Thirty or so years ago I was a scrawny proto-computer geek telling my sceptical classmates in Nanaimo about these newfangled home computers. I haven't lived there in many years, but it strikes me as funny now seeing the place turn up on Slashdot.
I believe it became generic eventually (as in "I can't find my polaroids!") but started out as brand specific, as the original Polaroid Lenses (http://www.visionsunglasses.com/polaroid/) specifically filtered out (I think) horizontally polarized light to improve visibility while driving. I haven't heard it in general conversation for probably 25 years however.
A million years ago when I was a young one, calling them "Polaroid sunglasses" was actually pretty standard. The text probably reflects the age of the person who put the release together.
True but nature's selection criteria aren't the same as man's. We can probably hit maxima that would be outcompeted in nature in a second. There are probably lots of unique and useful solutions out there when survival constraints are relaxed.
I've had a fair bit of experience with Atomic Energy Canada as well, and though I don't know Chalk River at all I would not be surprised to find them taking an absurdly cautious approach despite the dramatic negative impact on medical patients around the world. They're pretty much the epitome of bureaucratic.
Couldn't agree more - Pong was well within my time and I still find games that are great fun. I don't have as much time to play them, yeah, but when I do I've found lots of things to enjoy. Half Life 2 was good, Oblivion (though I never really had enough free time to complete it), hours of fun with BF2, and lots of others.
There's just as much creativity around, and just as much total crap, as there ever was.
It isn't even new. There's plenty known about bacterial genes in eukaryotes. This is just a striking case of large-scale horizontal transfer into an animal genome. It isn't even the first time transfer from bacteria to animals has been seen. It seems to be a pretty widespread process in general in eukaryotes.
Of course that's also ignoring the gigantic contribution of bacterial genes to eukaryotic genomes from the mitonchondrial symbiont, and the equally huge contribution of cyanobacterial genes from the chloroplast as well.
Because they would have filled the galaxy by now. The galaxy is OLD, and a self replicating probe would fill the galaxy in relatively short order, even at sublight speeds.
Provided that one model of the inevitable course which all civilizations must absolutely follow is true. Since we don't see the postulated results of that model we can conclude either (1) no civilizations exist within the galaxy, or (2) the model is wrong.
It's all guesswork at that point but having seen plenty of pretty models shot down over the years I'm not really inclined to be too impressed with this one negative result.
This is the kind of thing you really have to respect the NASA people for - ESA sits on their data for ages and releases little dribbles when it suits them - NASA puts it all out there.
I suspect their policy hasn't cost anyone a single publication.
Yup, and a mere ten years ago people were carefully explaining why spectroscopy of exoplanets was nigh-on impossible and many decades away at best.
At the rate things are happening it will be fascinating to see what we know a decade from now.
The 415 BBS's were some kind of nirvana back in the very early 80's. I was stuck way up in BC with a couple of local boards and ended up racking up big long distance bills dialing in to those systems. Yours rings a bell - I may well have dialed in at some point.
Did you even read your own link? The site brings up a number of very decent questions about his testimony, but nowhere does it suggest for a second that he was "full of shit".
A new factor has come up in to addition to Stalin's old maxim "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything."
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
Or something like that. Since the media refuses to acknowledge that there are serious questions about legitimacy under electronic voting, pointing out the problems probably doesn't matter any more - any evidence of problems is perforce "nutty conspiracy theory material" and so is a non-starter.
I cannot concieve of the geological event that allows a hole that use to push hydrocarbons, now just pushing h20
They pump seawater into the oil resevoir to balance off what they're sucking out. If a well starts producing water, that means there's no oil left in the bit that the well was tapping.
I can't help thinking this is damn near the case - since the station essentially does zero real scientific research now (and what it was planning to do originally was pretty darn thin to start with) it seems like they're truly scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Hell when I was at Stony Brook I tangled with some nutjob in Womyn's Studies and almost got throw out of school. Ultimately SUSB saw it my way and they gave me an A a I never went back but I'll bet a lot of kids forced into that class just got bullied or thrown out of it.
As a card-carrying liberal let me assure you that those nutjobs bug me just as much as they do you - I've seen people get sent up in front of star chambers and seriously messed around due to that kind of extremist nonsense. On the other hand I've spent quite a bit of time in academia and honestly the worst period for that kind of nonsense was the late-80's to mid-90's. The thing is that the administrations were generally just as perturbed by the kind of nonsense that went on as anyone else, and for the most part those kinds of extremists have now been shuffled off into positions where they can't hurt anyone.
Which is not to say they aren't still out there, but at the end of the day the academic world is reasonably self-correcting, it just takes a bit of time sometimes.
I recently went over a number of 10 year old CDRs in order to transfer to newer media. Some of them were burned on what was at the time cheap media (no-name gold disks), and I'd estimate that perhaps 1-2% of my files were lost to bit rot.
That's a lot better than I was worred about, but it's still a huge problem for large video files (home movies etc). I'm not sure there's any realistic alternative to multiple backups on different media.
I do like the tape idea - I wonder how hard it is to find blank tapes these days, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Thirty or so years ago I was a scrawny proto-computer geek telling my sceptical classmates in Nanaimo about these newfangled home computers. I haven't lived there in many years, but it strikes me as funny now seeing the place turn up on Slashdot.
They are totally unreasonable in just about every sense. Learn some basic astronomy before pulling "calculations" out of your ass.
Plus gratuitous football gear.
I believe it became generic eventually (as in "I can't find my polaroids!") but started out as brand specific, as the original Polaroid Lenses (http://www.visionsunglasses.com/polaroid/) specifically filtered out (I think) horizontally polarized light to improve visibility while driving. I haven't heard it in general conversation for probably 25 years however.
A million years ago when I was a young one, calling them "Polaroid sunglasses" was actually pretty standard. The text probably reflects the age of the person who put the release together.
True but nature's selection criteria aren't the same as man's. We can probably hit maxima that would be outcompeted in nature in a second. There are probably lots of unique and useful solutions out there when survival constraints are relaxed.
I've had a fair bit of experience with Atomic Energy Canada as well, and though I don't know Chalk River at all I would not be surprised to find them taking an absurdly cautious approach despite the dramatic negative impact on medical patients around the world. They're pretty much the epitome of bureaucratic.
I like your thoughts on this quite a lot, but just how many action figures would it sell?
Couldn't agree more - Pong was well within my time and I still find games that are great fun. I don't have as much time to play them, yeah, but when I do I've found lots of things to enjoy. Half Life 2 was good, Oblivion (though I never really had enough free time to complete it), hours of fun with BF2, and lots of others.
There's just as much creativity around, and just as much total crap, as there ever was.
It isn't even new. There's plenty known about bacterial genes in eukaryotes. This is just a striking case of large-scale horizontal transfer into an animal genome. It isn't even the first time transfer from bacteria to animals has been seen. It seems to be a pretty widespread process in general in eukaryotes. Of course that's also ignoring the gigantic contribution of bacterial genes to eukaryotic genomes from the mitonchondrial symbiont, and the equally huge contribution of cyanobacterial genes from the chloroplast as well.
Because they would have filled the galaxy by now. The galaxy is OLD, and a self replicating probe would fill the galaxy in relatively short order, even at sublight speeds.
Provided that one model of the inevitable course which all civilizations must absolutely follow is true. Since we don't see the postulated results of that model we can conclude either (1) no civilizations exist within the galaxy, or (2) the model is wrong.
It's all guesswork at that point but having seen plenty of pretty models shot down over the years I'm not really inclined to be too impressed with this one negative result.
I'd love to see those done with whatever the Oblivion engine was. That would be fun.
This is the kind of thing you really have to respect the NASA people for - ESA sits on their data for ages and releases little dribbles when it suits them - NASA puts it all out there. I suspect their policy hasn't cost anyone a single publication.
Wish I had some mod points for you - this is really very insightful.
Yup, and a mere ten years ago people were carefully explaining why spectroscopy of exoplanets was nigh-on impossible and many decades away at best. At the rate things are happening it will be fascinating to see what we know a decade from now.
We're in a downswing in people's vision for the future right now. Give it a couple of decades (or centuries) and things will change again.
Bummer to be us, though.
Amen to that - I have an mp3 player. It isn't an Ipod. I drag mp3s to it and then I play them when I want too.
Plus I paid a lot less for the ability to do so.
BFD.
The 415 BBS's were some kind of nirvana back in the very early 80's. I was stuck way up in BC with a couple of local boards and ended up racking up big long distance bills dialing in to those systems. Yours rings a bell - I may well have dialed in at some point.
Did you even read your own link? The site brings up a number of very decent questions about his testimony, but nowhere does it suggest for a second that he was "full of shit".
The difference between the masses of the hammer, feather, and moon are so vast that the time difference may not be observable to the universe.
I'd be interested in seeing the numbers.
A new factor has come up in to addition to Stalin's old maxim "He who votes decides nothing; he who counts the votes decides everything."
Something like "Who finds out about corruption is irrelevant; who gets to decide what kinds of corruption are "Serious Stories" versus "Tinfoil Hat" material decides the rest."
Or something like that. Since the media refuses to acknowledge that there are serious questions about legitimacy under electronic voting, pointing out the problems probably doesn't matter any more - any evidence of problems is perforce "nutty conspiracy theory material" and so is a non-starter.
I cannot concieve of the geological event that allows a hole that use to push hydrocarbons, now just pushing h20
They pump seawater into the oil resevoir to balance off what they're sucking out. If a well starts producing water, that means there's no oil left in the bit that the well was tapping.
I can't help thinking this is damn near the case - since the station essentially does zero real scientific research now (and what it was planning to do originally was pretty darn thin to start with) it seems like they're truly scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Hell when I was at Stony Brook I tangled with some nutjob in Womyn's Studies and almost got throw out of school. Ultimately SUSB saw it my way and they gave me an A a I never went back but I'll bet a lot of kids forced into that class just got bullied or thrown out of it.
As a card-carrying liberal let me assure you that those nutjobs bug me just as much as they do you - I've seen people get sent up in front of star chambers and seriously messed around due to that kind of extremist nonsense. On the other hand I've spent quite a bit of time in academia and honestly the worst period for that kind of nonsense was the late-80's to mid-90's. The thing is that the administrations were generally just as perturbed by the kind of nonsense that went on as anyone else, and for the most part those kinds of extremists have now been shuffled off into positions where they can't hurt anyone.
Which is not to say they aren't still out there, but at the end of the day the academic world is reasonably self-correcting, it just takes a bit of time sometimes.
I recently went over a number of 10 year old CDRs in order to transfer to newer media. Some of them were burned on what was at the time cheap media (no-name gold disks), and I'd estimate that perhaps 1-2% of my files were lost to bit rot.
That's a lot better than I was worred about, but it's still a huge problem for large video files (home movies etc). I'm not sure there's any realistic alternative to multiple backups on different media.
I do like the tape idea - I wonder how hard it is to find blank tapes these days, though.