All this time chimpanzees had already managed to launch at telecommunications satellite into geosynchronous orbit *and* perfect bio-engineered radar receivers and atomic clocks, and provide the serivce cost-free to their entire population. All those scientists re-inventing GPS must sure feel dumb.
Mitochondrial Eve really isn't an individual, it's just the population at the point where the gene pool is narrowed. It could mean any female within a few dozen generations of Hera.
I don't think the ending was ideal - I imagine there will be a whole cottage industry of alternate finales springing up - but there is far, far worse out there.
I'm puzzled, though, that, even if they did have to improvise with the plot continuity, all the supernatural interventions seemed to have such trivial purposes. The Opera house premonitions were an obvious example - neither Athena nor Roslin would have done a single thing differently without the visions. Thrace is killed on Earth 1.0, is reincarnated, learns a tune as a child, is killed in action and then reincarnated again, the Final Five hear the song, Hera is inspired with the same tune, all so she can input one set of FTL jump coordinates. Baltar is taken to the brink of insanity by visions from Virtual Six and starts a whole religious movement so he can make one speech where he states the obvious. Conoy plays mind games with Thrace for years and when he finds her body on Earth 1.0 just says, oh, I was wrong. Plus, God's / gods' plan was apparently to wipe out two civilizations just to bring Hera to Earth 2.0., and we still don't know if Earth 2.0 will repeat the whole cycle of society creates artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence rises in rebellion, artificial intelligence uses bioengineering to remake itself in its creators' image, and starts over with a species so close to the original that they're borderline capable of interbreeding.
The really big cop-out, in my opinion, was that so much of the plot - probably including the original attempted genocide by the Cylons - was driven by Cavil/John/Number One's mental illness. That never makes for a satisfying story.
Though I suppose none of this will matter after the new Cylon centurion civilization comes back and nukes Earth 2.0.
(And we never did learn Six's actual name. She obviously had one - she was undercover on Caprica for two years.)
*Eventually* is the operative word. Predicting open source Windows 'one of these decades' is not particularly insightful. Though knowing Microsoft I'd imagine they would undercut Wine and ReactOS with something almost, but not quite, a clone of the commercial version of Windows.
I'm sure it's a good idea to study the effecs scientifically, but, seriously, no-one actually believed that you could "whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine."
Quantum mechanics conflicts with general relativity, so (probably) general relativity is wrong, and the true law of gravity is quantum-mechanical. This has been known for a long time.
Even so, the "widely held view that intelligence is largely linear in nature" is not at all "widely held", unless they mean strictly among non-scientists. Honest scientists admit they don't really have a clue what intelligence is. Also evolution is not goal-oriented.
It must be hard to find ways spend the kind of money that Dubai has, but it would be nice if just a little bit of it could be put towards something constructive, like a world-class university (something the Arab-speaking world could actually use).
Unions are monopolies, with the same potentials for benefit or abuse as any other monopoly. Sadly, unions are lazy and like to target workforces that are easy to unionize, not where there may actually be some workplace injustice in need of correction.
Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer is one of the most pervasive viruses out there, and I'm guessing it won't be hard to find Vista systems infected with it.
That only gives you half the parentage.
Oh, top 100 classified *advertising* sites. I thought Craigslist and national security were an odd mix.
A "quantum leap" refers to any change which is not continuously incremental, and therefore includes advances which are qualitative differences.
No, quantum effects are just floating point rounding errors.
All this time chimpanzees had already managed to launch at telecommunications satellite into geosynchronous orbit *and* perfect bio-engineered radar receivers and atomic clocks, and provide the serivce cost-free to their entire population. All those scientists re-inventing GPS must sure feel dumb.
Mitochondrial Eve really isn't an individual, it's just the population at the point where the gene pool is narrowed. It could mean any female within a few dozen generations of Hera.
I don't think the ending was ideal - I imagine there will be a whole cottage industry of alternate finales springing up - but there is far, far worse out there.
I'm puzzled, though, that, even if they did have to improvise with the plot continuity, all the supernatural interventions seemed to have such trivial purposes. The Opera house premonitions were an obvious example - neither Athena nor Roslin would have done a single thing differently without the visions. Thrace is killed on Earth 1.0, is reincarnated, learns a tune as a child, is killed in action and then reincarnated again, the Final Five hear the song, Hera is inspired with the same tune, all so she can input one set of FTL jump coordinates. Baltar is taken to the brink of insanity by visions from Virtual Six and starts a whole religious movement so he can make one speech where he states the obvious. Conoy plays mind games with Thrace for years and when he finds her body on Earth 1.0 just says, oh, I was wrong. Plus, God's / gods' plan was apparently to wipe out two civilizations just to bring Hera to Earth 2.0., and we still don't know if Earth 2.0 will repeat the whole cycle of society creates artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence rises in rebellion, artificial intelligence uses bioengineering to remake itself in its creators' image, and starts over with a species so close to the original that they're borderline capable of interbreeding.
The really big cop-out, in my opinion, was that so much of the plot - probably including the original attempted genocide by the Cylons - was driven by Cavil/John/Number One's mental illness. That never makes for a satisfying story.
Though I suppose none of this will matter after the new Cylon centurion civilization comes back and nukes Earth 2.0.
(And we never did learn Six's actual name. She obviously had one - she was undercover on Caprica for two years.)
You mean electrons play a role in an electro-chemical decision-making machine like the human brain?
This might be cool if there was a real understanding of what "free will" was.
I wishfully think of him as static and final.
Corrupt just like the private sector.
Back in the 50s, they were worried about running out of one of the raw materials of vacuum tubes. We found a way around that.
*Eventually* is the operative word. Predicting open source Windows 'one of these decades' is not particularly insightful. Though knowing Microsoft I'd imagine they would undercut Wine and ReactOS with something almost, but not quite, a clone of the commercial version of Windows.
I'm sure it's a good idea to study the effecs scientifically, but, seriously, no-one actually believed that you could "whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine."
Quantum mechanics conflicts with general relativity, so (probably) general relativity is wrong, and the true law of gravity is quantum-mechanical. This has been known for a long time.
Though measuring stuff like this is very cool.
Even so, the "widely held view that intelligence is largely linear in nature" is not at all "widely held", unless they mean strictly among non-scientists. Honest scientists admit they don't really have a clue what intelligence is. Also evolution is not goal-oriented.
It must be hard to find ways spend the kind of money that Dubai has, but it would be nice if just a little bit of it could be put towards something constructive, like a world-class university (something the Arab-speaking world could actually use).
Isn't there prior art in things like wind blowing over the surface of open water?
Unions are monopolies, with the same potentials for benefit or abuse as any other monopoly. Sadly, unions are lazy and like to target workforces that are easy to unionize, not where there may actually be some workplace injustice in need of correction.
Isn't cluelessness with respect to sarcasm also a pointy-haired boss trait?
64 bits should be enough for anyone!
So that means if they shoot someone, it would be a medicinal homicide?
The missing cyanogen will probably turn up on the black market.
Study Confirms That Humans Project Personality Traits onto Cars
People were doing this with ships three thousand years ago.
That financial "bailout" has been a pretty effective scam so far.