But if it became extinct in the last 100 or 150 years, chances are likely that it was humans
In this case you can ring up the people involved in the extinction and ask them to tell you stories about trapping the creatures as youngsters - but be careful to check the time difference. Not many people in their nineties have email, but you never know.
1. Is the animal extinct today due to human interference?
Poison baits and modern rifles - I'd say that is a yes.
2. Can the animal re-establish itself in todays ecology?
It was doing OK before the poison baits and bullets, and about the only thing that has changed is that it would have to compete with a small number of foxes and some feral dogs. It would probably eat the feral cats for breakfast (as well as sheep - which is why it was made to disappear in the first place).
3. Is it practical to re-introduce the animal back into the wild?
That depends on how many can be produced, and political hassles like keeping them away from the sheep and small children. There's a lot of preserved specimens of these critters, including feotuses. Genetic diversity is something I don't know much about - hampsters and dog breeding broke all of the rules I've heard of about the size of a gene pool, it's more complex than X individuals to prevent inbreeding.
This one certainly did - although I would say incredibly shortsighted instead of evil.
There are still occasional sightings of dog-like critters where the Thylacine roamed, but they are probably foxes.
The recently deceased David Fleay was particularly proud of, among other things, breeding platypus and having a big scar on his bum from when he was bitten by a Thylacine.
A new solution may only take a single idea, and many seemingly obvious fixes take an individual to implement it.
An example is automotive cooling systems. For the majority of the last century to water flowed through in the wrong direction. The cold water came in through where the oil was kept, then the warmed water flowed around the cylinders where everything is hot. Now you want your oil to be nice and warm so that it will flow well and cover everything, and you want the rest of the engine to be kept cool so that pistons don't get stuck and other high temperature nastyness. The reason the water flowed the way it did was simply because that was the way water flowed with gravity feed, but for nearly a century after the water pump was introduced into the system the water flowed the wrong way.
There is always room for innovation. Even very simple systems can sometimes do with a tweak. The role of the lone inventor is not over, as shown by such people as the guy in Thailand that is making spherical fire extinguisers that you operate by rolling them into a fire.
Francis Ford Coppola *might* be able to turn Ender's Game into a good movie. I have strong doubts that any other popular Hollywood director could.
It's just as well that they are not using a Hollywood director then - they are using Wolfgang Peterson. Sorry guys, but Hollywood has hit a low point, probably due to creative control by uncreative people that want to rip off writers, directors, the public, the IRS etc, while being more interested in copying what the other studios are doing or remaking sitcoms than making something watchable. Most of the best of the recent "Hollywood" productions are made somewhere else with Hollywood money (eg.LOTR, Matrix, Ep2), and have managed to escape whatever it is that stifles Hollywood movies.
Lucas and Speilberg didn't get to where they are by being good directors (but I'm not saying they are bad directors), they got there by playing the Hollywood game. Even after "Alien", Sigorney Weaver had to go through embarassing auditions that closely resembled a casting couch (for her role as a businesswoman in the film "Working Girl"). Hollywood isn't about movies anymore, it's just about greed and profit. Enough ranting, I'm sure someone will post good counter-examples to give me hope. Strangely, a lot of the best Hollywood films I've seen lately have been about why Hollywood is bad (Timecode, Jay & Silent Bob, etc).
Ok - more ranting. At least while Hollywood is a corrupt cesspool it lets other countries profit by making the movies there. People in the USA shouldn't worry, it's not as if any taxes would be paid to the USA, and it's not as if long term jobs would go to those that are not relatives, cronies or willing to humiliate themselves for a chance anyway.
So therefore it's not hard to guess the cause of Red Hat / Raster split - Red Hat wanted a functioning, lightweight WM to put behind GNOME so it could sell it to businesses and normal users
RedHat (or a person who was there at the time and is unlikely to still have a job) wanted a window manager that looked like win* with a bit of fvwm thrown in so that win* users could use their distribution easily from day one - not a bad goal really. E with the right theme gave them that almost from the first day Raster worked there. Raster then proceeded to put stuff into E that would not be used in that cut down theme. One of Rasters superiors (who is probably no longer at RedHat) who was not particularly skilled in the use of email flamed Raster and his "posse" (simply being an unprofessional way of refering to the unpaid developers) for putting stuff in in their spare time which wasn't in the business plan. Raster was not supposed to get the email, but technical illitracy will out - and eventually raster went off to work somewhere else with different management. Google will tell you more. The other window manager was used simple becuase it was the window manager for gnome.
Enlightenment was briefly part of gnome, but the dependencies and politics killed that. At that point E ran on a variety of platforms, and the gnome people of the time didn't have any short term plans to move off x86 hardware and linux. Raster et al more or less had a choice between personally porting the rapidly moving target of the gimp tool kit (gtk) to Solaris etc, or just keeping the window manager seperate. Gnome at the time was sadly dominated by politics over functionality, but thankfully moved on to where it is now. There were actually arguments at the time over whether it should ever be ported to any kind of commercial OS for idealogical reasons. In hindsight, the Enlightenment project was better off without that, and other themed window managers were developed to work with gnome and kde. E v0.16 of course works with both.
E was always about "kewl fx" as well as funtionality anyway - the alternatives were fvwm (not fvwm2) which looked pretty horrible and was time consuming to configure, and windowmaker, which had a few cool features like the dock.
I wouldn't have called Enlightenment a desktop shell (E16) at the time that GNOME was being released
That, I believe, is the long range plan. E at the time was simply a window manager with icons, menus, and a pager. The filemanager etc comes seperately, as whatever one you pick from kde, gnome or myriads of unconnected projects.
simply because E was a big bloated monster that wanted to own the desktop
Oh well - yet another person that didn't realise that the default themes were designed to show off everything that the window manager could do. E was a big bloated monster because you configured it that way I suspect. Did you have sixteen desktops, each with a different background pic at 1280x1024, 32 bit colour? Did you use themes with lots of oddly shaped window borders with transparent bits? What about the memory settings?
I've used the current stable release of E very happily on a pentium 75 with a crap graphics card, just by using a fairly clean theme (the one that looks like an IRIX desktop), using the same background for all desktops, and turning off the animations. The machine very happily ran X and E, and it worked very well since everything that required real grunt was running on an SGI box in the next building (and no folks, a GHz Intel box would not have had enough grunt).
Releasing patches often would give the average users the idea that "this software is crap, they keep finding problems with it, that little Updates thingie keeps popping up and annoying me, why didn't they get it right the first time?"
People don't think that about games and video drivers, they just keep on patching. Perceptions change. Since people think rebooting more than once a day, let alone once a month is acceptable, why won't they accept patching once a month as being acceptable?
In the context of system administrators who forget to patch their boxes
MS control the education of people that become and remain sysadmins - I'm sure everyone here has heard of the fake engineering degree called the MSCE for example. MS can add a patch often mindset just by adding it to their courses, and making it so that if you don't answer questions on this and other important security questions you fail. If MS changes their security policy for the better, they can thus use their certification branch to their benefit (less bad publicity since things like code red wouldn't spread as far), and ultimately in this case to the benefit of anyone on the net. It's been made a professional qualification, so lets get them acting as professionals.
I bet the next thing will be an MS fake architecture degree!
Special encryption software for the financial benefit of Hollywood enshrined in legislation? Perhaps Hollywood should start paying some tax instead of dodging it, sometimes entirely (eg. Forrest Gump) before they have the hide to try and push legislation like this through.
In contrast, Pinochet stepped down in favor of free elections, and surrendered power peacably when he lost the elections. Again, which of these two is `democratic'?
Somehow I don't see an armed overthrow and the systematic killing or imprisonment and torture of your political opposition as particularly democratic. Comparisons to Allende are irrelevent, we're rating Pinochet on a scale of evil to beneign.
The writer of the original story is just showing he's a bad journalist by drawing comparisons that he doesn't have a clue about - there's no point arguing about who is the meanest in the world. There's no point speaking up Pinochet just because the US backed him at the start - mistakes happen, the US used to like Saddam Hussain after all and no-one is calling him a good guy in the west now.
The Matrix was a really great movie and I loved the fact that it just popped up unhyped..
There was hype - just not Blair Witch or Episode I hype. The preview web page had some great stuff on it (eg. other stories set in the matrix), and the original trailer blew me away. I still have it on my hard drive - even after deleting numerous games. I think it showed the whole feel of the story better than the movie as a whole did - but watching a whole movie at that pace would be as mind blowing as watching Run Lola Run on fast forward. I hope the new movie is as good a fantasy movie as the last.
At least now all of those people that bitch about X have something better to play with now than SVGAlib. Personally I like X, but I'm probably biased since I like to run stuff across networks. something like this may actually work on a large scale if qt and gtk support is added. How many apps actually talk to X directly?
Two is quite enough, as evidenced by the technological advances cable companies
Notice the key word "companies" implying more than one. I suspect that there are somewhat more than two cable television providers in the USA. In Australia there are two, but in a few months one will simply be reselling services from the other.
With no true competition, there is no motivation.
I suspect the point the previous poster is making is that if you can only buy your service from one provider then there will be no competition. Then it comes down to a choice as to whether you make a private orginisation fat and steadily less efficient, or whether you make a government organisation that you can influence with your vote fat and steadily less efficient.
This is simply false. Legally enforced government monopolies have zero incentive to compete. The whole point of privatization is to increase competition
The point in this case is that it is going from a government owned monopoly to a privately owned monopoly. When the government owns it competition of a kind and innovation can be forced. When the government doesn't, the monopoly just sits there and tries to work out how much it's consumers will pay for a steadily diminising service. At least that looks like the way it is going in Australia.
assuming it is done correctly, i.e. no market-splitting or corruption, which I believe was a major problem in the former USSR
I understand now, perhaps privitisation in Australia is being carried out to the USSR model! We based our power industry restructure on the Californian model (I kid you not!) in 1996, and even then it was clear that there were problems with the way things were done in the Californian power industry.
This type of economic illiteracy is bad enough coming from a normal poster, but even worse coming from the author of the article
The situation is simply different to the US situation. Economics has almost nothing to do with the way privatisation is being done in Australia - it's all about political expediency, and it's expediant to keep the monopolies intact and just sell them to specific interested parties, not even opening things up for bidding (eg. a government run finance group that was sold for less than a years profit to a particular bank - no other bank got a chance to bid). There is little chance of outside competition coming in, in most cases they will just get driven out of business by large groups that can afford to undercut them until they go away.
Considering that the initial installion charge to the consumer when ADSL is installed is more than the cost of a wireless card, it may be the way to go. The real cost of the hardware is immaterial to the consumer, it's the amount charged to the consumer that matters. This may be the way out of the Telstra broadband monopoly in most areas.
The costs to the service provider may also be significantly less than using the full Telstra ADSL or ISDN service. In some areas they may only need to put an antenna on the roof of their office and pay Telstra for the connection to the backbone (instead of having to also rent wires to their customers).
I'm amazed by the number of people in Australia who ditch their ISP due to poor quality connections, and then have the same problem with the next ISP - and don't realise that everything is coming down the same wire controlled by the same telecommunications company.
To all those who are confused as to who Telstra is, it is the formerly government owned, half privatised telecommunications company that owns most of the communications in Australia. The remainder is owned by Optus/Singtel, a mainly Singapore government owned telecommunications company, which has a few lines, provides cable TV and broadband to a few small areas and has a mobile phone network. These half privatised companies have most of the worst aspects of both goverment (a we rule you attitude) and private enterprise (more charges for less service all of the time). The way they are heading, full privatisation will turn them into monsters that make the worst multinational mining corporations look like a charities. Therefore, anything that increases the choice here is good.
All the other telecommunications companies mainly just rent space on those two networks.
Emotive history lessons aside, I think it is a very good thing to be able to give to pilot huge amounts of well presented info. the cheaper the baseline is, the better the cutting edge will be, since military budgets are not infinite either. The incident I mentioned was to highlight that even with a variety of checks and balances, pilots sometimes disobey orders and fire at unknown targets in situations where there is no hostile threat to an aircraft. The info was all there, but was not presented to the pilots, only to the ground control officer that they should have contacted. Better display of position information may have solved the entire problem.
The Pentagon's handling of it was definitely a black mark on America.
It was a black mark on the people involved, who invoked "secret" status just to cover themselves. The British Ministry of Defence actually knew the names of the pilots (from radio logs) but refused to disclose them to the inquest. Ultimately the responsibility for the rather botched cover up lay with the British Ministry of Defence and Dick Cheney, then minister of defence under George Bush Snr, who said there was no way that he was going to make the pilots available for a "media circus". It looks like my comment about the chain of command was incorrect, since he was in it.
The inquest recommended that no joint military actions ever be taken with the USA until an agreement was made that the USA will co-operate with inquests in Britain. No such agreement was made with Britan or any other allies of the USA, but the reaction to September 11 is more important.
That's when the fur flies! The flight crew of an AWACS was court martialled when some US servicemen died in a friendly fire incident, but the other incidents were not seen as important enough for disiplinary action (as far as the public knows - but if there was some it most likely would have been announced) because only allies were killed.
The military has its own share of idiots like any organisation
Some of the idiots are a bit too high in the chain of command - or the more likely situation is that incidents like this are "political" and the chain of command is compromised by elected officials that should mind their own business. Seperation of powers is not just there to keep polititions from overuling judges or telling juries what to do.
A very senior US military spokesman blamed a maverick missile attack on some british tanks behind the lines on a variety of factors - including bad weather conditions (the reality was that it was a warm sunny day with zero humidity and very good visability), and "the extreme differences in the languges of the forces". The reality about the language would be that anyone that is flying an A10 for the USA would be a fluent english speaker - so the "Ebonics?" comment could be better phrased as "who do you think you're fooling by talking about language differences - it's not as if they are going to be talking in ebonics". The A10 pilots screwed up, but their bosses really screwed up, and showed what they personally thought of their military allies.
But do us all a favor and keep the racist crap on your side of the Atlantic.
Maybe I've missed something here, but from where I am I've heard ebonics is some sort of pigin spanish/english mix that was proposed to be taught in schools in parts of California. What has racism got to do with it? If the schools haven't got their shit together enough to teach the kids english in an english speaking country then those kids are going to be screwed when they start looking for work.
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There are still occasional sightings of dog-like critters where the Thylacine roamed, but they are probably foxes.
The recently deceased David Fleay was particularly proud of, among other things, breeding platypus and having a big scar on his bum from when he was bitten by a Thylacine.
Obviously with IPv7 we'll just have to ask lain to send us to the right site.
An example is automotive cooling systems. For the majority of the last century to water flowed through in the wrong direction. The cold water came in through where the oil was kept, then the warmed water flowed around the cylinders where everything is hot. Now you want your oil to be nice and warm so that it will flow well and cover everything, and you want the rest of the engine to be kept cool so that pistons don't get stuck and other high temperature nastyness. The reason the water flowed the way it did was simply because that was the way water flowed with gravity feed, but for nearly a century after the water pump was introduced into the system the water flowed the wrong way.
There is always room for innovation. Even very simple systems can sometimes do with a tweak. The role of the lone inventor is not over, as shown by such people as the guy in Thailand that is making spherical fire extinguisers that you operate by rolling them into a fire.
Lucas and Speilberg didn't get to where they are by being good directors (but I'm not saying they are bad directors), they got there by playing the Hollywood game. Even after "Alien", Sigorney Weaver had to go through embarassing auditions that closely resembled a casting couch (for her role as a businesswoman in the film "Working Girl"). Hollywood isn't about movies anymore, it's just about greed and profit. Enough ranting, I'm sure someone will post good counter-examples to give me hope. Strangely, a lot of the best Hollywood films I've seen lately have been about why Hollywood is bad (Timecode, Jay & Silent Bob, etc).
Ok - more ranting. At least while Hollywood is a corrupt cesspool it lets other countries profit by making the movies there. People in the USA shouldn't worry, it's not as if any taxes would be paid to the USA, and it's not as if long term jobs would go to those that are not relatives, cronies or willing to humiliate themselves for a chance anyway.
Impossible? Then use animation.
And here Sir, on this diagram we see that the landing gear on the Iranian jet is lowered by a water sheep - er, hydraulic ram.
Enlightenment was briefly part of gnome, but the dependencies and politics killed that. At that point E ran on a variety of platforms, and the gnome people of the time didn't have any short term plans to move off x86 hardware and linux. Raster et al more or less had a choice between personally porting the rapidly moving target of the gimp tool kit (gtk) to Solaris etc, or just keeping the window manager seperate. Gnome at the time was sadly dominated by politics over functionality, but thankfully moved on to where it is now. There were actually arguments at the time over whether it should ever be ported to any kind of commercial OS for idealogical reasons. In hindsight, the Enlightenment project was better off without that, and other themed window managers were developed to work with gnome and kde. E v0.16 of course works with both.
E was always about "kewl fx" as well as funtionality anyway - the alternatives were fvwm (not fvwm2) which looked pretty horrible and was time consuming to configure, and windowmaker, which had a few cool features like the dock.
That, I believe, is the long range plan. E at the time was simply a window manager with icons, menus, and a pager. The filemanager etc comes seperately, as whatever one you pick from kde, gnome or myriads of unconnected projects.I've used the current stable release of E very happily on a pentium 75 with a crap graphics card, just by using a fairly clean theme (the one that looks like an IRIX desktop), using the same background for all desktops, and turning off the animations. The machine very happily ran X and E, and it worked very well since everything that required real grunt was running on an SGI box in the next building (and no folks, a GHz Intel box would not have had enough grunt).
I bet the next thing will be an MS fake architecture degree!
Special encryption software for the financial benefit of Hollywood enshrined in legislation? Perhaps Hollywood should start paying some tax instead of dodging it, sometimes entirely (eg. Forrest Gump) before they have the hide to try and push legislation like this through.
The writer of the original story is just showing he's a bad journalist by drawing comparisons that he doesn't have a clue about - there's no point arguing about who is the meanest in the world. There's no point speaking up Pinochet just because the US backed him at the start - mistakes happen, the US used to like Saddam Hussain after all and no-one is calling him a good guy in the west now.
At least now all of those people that bitch about X have something better to play with now than SVGAlib. Personally I like X, but I'm probably biased since I like to run stuff across networks. something like this may actually work on a large scale if qt and gtk support is added. How many apps actually talk to X directly?
The costs to the service provider may also be significantly less than using the full Telstra ADSL or ISDN service. In some areas they may only need to put an antenna on the roof of their office and pay Telstra for the connection to the backbone (instead of having to also rent wires to their customers).
I'm amazed by the number of people in Australia who ditch their ISP due to poor quality connections, and then have the same problem with the next ISP - and don't realise that everything is coming down the same wire controlled by the same telecommunications company.
To all those who are confused as to who Telstra is, it is the formerly government owned, half privatised telecommunications company that owns most of the communications in Australia. The remainder is owned by Optus/Singtel, a mainly Singapore government owned telecommunications company, which has a few lines, provides cable TV and broadband to a few small areas and has a mobile phone network. These half privatised companies have most of the worst aspects of both goverment (a we rule you attitude) and private enterprise (more charges for less service all of the time). The way they are heading, full privatisation will turn them into monsters that make the worst multinational mining corporations look like a charities. Therefore, anything that increases the choice here is good.
All the other telecommunications companies mainly just rent space on those two networks.
Emotive history lessons aside, I think it is a very good thing to be able to give to pilot huge amounts of well presented info. the cheaper the baseline is, the better the cutting edge will be, since military budgets are not infinite either. The incident I mentioned was to highlight that even with a variety of checks and balances, pilots sometimes disobey orders and fire at unknown targets in situations where there is no hostile threat to an aircraft. The info was all there, but was not presented to the pilots, only to the ground control officer that they should have contacted. Better display of position information may have solved the entire problem.
It was a black mark on the people involved, who invoked "secret" status just to cover themselves. The British Ministry of Defence actually knew the names of the pilots (from radio logs) but refused to disclose them to the inquest. Ultimately the responsibility for the rather botched cover up lay with the British Ministry of Defence and Dick Cheney, then minister of defence under George Bush Snr, who said there was no way that he was going to make the pilots available for a "media circus". It looks like my comment about the chain of command was incorrect, since he was in it.The inquest recommended that no joint military actions ever be taken with the USA until an agreement was made that the USA will co-operate with inquests in Britain. No such agreement was made with Britan or any other allies of the USA, but the reaction to September 11 is more important.