting broadband. (I regard MP3 exchanging as less than useless without broadband.) These fall into 3 categories:
1. Songs I never would have bought, about 200
OK, not "never;" if downloads were a reasonable price (say $0.50/song) I'd have probably paid willingly for this little collection. But no way would I have bought CD's totalling over $1,000 or, what is it, four bucks a song that one site wants to charge? Given the current distribution models, I think this was entirely fair. It isn't like I downloaded every song I ever heard; I used some discretion here.
2. Songs I already own, about 1000.
Before I got DSL, I spent almost a year recording a very large collection of LP's onto CD's. Naturally the ones I listen to most were in the worst shape. I have gradually reconstructed these reconstructed CD's using better quality MP3's from Napster. I regard this as a quality improvement comparable to the one I made when I ran the original vinyl through DC-ART. Why should I pay twice for something because it was originally sold on technologically inferior media?
3. Money lying around in the road, 200 songs.
All right, I have ID'ed someone who has a very fast connection and there is an entire Bob Dylan album there I don't have, I can Do The Right Thing (tm) and leave it be or select tracks 1-12 and hit Get Selected Music. It's not like I went hunting for it, but I was looking for something legit and There It Was, so I did the human thing.
In similar news it has happened a few times that drug couriers running payments up and down I-12 near here have had blowouts on tires stuffed with money. If you passed such a scene would you drive by or stop and pick up a few bills? There is only one answer I would really believe.
I don't know what the final answer should be w/r/t things like Napster. I want artists to be paid but I don't want dagummint's nose up my butt every time I download a file either. I don't think anybody is being very reasonable in the whole debate.
Yeah, you're jealous. The solution isn't to impoverish musicians but to reward people who create information proportionately to the good they provide.
There is a ridiculous assumption hidden between the lines here that musicians, authors, and inventors somehow aren't doing "real work" like manufacturers and printers. This is stupid, because without the musicians, authors, and inventors the manufacturers and printers wouldn't have anything to manufacture or print. They are the real architects of our economy, our culture, and our technology, and it makes sense they should be massively compensated if their ideas take hold on a massive scale.
Unfortunately, there seem to be no sane voices on this issue. One side wants to be able to steal freely from the creators of information, the other wants a fascist state. Surely there is another way.
Air conditioning tends to do this anyway. When the air is cooled moisture is removed, which is why air conditioners drip water.
Also, while selenite is not the most durable of minerals neither is it the most fragile in this sense. The much smaller selenites in my personal collection are unharmed after ~ 10 years despite being kept in open cabinets in New Orleans, LA which is not exactly a low-humidity environment.
In fact, the air conditioning would probably help to preserve the crystals, since the introduction of outside air cannot be undone. By making that outside air cooler and drier any damage to the crystals will be slowed.