That reminds me of Calculus 101 and Dr. Spenceley's room. Dr. Spenceley had been the math department head for 30 years and had always been complaining that the chalk boards were too small, so when a new building was constructed, they made a class room just for him: it sat 50, had two doors and one small window, and all the rest of the space on all four walls were chalkboards.
Spenceley was a pretty good teacher, but still, it was calculus, and some people had been partying the night before... So eventually someone was snoring, leaned over against chalkboard on the side wall. Spenceley took an eraser and fired it 30 feet down that little ledge at the bottom of the chalkboard, smack into the guy and pushing a great cloud of chalkdust ahead.
He had an awake and alert class for the rest of the term.
there may not be as high a demand for software developers in the future. No, open source does not threaten the whole class of "software developers" at all. Most of them are now, and always have been, writing programs specifically for a non-software company. (The software is not for re-sale, and often you couldn't give them away). If they are riding on top of an open source platform rather than buying MS's proprietary OS + data base + etc., it seems like there would be more money left for the developers. The other issue is whether they are going to be more or less efficient by using open source -- if substantially less efficient, then MS doesn't have anything to worry about, and if more efficient, then Mundie's diatribes are like a buggy whip manufacturer asking for laws against horseless carriages...
Open source _does_ threaten some jobs, at companies that sell only software. But it adds more jobs at companies that sell hardware and use open source to provide the software part of the package. And this increases real wealth -- that is, actual gismos, not pieces of paper like Mundie's stock options.
You are both right. The sudden burst of fusion in the higher elements (helium to iron) releases both neutrinos and gamma rays in the core of the collapsing star. The neutrinos pass straight out at the speed of light. The gamma rays travel a few feet, are absorbed and re-emitted as somewhat lower power photons, repeating this many, many times and being shifted down to thermally-emitted visible light by the time they make it out of the star. So the neutrinos get a head start leaving the star because they pass through _the star's_ matter easily. Once they are out in space, light and neutrinos travel at the same speed. (Or, if neutrinos have a very tiny rest mass, they travel at just under the speed of light.)
And maybe that's the best reason to think that it didn't happen (or CNN fouled up the time scale, like they fouled up the distance to the next possible supernova): IIRC the fossil record does not show unexplained or sudden massive extinctions in land animals 2 million years ago. This was an ice age, so the climate was highly variable, and this did influence evolution by frequently changing the evolutionary pressures. This would have pushed evolution towards the more versatile types -- say a smart bipedal ape that can figure out how to survive when the climate keeps flipping back and forth between extremely wet and semi-desert every few generations.
Phytoplankton get some radiation shielding from the water, so a supernova that hit hard enough to kill 40% of them would have killed many more land species, and I don't recall anything like that. The big extinctions were either earlier (presumably when the Ice Age was starting) or later (when the bipedal apes started killing large animals with sharp flakes tied to sticks.) Especially, I don't recall any massive plant extinctions (land plants would be the most vulnerable) which aren't related to climate changes.
Note also that most humanoid fossils have been found in the Great Rift Valley, where Africa was being ripped apart 2 million years ago. Geological change might have accentuated the evolutionary pressure towards smart and adaptable. Or it may be that Australopithecus was evenly distributed all over Africa, but was generally smart enough to avoid the sudden burials that form most fossils. The Great Rift Valley had plenty of volcanic eruptions and flash floods, so the only way intelligence would have kept any species non-fossilized was by living somewhere else. It might explain a few things if the Leakeys are digging up the bones of the losers who had to live in the most undesirable real estate in the continent, rather than the more successful forms of early man...
There's quite a difference between 400 feet and 1,000 feet. Poetic license?
Big ships have to be extremely strong to handle the bending stresses caused by big waves in the deep ocean, and, and 400 feet may be about the outer limit attainable with wood. IIRC, at the height of the 19th century era of clipper ships, they never reached 400 feet. But these clipper ships had dozens of sails on 3 masts in a quite intricate rigging. Dividing the sails up that way helped keep them to manageable sizes.
A heavy-laden 400 foot ship with 9 masts, and a single lateen sail on each mast would be a really impressive sight, but it sounds like a handling nightmare to me. If the sails were big enough to provide any speed, they were enormous and the forces required to control them would have been far beyond human strength. How good were the Chinese at building capstans? And how many normal-sized junks did they send along as tugs and tenders for each monster ship?
Another poster later on says that these ships were known to history (although he isn't confirming the size). They were called "treasure ships" and were built to show off the Emperor's wealth and power to other nations. That is, impractically large ships loaded with gold and gems. I still don't believe 1,000 feet, but 400 feet is possible.
I do wonder: did they send several normal-sized ships along with each monster to act as tugs and tenders?
I took a world history course only two years ago in which I learned about the Chinese treasure ships. They were intended to be these massive, floating testements to the wealth and power of the Chinese civilization.
In other words, the treasure ships were mainly for show-off, like the Apollo moon landings. Once you've done it once, it's hard to see a reason to spend so much to do it again.
Except that I'm sure the treasure ships did reveal possible lucrative trade routes. Why didn't Chinese merchants follow and keep these routes open? My guess is that the new emperor was worried that new ideas and technology would come back along the trade routes and de-stabilize the empire. Also, Chinese traders tend to settle somewhere outside the emperor's (or chairman's, or whatever they call it now) influence, and ignore imperial decrees. You can't allow too much of that and still remain an absolute monarch of the kingdom at the center of the world... So, IIRC the emperors began restricting the size of ships, excluding foreign traders and taxing and regulating Chinese traders, and resolutely rejecting new technology whether foreign or invented at home, and so on until they'd put their country so far behind that the British could overthrow that dynasty just by giving a semi-barbarian tribe (the Manchus) a few cannon and muskets.
The car door lock is a lousy analogy, because it protects the purchaser, not GM. DRM protects the seller, and is nothing but a pain in the rear to the purchaser. Imagine having to call GM to re-activate your car key every time you get an oil change...
But there are two important lessons you can learn from car locks. One is that they aren't absolute security; anyone who bothers to spend a few hours learning how can steal any car in less than five minutes. The other is that cars are rarely stolen anyhow, because car thieves get caught and severely punished. Go after the thieves, don't cripple the product.
The Vikings never conquered Ireland. Not Vikings, Normans -- that is, Vikings that had learned to speak French, fight like "civilized" men (wearing armor, riding horses, and slaughtering systematically instead of haphazardly), and to claim that God supported them in their depredations. In the century after the Normans took England, they spread out everywhere that didn't meet them with equal ferocity, and that does include Ireland. AFAIK most of the Irish lords were replaced by Normans for a while. However, once they grabbed a piece of land for themselves, the Normans did not unite behind one king except in Normandy and England (several generations of Dukes and Kings had to make damned sure that unity was NOT voluntary), and without a central authority the Normans just melted into the Irish population over a couple of generations. This was apparently a far more peaceful process than the end of Norman rule in Sicily and Palestine...
The most obvious Norman influence remaining is in Irish names. You do know that the "Fitz" prefix so common is the Norman for "bastard son of"?
Correct, fishing and other boats do get caught in storms and blown clear across oceans, sometimes arriving with someone still alive on board. Japanese fishermen do sometimes fetch up on American shores, and it's quite likely that even in St Brendan's time Irish boats sometimes got blown clear to North America. It's a lot less likely that they ever made it home. OTOH, Lief Ericson was simply following the report of a storm-blown Norseman named Bjarni something, who spotted land but didn't land.
Thor Heyerdahl is a crackpot. That doesn't mean he is always wrong, but he is incapable of recognizing it when he is in error. OTOH, he's an interesting crackpot...
He sailed a balsa-wood raft, named Kon Tiki after a supposed Peruvian/Easter Islander (IIRC) legendary figure, from the coast of Peru to somewhere in Polynesia. (Yes, the raft had sails and keelboards, and Heyerdahl claims to have got the design from drawings by the first Spanish explorers on that coast.) If he was aiming at Easter Island, he missed, but certainly he showed that it was not impossible for ancient Peruvians to have reached Easter Island -- if only they had canned foods, water de-salinators, compass, sextant, chronometer, and a radio to get those weather reports. Seriously, part of his crew did live on native foods + fish and rainwater. Fishing was easy (the raft doesn't scare the fish, and it's so low often they'd come right aboard on the waves), the water supply was more iffy. His theory is that "Kon Tiki" and his people fled from losing a war in Peru by raft, and landed in Easter Island. It would have been damned dangerous to sail without the modern gear, but if they happened to aim right and the weather was reasonable chances are part of them would have survived. Not that this is any proof it really happened; AFAIK, the main support for this theory being that in Heyerdahl's interpretion of Peruvian legends Tiki sailed away, and Easter Island legends also contain a Tiki among the founders. This is roughly like finding evidence that one of Robert E. Lee's relatives sailed towards China and claiming that he must have founded the Lee family of China... And let's not get into the racist elements of Heyerdahl's hypothesis (Tiki was supposed to be white).
It's rather more likely that a Polynesian/Peruvian connection began the other way; storm-caught Polynesian outriggers and catamarans could easily have fetched up on the South American coast now and then. If the natives didn't kill them right away, they might even have formed a Polynesian colony in Peru for a while, and discovered Easter Island from there. This seems to me equally likely as finding Easter Island from any other Pacific island. And this would simply make "Tiki" a Polynesian chief who offended the Peruvians and had to sail away, if there is anything at all to Heyerdahl's interpretation of the legends.
Heyerdahl also tried to sail a ship made from papyrus reeds across the Atlantic, on the theory that ancient Egyptians built their ships this way and crossed the Atlantic. First time, it disintegrated in mid-ocean. It's certainly nice to be able to radio for rescue when your theories don't work out. 8-) He claimed he recognized the error he had made in putting the ship together and was going to try again, but I don't remember if he made it. According to him, one nice about the reed ship is that it's very flexible, so it doesn't have to endure high forces like a rigid ship, but does this make up for the fact that the ships material will come apart when it soaks up enough water?
This makes me suspect that the accepted formulae may be a bit off when it comes to these ships. I am not a naval architect, but I find the idea of 500+ foot wooden ocean-going ships quite dubious from a strength of materials standpoint. The problem is, the ocean has very big waves; even an aircraft carrier has times when one big wave is holding it up in the middle with both ends out of water, and this will alternate with both ends in waves and the middle hanging. Wooden structures just don't scale up in strength well, and I don't think the Chinese managed to build better than the best 19th century shipyards. Find the whole keel, and I'll believe it -- but if it's strong enough, I would think it was so thick and heavy as to make the ship unusable for cargo and too expensive to ever be built except by imperial decree. Written records would have to be carefully evaluated, to make sure that neither errors of measuring units nor poetic license had exaggerated the size.
While the competition between lords, kinglets, and city-states certainly helped Europe advance, my hypothesis is that the Black Plague in the 14th century actually kicked off industrialization and the age of exploration. It concentrated wealth (by inheritance) and it caused a considerable shortage of labor. I very much doubt that it's a coincidence that Europeans started using sailing ships much more just about the time the Plague killed most of the galley slaves. And although the ancient Egyptians had explored widely with what were basically large galleys, this was done with tax money. To keep the voyaging going, you have to make money off of trade, and it isn't profitable at longer distances if you've got to feed a lot of rowers to haul a small cargo. So although Lief Ericson could cross the atlantic in a big rowboat with one auxiliary sail, it took better sailing ships to make it profitable to keep going, and these weren't developed in the west until after the Plague. (I think the Chinese were capable of building good ships, but the next emperor became scared of the consequences of bringing in new ideas along with far-ranging trade, so the big ships were destroyed. This is where the competing petty countries of Europe comes in -- some rulers could get scared and pull back, but their neighbors would grab the new opportunities and surpass them.)
With all the ill effects of the industrial revolution, it has made the average 21st century westerner richer than a medieval king, and it seems to have started with some medieval blacksmith hooking up his bellows to a waterwheel -- maybe because the big dumb men he hired to pump the bellows had died of the plague. In any case, with the labor shortage following the plague, the larger iron-working shops began using waterpowered blowers. Originally this was just a replacement for the least skilled workers, but the new blowers could be much more powerful and this transformed iron-making within two centuries. The results of this first showed up in warfare (stronger armor and crossbows to penetrate it, then cannon, bigger cannon, and muskets in the hands of peasant levies that could barely afford iron spear-tips before), but it also gave butchers and barbers better blades, carpenters better saws and nails instead of pegs, etc. Additionally, the iron plants found ways of linking water power to raise and drop sledgehammers, reducing their need of big unskilled men for the early, crude stages of forging. This idea was then extended to run textile equipment, sawmills, etc. And finally, the need to locate at the waterpower led to larger shops and the first factories.
Exploration is one thing. Exploiting a discovery across an ocean is quite another. The Vikings had too many opportunities closer to home to leave very many of them interested in taking up farms in Newfoundland. (One group had already conquered Russia; another conquered a province of France, became Christians, then conquered England, Ireland, Sicily, Jerusalem,...) So they didn't get a big enough colony to fight off the indian tribes. There wasn't much chance they could get along with them. Lief Ericson's father had been run out of two countries for murdering his neighbors, and in America Lief couldn't even speak the neighbors' language before he started off by stealing their land...
So the Vikings might have ranged along the coast, and their fishermen might have landed there to dry cod for some centuries. There are also indications that English fishermen were taking cod from the Grand Banks well before Columbus sailed, and of course they would have noticed the nearby land. But in 1492, Europeans were finally becoming ready to cross an ocean and _stay_. It was no longer possible to loot the middle east under guise of a crusade. Looting each other led to early death far more often than to wealth. But now they had much improved sailing ships so they could go out and loot new lands...
Of course, those Englishmen who landed at Jamestown in the expectation of digging gold up on the beach, or stealing it from the Indians, were sorely disappointed. They had to turn farmers just to survive -- and then farming turned out to be quite lucrative, especially once explorers along the African coast found a solution to the labor problem...
stop the music industry from passing off copy-protected CDs as regular copyable CDs. This is just a case of enforcing existing laws fairly (rather than warped towards corporate content providers). The copy protected disks are NOT CD's according to Philips (which holds the trademark rights). Selling them as CD's thus violates the trademark. They won't play in everything which plays CD's; hence, either they are defective, or selling them as CD's is fraud.
But what we really, really don't need is yet another law written for one special case...
Passing contradictory laws is hardly the answer. Unless, of course, your real goal is to create a system where everyone is in violation of some law, and those who decide whom to prosecute have absolute power....
Pterodactyl skeletons are more like bats are they are like birds; their wings were stretched-out flaps of skin, rather than feathers. No way did they evolve into birds.
The closest thing to birds we have found so far are the oviraptor (a chicken-sized cousin of the velociraptor) or something similar. The skeleton is similar to a bird in some ways. (This similarity is far from conclusive though, I'll discuss that later.) Raptors were fast-running bipedal predators with long arms. To be as active as their skeletal form indicates, they were probably warm-blooded, and a chicken-sized warm-blooded animal needs either fur or feathers quite badly. Presumably it was feathers, since we know that fur evolved in a quadrupedal lineage. Some fossil oviraptors apparently died defending their nest of eggs -- birdlike behavior.
My hypothesis here is that the bird ancestor was a small fast down-covered warm-blooded long armed bipedal predator. Presumably the long arms were for catching bugs and small animals. If a larger predator came after it, it would run up a tree. Originally the feathers were just soft branching down for insulation, but it evolved larger stiffer feathers on the arms; these might have helped strain bugs out of the air, or given a little lift to jump higher after a butterfly, and get up the tree faster. Sometimes it would fall out of the tree, but larger feathers would slow the fall. Even larger feathers let it climb trees, jump off, and glide to catch more bugs. Flapping the proto-wings extended the glides...
The oviraptor fossils _almost_ fit the pre-gliding stage of this. The legs and hips are quite birdlike, aside from the hipbone also supporting a lizard-like tail. Other skeletal changes would have come later: losing the teeth because they are too heavy, hollow bones, losing the tail except for a stub to support steering feathers, breastbone & collarbone reshaped to support massive flight muscles.
However, there is one serious discrepancy. In birds, the first, second, and third fingers have become enormously elongated and form the bony stiffeners for the wings. (That is, compared to a human hand, the little and ring fingers are missing, and the thumb index, and middle fingers are stretched way out.) Raptors are also three-fingered, but it's the middle three that were retained. It's pretty much impossible to create a scenario where finger 1 would have been brought back and finger 4 eliminated. Unless the scientists are mistaken about raptor fingers, we'll have to look elsewhere for the bird ancestor.
Besides the issue of "how do you count what you haven't found yet", there is also considerable discrepancy in what different classifiers will call species or subspecies. The usual definition of species now is "will interbreed in the wild to produce viable and fertile offspring", but that sometimes conflicts with traditional species. (1) In the gulls, there are subspecies that interbreed with the subspecies to their east and west, but where the circle closed around the Artic Sea, two subspecies met and are too different to recognize each other as possible mates. (2) Apparently all the species of genus Canis (dogs, wolves, coyotes) can and sometimes do interbreed, although it's not entirely normal for dogs and wolves to _want_ to get that close; so is that one species with several subspecies, or 3-4 different species in North America alone? (3) In Europe, IIRC there is a bird, traditionally considered a single species, but which DNA testing shows to be five non-interbreeding species.
As we continue to collect more data, we're going to see many more of these borderline cases, and the "splitters" are going to count two or three times as many species as the "lumpers" in the well characterized populations.
Actually, most of the species are bacteria and other Prokaryotes. However, since these do not reproduce sexually, and do swap DNA even across dramatically different types (Kingdoms according to some classifiers), the definition of "species" is quite fuzzy. Given the ability of bacteria to evolve in hours, I'd be quite happy if we just had one of each Family living in captivity -- if that isn't enough genetic variety, just let them evolve for a few weeks.
Note that there is now a considerable controversy over whether the red wolf of the southeast US was a distinct species, a subspecies of the timber wolf, or just a timber wolf - coyote hybrid. By the time they started doing DNA testing, the red wolf was gone as a distinct population, the southeast population of wild canines was all coyotes and obvious coyote-wolf hybrids. (Coyotes will move into farms and suburbs, finding new food sources, while wolves rarely survive human intrusions.)
As a side note, 30 years ago I saw the entire Biology department of a small college clustered around a dissecting table, arguing about whether the critter on the table was a coyote hundreds of miles out of its known range, or just a mongrel dog. Alive, the behavior is quite distinct, but this animal had been shot by a nervous farmer. This was a few years before DNA, and apparently no one knew of a definite morphological difference...
In any modern modem, the UART is in the micro, so Rxd and Txd are "IO pin[s] on the microcontroller." There may or may not be other status pins which could be used to run LED's, but RXD and TXD are there and will obviously work to show when data is coming in and going out. So why not use them?
Yesterday I would have. Today -- I'd think about it... (embarrassed grin)
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That reminds me of Calculus 101 and Dr. Spenceley's room. Dr. Spenceley had been the math department head for 30 years and had always been complaining that the chalk boards were too small, so when a new building was constructed, they made a class room just for him: it sat 50, had two doors and one small window, and all the rest of the space on all four walls were chalkboards.
Spenceley was a pretty good teacher, but still, it was calculus, and some people had been partying the night before... So eventually someone was snoring, leaned over against chalkboard on the side wall. Spenceley took an eraser and fired it 30 feet down that little ledge at the bottom of the chalkboard, smack into the guy and pushing a great cloud of chalkdust ahead.
He had an awake and alert class for the rest of the term.
Animal cruelty is just plain wrong. Shoot a lawyer instead.
And the best part is, wooden guns won't trip the courthouse metal detectors. 8-)
there may not be as high a demand for software developers in the future. No, open source does not threaten the whole class of "software developers" at all. Most of them are now, and always have been, writing programs specifically for a non-software company. (The software is not for re-sale, and often you couldn't give them away). If they are riding on top of an open source platform rather than buying MS's proprietary OS + data base + etc., it seems like there would be more money left for the developers. The other issue is whether they are going to be more or less efficient by using open source -- if substantially less efficient, then MS doesn't have anything to worry about, and if more efficient, then Mundie's diatribes are like a buggy whip manufacturer asking for laws against horseless carriages...
Open source _does_ threaten some jobs, at companies that sell only software. But it adds more jobs at companies that sell hardware and use open source to provide the software part of the package. And this increases real wealth -- that is, actual gismos, not pieces of paper like Mundie's stock options.
You are both right. The sudden burst of fusion in the higher elements (helium to iron) releases both neutrinos and gamma rays in the core of the collapsing star. The neutrinos pass straight out at the speed of light. The gamma rays travel a few feet, are absorbed and re-emitted as somewhat lower power photons, repeating this many, many times and being shifted down to thermally-emitted visible light by the time they make it out of the star. So the neutrinos get a head start leaving the star because they pass through _the star's_ matter easily. Once they are out in space, light and neutrinos travel at the same speed. (Or, if neutrinos have a very tiny rest mass, they travel at just under the speed of light.)
And maybe that's the best reason to think that it didn't happen (or CNN fouled up the time scale, like they fouled up the distance to the next possible supernova): IIRC the fossil record does not show unexplained or sudden massive extinctions in land animals 2 million years ago. This was an ice age, so the climate was highly variable, and this did influence evolution by frequently changing the evolutionary pressures. This would have pushed evolution towards the more versatile types -- say a smart bipedal ape that can figure out how to survive when the climate keeps flipping back and forth between extremely wet and semi-desert every few generations.
Phytoplankton get some radiation shielding from the water, so a supernova that hit hard enough to kill 40% of them would have killed many more land species, and I don't recall anything like that. The big extinctions were either earlier (presumably when the Ice Age was starting) or later (when the bipedal apes started killing large animals with sharp flakes tied to sticks.) Especially, I don't recall any massive plant extinctions (land plants would be the most vulnerable) which aren't related to climate changes.
Note also that most humanoid fossils have been found in the Great Rift Valley, where Africa was being ripped apart 2 million years ago. Geological change might have accentuated the evolutionary pressure towards smart and adaptable. Or it may be that Australopithecus was evenly distributed all over Africa, but was generally smart enough to avoid the sudden burials that form most fossils. The Great Rift Valley had plenty of volcanic eruptions and flash floods, so the only way intelligence would have kept any species non-fossilized was by living somewhere else. It might explain a few things if the Leakeys are digging up the bones of the losers who had to live in the most undesirable real estate in the continent, rather than the more successful forms of early man...
There's quite a difference between 400 feet and 1,000 feet. Poetic license?
Big ships have to be extremely strong to handle the bending stresses caused by big waves in the deep ocean, and, and 400 feet may be about the outer limit attainable with wood. IIRC, at the height of the 19th century era of clipper ships, they never reached 400 feet. But these clipper ships had dozens of sails on 3 masts in a quite intricate rigging. Dividing the sails up that way helped keep them to manageable sizes.
A heavy-laden 400 foot ship with 9 masts, and a single lateen sail on each mast would be a really impressive sight, but it sounds like a handling nightmare to me. If the sails were big enough to provide any speed, they were enormous and the forces required to control them would have been far beyond human strength. How good were the Chinese at building capstans? And how many normal-sized junks did they send along as tugs and tenders for each monster ship?
Another poster later on says that these ships were known to history (although he isn't confirming the size). They were called "treasure ships" and were built to show off the Emperor's wealth and power to other nations. That is, impractically large ships loaded with gold and gems. I still don't believe 1,000 feet, but 400 feet is possible.
I do wonder: did they send several normal-sized ships along with each monster to act as tugs and tenders?
The Vikings did tell everyone, but they were speaking Norse so no one understood them. Not to mention that they killed most of the people they met...
8-)
I took a world history course only two years ago in which I learned about the Chinese treasure ships. They were intended to be these massive, floating testements to the wealth and power of the Chinese civilization.
In other words, the treasure ships were mainly for show-off, like the Apollo moon landings. Once you've done it once, it's hard to see a reason to spend so much to do it again.
Except that I'm sure the treasure ships did reveal possible lucrative trade routes. Why didn't Chinese merchants follow and keep these routes open? My guess is that the new emperor was worried that new ideas and technology would come back along the trade routes and de-stabilize the empire. Also, Chinese traders tend to settle somewhere outside the emperor's (or chairman's, or whatever they call it now) influence, and ignore imperial decrees. You can't allow too much of that and still remain an absolute monarch of the kingdom at the center of the world... So, IIRC the emperors began restricting the size of ships, excluding foreign traders and taxing and regulating Chinese traders, and resolutely rejecting new technology whether foreign or invented at home, and so on until they'd put their country so far behind that the British could overthrow that dynasty just by giving a semi-barbarian tribe (the Manchus) a few cannon and muskets.
Just exactly does she do that? I don't believe the native americans chipped their birth certificates into stone...
The car door lock is a lousy analogy, because it protects the purchaser, not GM. DRM protects the seller, and is nothing but a pain in the rear to the purchaser. Imagine having to call GM to re-activate your car key every time you get an oil change...
But there are two important lessons you can learn from car locks. One is that they aren't absolute security; anyone who bothers to spend a few hours learning how can steal any car in less than five minutes. The other is that cars are rarely stolen anyhow, because car thieves get caught and severely punished. Go after the thieves, don't cripple the product.
The Vikings never conquered Ireland. Not Vikings, Normans -- that is, Vikings that had learned to speak French, fight like "civilized" men (wearing armor, riding horses, and slaughtering systematically instead of haphazardly), and to claim that God supported them in their depredations. In the century after the Normans took England, they spread out everywhere that didn't meet them with equal ferocity, and that does include Ireland. AFAIK most of the Irish lords were replaced by Normans for a while. However, once they grabbed a piece of land for themselves, the Normans did not unite behind one king except in Normandy and England (several generations of Dukes and Kings had to make damned sure that unity was NOT voluntary), and without a central authority the Normans just melted into the Irish population over a couple of generations. This was apparently a far more peaceful process than the end of Norman rule in Sicily and Palestine...
The most obvious Norman influence remaining is in Irish names. You do know that the "Fitz" prefix so common is the Norman for "bastard son of"?
Correct, fishing and other boats do get caught in storms and blown clear across oceans, sometimes arriving with someone still alive on board. Japanese fishermen do sometimes fetch up on American shores, and it's quite likely that even in St Brendan's time Irish boats sometimes got blown clear to North America. It's a lot less likely that they ever made it home. OTOH, Lief Ericson was simply following the report of a storm-blown Norseman named Bjarni something, who spotted land but didn't land.
Thor Heyerdahl is a crackpot. That doesn't mean he is always wrong, but he is incapable of recognizing it when he is in error. OTOH, he's an interesting crackpot...
He sailed a balsa-wood raft, named Kon Tiki after a supposed Peruvian/Easter Islander (IIRC) legendary figure, from the coast of Peru to somewhere in Polynesia. (Yes, the raft had sails and keelboards, and Heyerdahl claims to have got the design from drawings by the first Spanish explorers on that coast.) If he was aiming at Easter Island, he missed, but certainly he showed that it was not impossible for ancient Peruvians to have reached Easter Island -- if only they had canned foods, water de-salinators, compass, sextant, chronometer, and a radio to get those weather reports. Seriously, part of his crew did live on native foods + fish and rainwater. Fishing was easy (the raft doesn't scare the fish, and it's so low often they'd come right aboard on the waves), the water supply was more iffy. His theory is that "Kon Tiki" and his people fled from losing a war in Peru by raft, and landed in Easter Island. It would have been damned dangerous to sail without the modern gear, but if they happened to aim right and the weather was reasonable chances are part of them would have survived. Not that this is any proof it really happened; AFAIK, the main support for this theory being that in Heyerdahl's interpretion of Peruvian legends Tiki sailed away, and Easter Island legends also contain a Tiki among the founders. This is roughly like finding evidence that one of Robert E. Lee's relatives sailed towards China and claiming that he must have founded the Lee family of China... And let's not get into the racist elements of Heyerdahl's hypothesis (Tiki was supposed to be white).
It's rather more likely that a Polynesian/Peruvian connection began the other way; storm-caught Polynesian outriggers and catamarans could easily have fetched up on the South American coast now and then. If the natives didn't kill them right away, they might even have formed a Polynesian colony in Peru for a while, and discovered Easter Island from there. This seems to me equally likely as finding Easter Island from any other Pacific island. And this would simply make "Tiki" a Polynesian chief who offended the Peruvians and had to sail away, if there is anything at all to Heyerdahl's interpretation of the legends.
Heyerdahl also tried to sail a ship made from papyrus reeds across the Atlantic, on the theory that ancient Egyptians built their ships this way and crossed the Atlantic. First time, it disintegrated in mid-ocean. It's certainly nice to be able to radio for rescue when your theories don't work out. 8-) He claimed he recognized the error he had made in putting the ship together and was going to try again, but I don't remember if he made it. According to him, one nice about the reed ship is that it's very flexible, so it doesn't have to endure high forces like a rigid ship, but does this make up for the fact that the ships material will come apart when it soaks up enough water?
This makes me suspect that the accepted formulae may be a bit off when it comes to these ships. I am not a naval architect, but I find the idea of 500+ foot wooden ocean-going ships quite dubious from a strength of materials standpoint. The problem is, the ocean has very big waves; even an aircraft carrier has times when one big wave is holding it up in the middle with both ends out of water, and this will alternate with both ends in waves and the middle hanging. Wooden structures just don't scale up in strength well, and I don't think the Chinese managed to build better than the best 19th century shipyards. Find the whole keel, and I'll believe it -- but if it's strong enough, I would think it was so thick and heavy as to make the ship unusable for cargo and too expensive to ever be built except by imperial decree. Written records would have to be carefully evaluated, to make sure that neither errors of measuring units nor poetic license had exaggerated the size.
While the competition between lords, kinglets, and city-states certainly helped Europe advance, my hypothesis is that the Black Plague in the 14th century actually kicked off industrialization and the age of exploration. It concentrated wealth (by inheritance) and it caused a considerable shortage of labor. I very much doubt that it's a coincidence that Europeans started using sailing ships much more just about the time the Plague killed most of the galley slaves. And although the ancient Egyptians had explored widely with what were basically large galleys, this was done with tax money. To keep the voyaging going, you have to make money off of trade, and it isn't profitable at longer distances if you've got to feed a lot of rowers to haul a small cargo. So although Lief Ericson could cross the atlantic in a big rowboat with one auxiliary sail, it took better sailing ships to make it profitable to keep going, and these weren't developed in the west until after the Plague. (I think the Chinese were capable of building good ships, but the next emperor became scared of the consequences of bringing in new ideas along with far-ranging trade, so the big ships were destroyed. This is where the competing petty countries of Europe comes in -- some rulers could get scared and pull back, but their neighbors would grab the new opportunities and surpass them.)
With all the ill effects of the industrial revolution, it has made the average 21st century westerner richer than a medieval king, and it seems to have started with some medieval blacksmith hooking up his bellows to a waterwheel -- maybe because the big dumb men he hired to pump the bellows had died of the plague.
In any case, with the labor shortage following the plague, the larger iron-working shops began using waterpowered blowers. Originally this was just a replacement for the least skilled workers, but the new blowers could be much more powerful and this transformed iron-making within two centuries. The results of this first showed up in warfare (stronger armor and crossbows to penetrate it, then cannon, bigger cannon, and muskets in the hands of peasant levies that could barely afford iron spear-tips before), but it also gave butchers and barbers better blades, carpenters better saws and nails instead of pegs, etc. Additionally, the iron plants found ways of linking water power to raise and drop sledgehammers, reducing their need of big unskilled men for the early, crude stages of forging. This idea was then extended to run textile equipment, sawmills, etc. And finally, the need to locate at the waterpower led to larger shops and the first factories.
Exploration is one thing. Exploiting a discovery across an ocean is quite another. The Vikings had too many opportunities closer to home to leave very many of them interested in taking up farms in Newfoundland. (One group had already conquered Russia; another conquered a province of France, became Christians, then conquered England, Ireland, Sicily, Jerusalem, ...) So they didn't get a big enough colony to fight off the indian tribes. There wasn't much chance they could get along with them. Lief Ericson's father had been run out of two countries for murdering his neighbors, and in America Lief couldn't even speak the neighbors' language before he started off by stealing their land...
So the Vikings might have ranged along the coast, and their fishermen might have landed there to dry cod for some centuries. There are also indications that English fishermen were taking cod from the Grand Banks well before Columbus sailed, and of course they would have noticed the nearby land. But in 1492, Europeans were finally becoming ready to cross an ocean and _stay_. It was no longer possible to loot the middle east under guise of a crusade. Looting each other led to early death far more often than to wealth. But now they had much improved sailing ships so they could go out and loot new lands...
Of course, those Englishmen who landed at Jamestown in the expectation of digging gold up on the beach, or stealing it from the Indians, were sorely disappointed. They had to turn farmers just to survive -- and then farming turned out to be quite lucrative, especially once explorers along the African coast found a solution to the labor problem...
if a company wants copyright protection they have to let the consumer have full access to the content for the purpose of space and time shifting.
Great suggestion!
stop the music industry from passing off copy-protected CDs as regular copyable CDs. This is just a case of enforcing existing laws fairly (rather than warped towards corporate content providers). The copy protected disks are NOT CD's according to Philips (which holds the trademark rights). Selling them as CD's thus violates the trademark. They won't play in everything which plays CD's; hence, either they are defective, or selling them as CD's is fraud.
But what we really, really don't need is yet another law written for one special case...
Passing contradictory laws is hardly the answer. Unless, of course, your real goal is to create a system where everyone is in violation of some law, and those who decide whom to prosecute have absolute power....
Pterodactyl skeletons are more like bats are they are like birds; their wings were stretched-out flaps of skin, rather than feathers. No way did they evolve into birds.
The closest thing to birds we have found so far are the oviraptor (a chicken-sized cousin of the velociraptor) or something similar. The skeleton is similar to a bird in some ways. (This similarity is far from conclusive though, I'll discuss that later.) Raptors were fast-running bipedal predators with long arms. To be as active as their skeletal form indicates, they were probably warm-blooded, and a chicken-sized warm-blooded animal needs either fur or feathers quite badly. Presumably it was feathers, since we know that fur evolved in a quadrupedal lineage. Some fossil oviraptors apparently died defending their nest of eggs -- birdlike behavior.
My hypothesis here is that the bird ancestor was a small fast down-covered warm-blooded long armed bipedal predator. Presumably the long arms were for catching bugs and small animals. If a larger predator came after it, it would run up a tree. Originally the feathers were just soft branching down for insulation, but it evolved larger stiffer feathers on the arms; these might have helped strain bugs out of the air, or given a little lift to jump higher after a butterfly, and get up the tree faster. Sometimes it would fall out of the tree, but larger feathers would slow the fall. Even larger feathers let it climb trees, jump off, and glide to catch more bugs. Flapping the proto-wings extended the glides...
The oviraptor fossils _almost_ fit the pre-gliding stage of this. The legs and hips are quite birdlike, aside from the hipbone also supporting a lizard-like tail. Other skeletal changes would have come later: losing the teeth because they are too heavy, hollow bones, losing the tail except for a stub to support steering feathers, breastbone & collarbone reshaped to support massive flight muscles.
However, there is one serious discrepancy. In birds, the first, second, and third fingers have become enormously elongated and form the bony stiffeners for the wings. (That is, compared to a human hand, the little and ring fingers are missing, and the thumb index, and middle fingers are stretched way out.) Raptors are also three-fingered, but it's the middle three that were retained. It's pretty much impossible to create a scenario where finger 1 would have been brought back and finger 4 eliminated. Unless the scientists are mistaken about raptor fingers, we'll have to look elsewhere for the bird ancestor.
Besides the issue of "how do you count what you haven't found yet", there is also considerable discrepancy in what different classifiers will call species or subspecies. The usual definition of species now is "will interbreed in the wild to produce viable and fertile offspring", but that sometimes conflicts with traditional species. (1) In the gulls, there are subspecies that interbreed with the subspecies to their east and west, but where the circle closed around the Artic Sea, two subspecies met and are too different to recognize each other as possible mates. (2) Apparently all the species of genus Canis (dogs, wolves, coyotes) can and sometimes do interbreed, although it's not entirely normal for dogs and wolves to _want_ to get that close; so is that one species with several subspecies, or 3-4 different species in North America alone? (3) In Europe, IIRC there is a bird, traditionally considered a single species, but which DNA testing shows to be five non-interbreeding species.
As we continue to collect more data, we're going to see many more of these borderline cases, and the "splitters" are going to count two or three times as many species as the "lumpers" in the well characterized populations.
Actually, most of the species are bacteria and other Prokaryotes. However, since these do not reproduce sexually, and do swap DNA even across dramatically different types (Kingdoms according to some classifiers), the definition of "species" is quite fuzzy. Given the ability of bacteria to evolve in hours, I'd be quite happy if we just had one of each Family living in captivity -- if that isn't enough genetic variety, just let them evolve for a few weeks.
Note that there is now a considerable controversy over whether the red wolf of the southeast US was a distinct species, a subspecies of the timber wolf, or just a timber wolf - coyote hybrid. By the time they started doing DNA testing, the red wolf was gone as a distinct population, the southeast population of wild canines was all coyotes and obvious coyote-wolf hybrids. (Coyotes will move into farms and suburbs, finding new food sources, while wolves rarely survive human intrusions.)
As a side note, 30 years ago I saw the entire Biology department of a small college clustered around a dissecting table, arguing about whether the critter on the table was a coyote hundreds of miles out of its known range, or just a mongrel dog. Alive, the behavior is quite distinct, but this animal had been shot by a nervous farmer. This was a few years before DNA, and apparently no one knew of a definite morphological difference...
At the sentencing hearing for Leroy Jones, convicted of grand theft auto, reckless driving, and driving under the influence of crack:
Prosecutor: "Your honor, because the case is so weak, we want to plea bargain this down to speeding and fine him $50."
Judge: "What do you mean the case is weak, he's been CONVICTED already."
In any modern modem, the UART is in the micro, so Rxd and Txd are "IO pin[s] on the microcontroller." There may or may not be other status pins which could be used to run LED's, but RXD and TXD are there and will obviously work to show when data is coming in and going out. So why not use them?
Yesterday I would have. Today -- I'd think about it... (embarrassed grin)