Depends. If the ice is going to melt sooner or later anyway, we're a heck of a lot better off burning it to produce CO2 than letting it simply melt and release the methane, which has a much bigger greenhouse impact than the CO2 would. Long term, it's a step in the right direction. It might be a short term back step, however, as the CO2 release will come earlier than the methane release would. Basically, you're causing a bit more greenhouse effect right away, but causing much less greenhouse effect long term.
Random changes to occur, but the selection process is not random, so the overall result is non-random, just like Boyle's gas laws result in predictable behavior for air, despite the fact that the motions of the underlying particles are random.
Evolution is not like a zillion monkeys typing randomly. It's like a zillion monkeys typing randomly while a zillion men stand next to them, and every time they type what is not the next letter of a play by William Shakespeare, the man hits the backspace key. Sure, the input may be rather random, but the output will rather quickly start looking like Shakespeare nonetheless.
There are no written accounts, as far as I know, of a meteorite causing significant numbers of human casualties, either through an impact or through a tsunami induced by impact.
Um, no. And, prior to the last couple of centuries, there were no written accounts of people dying of microbial infection, either, despite the fact that plagues killed millions. They knew millions died, but they didn't know it was caused by microorganisms, so they didn't write that. Human history may record the deaths of many people that were killed as a result of meteor impact, but we have no way of knowing, since they had no idea what caused the various disasters that befell them, so they didn't write that people were killed by a tsunami caused by an impact any more than they wrote people were killed by a plague caused by some microorganism. They just wrote people died in a tsunami or plague, leaving us to speculate about the cause.
It's been, what, a few decades since we could reliably correlate specific tsunamis to specific earthquakes? Certainly less than a century. History records many tsunamis, and we don't honestly know the cause of almost all of them, and never will. We know going forward, but we can't dig that info out for the past events.
It may very well be true that humans aren't killed by meteors more often that once every ten thousand years. It may also be true that humans are killed by meteors once every fifty years, on average. The historical record is consistent with either, given the large number of people killed by events in the past that we have no way of knowing if they were associated with meteors or not.
Now, big impacts that have worldwide devastation obvious to the fossil record, those we can tell you how frequently they occur. But minor events like those that would create a big wave, or a localized earthquake? We have no bloody idea how common those are, really. The fossil record doesn't help, since small scale events don't impact it, and human historical records don't help much, since until recently we didn't understand the world well enough to accurately record things like this.
Then add in random variation. It may be Tunguska like impacts happen every twenty years or so, on average, we're just having a dry spell these last couple centuries.
The fact of the matter is, we just don't know, and historical records don't help in this case. But we understand the laws of physics well enough to send spacecraft through the solar system with such incredible accuracy, it's like a golfer scoring a hole-in-one from 5000 miles away. Given this, I'll take odds calculated from our knowledge of an object's mass and orbital velocity over your speculations based on human historical records, thank you very much.
Demand and price in a free market are reversely proprotional.
One way to spot someone who doesn't really understand economics is how quickly they make statements like that. You would need to know a lot more about the thing in question before being able to make a generalization like that. Sometimes, they're directly proportional, sometimes, they're reversely proportional, and sometimes they're neither. It depends on a lot of other things which relationship hold true, if any.
At least, first and foremost, it indicates popularity. There might be a secondary impact based on strength, but how you'd determine how big that is is a mystery to me. The large factor will drown out the smaller ones.
This isn't flamebait... (I love my Mac) its an observation that IMHO over the past year Apple seems to have been far more agressive at implementing "control" measures through legal means -- not as bad as MSFT, but a far cry from the "We want everyone to love us" attitude of the past.
*boggle* When I was a young'un, my friends and I, mostly Apple II fans, used to talk about Apple's "rabid attack lawyers". I have never known in my life any company more legally aggressive than Apple Computer, and this has been true for the entire 23 years I've been using Apple products. I'm not sure which past you're referring to. Back when Jobs and Woz were still in the garage? Those days were long gone by the time I got to know Apple in the early 80's.
I went to the mall with $100. By the end of the day, all I had were some clothes and pretty trinkets. I was completely unable to cash out more money than I put it. Therefore, the mall must be a pyramid scheme!
Not really. Actually, a better summary would be this: we made virtual dollars from virtual investments, but when we tried to cash out, the exchange ate our profits so we ended up not making more than we put in. Because we couldn't make more money than we put in, it's a pyramid scheme.
If boiled down to this, it seems like stupid logic, that's because it is. This whole article was clearly written by someone entirely clueless.
It is in fact very easy to make money in SL. But you can't do it by investing, at least not yet. (If you try, you're likely to run into actual Ponzi schemes like (allegedly) Ginko Bank). You actually have to create things and sell them, or sell your services. If all you put into the game is money, you won't get any more out than you put in. Sorry.
It should also be noted that some of us have to have fairly large monitors to do our jobs, and what might pump out acceptable performance on an average sized monitor with 768k pixels just doesn't cut it when trying to push around 3M pixels (and running your LCD monitor at anything other than it's native resolution looks like crap, so changing your resolution isn't an acceptable option).
So it's not like the only point of the high-end card is to win benchmarks and sell more low-end cards, the point is to have a useful product for those of who actually need that powerful of a card just to get the same performance on our monitors that you're getting with that 5200 on yours.
Restore sanity? Please. There's nothing insane going on here. Insanity would be abandoning any customer who isn't "mainstream". Your competition will naturally and intelligently pounce on any market you choose to ignore. A smaller piece of a huge market is frequently itself a multi-million dollar market. Companies don't score points by turning down money. This is particularly true when the market segment you're turning your back on is the one's that spend the most bucks (about 70% of the cost of any computer system I buy is devoted to the graphics -- my most expensive component is always the monitor, and next most expensive is the card to run it. The entire rest of the system generally accounts for less than 30% of the cost).
Perhaps the same mechanism operating on different materials? Vaporised aluminum? Of course, if lighting is vaporizing parts of your aircraft, you'd think that'd be more noticeable.:)
I'm not sure how trying to negotiate a fair contract and getting it enforced qualifies as communist propaganda.
It's the word fair here that's at issue. I'm a political moderate, so I end up being called a communist by my right-wing friends. If you suggest you should actually fight for fairness rather than letting big corporations screw you right and left, and if you have to audacity to actually suggest laws be enforced against corporations as well as individuals, right-wingers call you an anti-corporate left-wing pinko commie. It's their way of dismissing you without having to actually think about what you've said. You can always tell they've lost an argument completely as soon as they use the word "communist". They've run out of legit points, they've decided to resort to branding in order to dismiss you.
If you prefer Apple because its one and only way fits well, that's fine. But please stop looking down others (Microsoft users, Linux, etc), because you're the inferior drones.
I look down on any person as inferior who thinks there's something wrong with buying and using whatever I like best for whatever reasons make the most sense for me.
The flaw with all these searches is that it assumes that any nearby civilizations are exactly at the same level of development as humanity.
No it doesn't. An experiment to detect radio emissions from nearby civilizations assumes only that there's a possibility that there might be a nearby civilization that uses radio waves for some purpose. It does not in any way assume that all civilizations do.
Calling an experiment flawed because it can't detect what it isn't even looking for is like calling an MRI flawed because it didn't detect your athlete's foot. My cable box doesn't pick up short-wave radio, either. Gosh, everything is flawed...
The article is CLEARLY about one solution to a problem (how to test using IE7), and the poster is CLEARLY mentioning an alternative solution to the exact same problem. The comment is CLEARLY apropos to the article, particularly because it suggests something that's not considered in the article. Going beyond the scope of the article itself is the only point to comments. Otherwise I might as well just RTFA and skip the comments, since they'll offer nothing useful beyond what the article itself had to say.
One con for the suggested alternative: you do need a licensed (or hacked) Windows to use it, unlike the article's solution.
Actually, since this client would tend to trickle data more slowly to people who have poor upload rates, it would hurt leeches who don't upload at all. The overall effect will be to make like more difficult for leeches, while making sure people who can spool out content faster get complete copies to spool out faster. I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how this is a bad thing in any way.
Re:Lenticular clouds...some look like UFOs
on
UFOs In the News
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· Score: 1
Nice pics! When looking at several of them, I can almost hear the adviser saying, "Carrier has arrived."
The ones that have something important to say is far fewer than the massive numbers that think they have something important to say, and would be better off if they didn't try to be more than the vapid entertainment they are. There's nothing wrong with a good "popcorn flick", every movie doesn't have to have a message, sometimes we just want a bit of cheap cheesy fun. Those movies that unashamedly provide it are the best of their genre, and better than the crap that tries to be more than it is.
I'm not sure which ones you are referring to, except of course English.
I'm sure he's referring to western languages, which, like most of the ones you mentioned, are represented perfectly fine in good old 8-bit Latin-1 (not suprising, since the Latin alphabet is one of the things all western languages have in common).
I swear, every year, more and more science fiction becomes fact as we push the boundaries. When I see news like this, I realize how every day the real world comes closer to the vision of authors like Douglas Adams.
I simply use greylisting. After that removes 99.99% of the spam, I just don't see the need for any further measures like SpamAssassin or RBLs or whatever, it just wastes time at that point. Greylisting does all the real work.
SORBS has one useful list: the dial-up DNS blacklist (spare me the diatribes about being able to send mail from a dynamic address. I know the arguments, but the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost of the spam coming from that address space).
True. Now, if only someone actually had an accurate list of dynamic IP addresses, this would be a good strategy, but since neither SORBS nor anyone else actually has one, it gets rather annoying for those of us who get our email bounced or eaten because some idiot has their mailserver configured to bounce mail from our perfectly static IP addresses that happens to be on one of these highly inaccurate lists.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends. If the ice is going to melt sooner or later anyway, we're a heck of a lot better off burning it to produce CO2 than letting it simply melt and release the methane, which has a much bigger greenhouse impact than the CO2 would. Long term, it's a step in the right direction. It might be a short term back step, however, as the CO2 release will come earlier than the methane release would. Basically, you're causing a bit more greenhouse effect right away, but causing much less greenhouse effect long term.
Random changes to occur, but the selection process is not random, so the overall result is non-random, just like Boyle's gas laws result in predictable behavior for air, despite the fact that the motions of the underlying particles are random.
Evolution is not like a zillion monkeys typing randomly. It's like a zillion monkeys typing randomly while a zillion men stand next to them, and every time they type what is not the next letter of a play by William Shakespeare, the man hits the backspace key. Sure, the input may be rather random, but the output will rather quickly start looking like Shakespeare nonetheless.
There are no written accounts, as far as I know, of a meteorite causing significant numbers of human casualties, either through an impact or through a tsunami induced by impact.
Um, no. And, prior to the last couple of centuries, there were no written accounts of people dying of microbial infection, either, despite the fact that plagues killed millions. They knew millions died, but they didn't know it was caused by microorganisms, so they didn't write that. Human history may record the deaths of many people that were killed as a result of meteor impact, but we have no way of knowing, since they had no idea what caused the various disasters that befell them, so they didn't write that people were killed by a tsunami caused by an impact any more than they wrote people were killed by a plague caused by some microorganism. They just wrote people died in a tsunami or plague, leaving us to speculate about the cause.
It's been, what, a few decades since we could reliably correlate specific tsunamis to specific earthquakes? Certainly less than a century. History records many tsunamis, and we don't honestly know the cause of almost all of them, and never will. We know going forward, but we can't dig that info out for the past events.
It may very well be true that humans aren't killed by meteors more often that once every ten thousand years. It may also be true that humans are killed by meteors once every fifty years, on average. The historical record is consistent with either, given the large number of people killed by events in the past that we have no way of knowing if they were associated with meteors or not.
Now, big impacts that have worldwide devastation obvious to the fossil record, those we can tell you how frequently they occur. But minor events like those that would create a big wave, or a localized earthquake? We have no bloody idea how common those are, really. The fossil record doesn't help, since small scale events don't impact it, and human historical records don't help much, since until recently we didn't understand the world well enough to accurately record things like this.
Then add in random variation. It may be Tunguska like impacts happen every twenty years or so, on average, we're just having a dry spell these last couple centuries.
The fact of the matter is, we just don't know, and historical records don't help in this case. But we understand the laws of physics well enough to send spacecraft through the solar system with such incredible accuracy, it's like a golfer scoring a hole-in-one from 5000 miles away. Given this, I'll take odds calculated from our knowledge of an object's mass and orbital velocity over your speculations based on human historical records, thank you very much.
Demand and price in a free market are reversely proprotional.
One way to spot someone who doesn't really understand economics is how quickly they make statements like that. You would need to know a lot more about the thing in question before being able to make a generalization like that. Sometimes, they're directly proportional, sometimes, they're reversely proportional, and sometimes they're neither. It depends on a lot of other things which relationship hold true, if any.
At least, first and foremost, it indicates popularity. There might be a secondary impact based on strength, but how you'd determine how big that is is a mystery to me. The large factor will drown out the smaller ones.
This isn't flamebait... (I love my Mac) its an observation that IMHO over the past year Apple seems to have been far more agressive at implementing "control" measures through legal means -- not as bad as MSFT, but a far cry from the "We want everyone to love us" attitude of the past.
*boggle* When I was a young'un, my friends and I, mostly Apple II fans, used to talk about Apple's "rabid attack lawyers". I have never known in my life any company more legally aggressive than Apple Computer, and this has been true for the entire 23 years I've been using Apple products. I'm not sure which past you're referring to. Back when Jobs and Woz were still in the garage? Those days were long gone by the time I got to know Apple in the early 80's.
Last I checked, Mr Popper was a bit of a stubborn about how an experiment can disprove a theory, but it never can prove it!
Yes. And Duhem and Quine showed how an experiment can't really disprove a theory either. However, they do make theories more or less credible.
I went to the mall with $100. By the end of the day, all I had were some clothes and pretty trinkets. I was completely unable to cash out more money than I put it. Therefore, the mall must be a pyramid scheme!
Not really. Actually, a better summary would be this: we made virtual dollars from virtual investments, but when we tried to cash out, the exchange ate our profits so we ended up not making more than we put in. Because we couldn't make more money than we put in, it's a pyramid scheme.
If boiled down to this, it seems like stupid logic, that's because it is. This whole article was clearly written by someone entirely clueless.
It is in fact very easy to make money in SL. But you can't do it by investing, at least not yet. (If you try, you're likely to run into actual Ponzi schemes like (allegedly) Ginko Bank). You actually have to create things and sell them, or sell your services. If all you put into the game is money, you won't get any more out than you put in. Sorry.
It should also be noted that some of us have to have fairly large monitors to do our jobs, and what might pump out acceptable performance on an average sized monitor with 768k pixels just doesn't cut it when trying to push around 3M pixels (and running your LCD monitor at anything other than it's native resolution looks like crap, so changing your resolution isn't an acceptable option).
So it's not like the only point of the high-end card is to win benchmarks and sell more low-end cards, the point is to have a useful product for those of who actually need that powerful of a card just to get the same performance on our monitors that you're getting with that 5200 on yours.
Restore sanity? Please. There's nothing insane going on here. Insanity would be abandoning any customer who isn't "mainstream". Your competition will naturally and intelligently pounce on any market you choose to ignore. A smaller piece of a huge market is frequently itself a multi-million dollar market. Companies don't score points by turning down money. This is particularly true when the market segment you're turning your back on is the one's that spend the most bucks (about 70% of the cost of any computer system I buy is devoted to the graphics -- my most expensive component is always the monitor, and next most expensive is the card to run it. The entire rest of the system generally accounts for less than 30% of the cost).
Perhaps the same mechanism operating on different materials? Vaporised aluminum? Of course, if lighting is vaporizing parts of your aircraft, you'd think that'd be more noticeable. :)
If ships were thousands of miles long, they'd be easy to find with a rope and hook, too. But they aren't.
I'm not sure how trying to negotiate a fair contract and getting it enforced qualifies as communist propaganda.
It's the word fair here that's at issue. I'm a political moderate, so I end up being called a communist by my right-wing friends. If you suggest you should actually fight for fairness rather than letting big corporations screw you right and left, and if you have to audacity to actually suggest laws be enforced against corporations as well as individuals, right-wingers call you an anti-corporate left-wing pinko commie. It's their way of dismissing you without having to actually think about what you've said. You can always tell they've lost an argument completely as soon as they use the word "communist". They've run out of legit points, they've decided to resort to branding in order to dismiss you.
If you prefer Apple because its one and only way fits well, that's fine. But please stop looking down others (Microsoft users, Linux, etc), because you're the inferior drones.
I look down on any person as inferior who thinks there's something wrong with buying and using whatever I like best for whatever reasons make the most sense for me.
Don't dual-boot. Get a KVM switch and put multiple boxes under your desk. I mean, really.
Lugging around multiple laptops and a KVM switch is going to be a real pain. I think I'll stick with dual-booting, thanks.
The flaw with all these searches is that it assumes that any nearby civilizations are exactly at the same level of development as humanity.
No it doesn't. An experiment to detect radio emissions from nearby civilizations assumes only that there's a possibility that there might be a nearby civilization that uses radio waves for some purpose. It does not in any way assume that all civilizations do.
Calling an experiment flawed because it can't detect what it isn't even looking for is like calling an MRI flawed because it didn't detect your athlete's foot. My cable box doesn't pick up short-wave radio, either. Gosh, everything is flawed...
The article is CLEARLY about one solution to a problem (how to test using IE7), and the poster is CLEARLY mentioning an alternative solution to the exact same problem. The comment is CLEARLY apropos to the article, particularly because it suggests something that's not considered in the article. Going beyond the scope of the article itself is the only point to comments. Otherwise I might as well just RTFA and skip the comments, since they'll offer nothing useful beyond what the article itself had to say.
One con for the suggested alternative: you do need a licensed (or hacked) Windows to use it, unlike the article's solution.
Actually, since this client would tend to trickle data more slowly to people who have poor upload rates, it would hurt leeches who don't upload at all. The overall effect will be to make like more difficult for leeches, while making sure people who can spool out content faster get complete copies to spool out faster. I'm having a lot of trouble understanding how this is a bad thing in any way.
Nice pics! When looking at several of them, I can almost hear the adviser saying, "Carrier has arrived."
The ones that have something important to say is far fewer than the massive numbers that think they have something important to say, and would be better off if they didn't try to be more than the vapid entertainment they are. There's nothing wrong with a good "popcorn flick", every movie doesn't have to have a message, sometimes we just want a bit of cheap cheesy fun. Those movies that unashamedly provide it are the best of their genre, and better than the crap that tries to be more than it is.
I'm not sure which ones you are referring to, except of course English.
I'm sure he's referring to western languages, which, like most of the ones you mentioned, are represented perfectly fine in good old 8-bit Latin-1 (not suprising, since the Latin alphabet is one of the things all western languages have in common).
I swear, every year, more and more science fiction becomes fact as we push the boundaries. When I see news like this, I realize how every day the real world comes closer to the vision of authors like Douglas Adams.
I simply use greylisting. After that removes 99.99% of the spam, I just don't see the need for any further measures like SpamAssassin or RBLs or whatever, it just wastes time at that point. Greylisting does all the real work.
SORBS has one useful list: the dial-up DNS blacklist (spare me the diatribes about being able to send mail from a dynamic address. I know the arguments, but the benefit doesn't outweigh the cost of the spam coming from that address space).
True. Now, if only someone actually had an accurate list of dynamic IP addresses, this would be a good strategy, but since neither SORBS nor anyone else actually has one, it gets rather annoying for those of us who get our email bounced or eaten because some idiot has their mailserver configured to bounce mail from our perfectly static IP addresses that happens to be on one of these highly inaccurate lists.
I've always been curious why more people don't use gas.
People are afraid the pilot light is going to go out and then their house will explode with the next spark.
Not saying it's a realistic reason, but seriously, a lot of people are just afraid of gas.