A Spherical estimation is good enough for most purposes.
True, at least by the old engineer's rule of thumb that only three places are significant for practical purposes.
But there are some situations where it's not good enough. One is if you're dealing with the orbits of satellites. To the satellites, the Earth is decidedly lumpy, enough so to affect orbits on a time scale of weeks or months.
A fun case I ran across some years ago was a geography trivia question: Name the three "highest points on Earth", and for each, give the definition of "highest point" that it satisfies.
The only answer that most people know is Mount Everest, which is the point that's the highest above the local "geoid" (which is the extension of "sea level" to handle areas far from the closest open ocean).
Some people know another answer: Mauna Kea, which is the point that's the highest above the mean level of the surrounding land. Everest rises some 3,000 m above the surrounding land, the Tibetan Plateau, Mauna Kea rises from the bottom of the central Pacific Ocean, and it's a much taller pile of rock than Everest. Its peak is more than 10 km above its base.
Hardly anyone can even guess the third answer. It turns out to be Mount Chimborazo, which is on the equator in Ecuador, and is the point that's farthest from the Earth's center. It's a good-size volcano that rises some 2,500 m above the surrounding land, but its peak is estimated at 6,384.4 km above the Earth's center, several km higher than the peaks of Everest or Mauna Kea.
All of these "highest point" claims are mentioned in the wikipedia articles about them (which is where I checked the numbers). And you could probably find them reasonably quickly by googling for that phrase, though I haven't tried it. I also wonder if there are other definitions of "highest point" that have different answers.
(And Chimborazo is one of the answers to another trivia question that's fun in "global warming" discussions: What are the two places where there are glaciers on the equator? So far, nobody I've asked this one has got either answer right, though some people get close to the other answer. Both places' glaciers are retreating rapidly, and are predicted to disappear in a few decades.)
A few years ago, I read of a survey/study which concluded that 50% of the American population had never been more than 200 miles (that's about 300 km;-) from where they were born. I did suspect that the "200" implied a lot of rounding, which is reasonable given the error bars on most people's guesses as to how far away from home they've been. But the number is probably useful for a rough guide.
And, of course, it implies that 50% of Americans have been more than 200 miles from where they were born.
I've had fun occasionally with visitors from Ireland, by saying that I'm about the same distance from where I was born as they are from Ireland - and I was born in the USA. This tends to get interesting reactions, because they usually have no feel at all for how big a country it is.
Anyway, I wonder if numbers like this are available for any other country? I suppose they'd be most meaningful for the larger countries, since politics tends to get in the way of travel across national borders.
In cooperation, we support each other and do not require institutions... PROBLEM: cooperation requires the ability to kick out or kill non-cooperators, and it requires a strong innate culture, an "organic state."
Actually, in the primary example of social cooperation, raising children, this isn't true. There are hundreds of social species on this planet, and none of them expect their infants to contribute, or even "cooperate", for most of their childhood (however that's defined). Of course, part of the upbringing of species like ours is to teach the kids that cooperation and sharing are expected. Others (e.d., bees and ants) have builtin instincts that "force" them to cooperate when they become adults.
Of course, non-cooperating adults do tend to be evicted from social groups in most species. But "freeloaders" have been documented in many species. This may be a social inefficiency, but not necessarily. One could argue that, in software, it's advantageous to have freeloaders. They are regularly viewed by developers as testers. Software with lots of non-programmer users can be among the best, because such users can contribute bug reports ("complaints"), and this information can be used to improve the software. So the FOSS crowd doesn't kick out (or kill;-) non-cooperators, they just relegate you to the status of guinea pig for software ideas.
I was suspended for writing software and sharing it with my friends. My own source code. The administration of my school told myself and my parents in no uncertain terms that I was breaking the law by writing software and giving it to others, and they were having none of it on school property.
What might have been a fun ploy: The next time a teacher assigned a writing task, you should have written it, and then refused to turn it in until the teacher paid you $10. After all, writing is something that writers do for a living, and the school suspended you for giving away what you'd written. It's clearly also illegal for you to give your English teacher something you wrote (in competition with commercial writers) unless you were paid for it.
It'd be fun to see how they reacted to this. Their obvious argument is that the English teacher is trying to teach you to write. But it should be equally obvious that programmers need to learn to write software, since it's a difficult task. If it's proper for students to learn to write English in school, why isn't it also proper for students to learn to write java or python in school?
This argument would be interesting, because it gets right to the point. That school's administration was actively suppressing attempts to learn to write software. This is directly contrary to why schools exist. They should be teaching programming just like they should be teaching, say, woodworking or auto shop classes. By punishing a student for trying to learn something that's useful in the job market, they have seriously interfered with their students' education. Writing coherently in both human and computer languages is important, and schools should be teaching both.
I'm not sure scientific research is all that safe from commercial concerns.
Of course it isn't. We're all familiar with the horror stories of commercial scientific "research" that is bogus science, run by marketers rather than scientists. And exactly the same problem exists in software, where most commercial products are "binary only" and contain all sorts of hidden code that the customers can't know about.
This is why the scientific community has developed the system of open publication and independent verification of results. Science can't be trusted unless it has been verified independently, and "science" that can't be verified (often because of patents) isn't valid science.
Again, this is similar to what FOSS software has done. It produces software that can be examined, tested, and verified independently, so there are rarely surprises. If you want reliable, trustworthy software, you need the same openness and verifiability that you need for valid science. You can't get this with private science or private software. It's often hard enough with open software; with binary-only software it's impossible.
A very large number of people hold that "piracy" is not only ethically permissible, it is ethically obligatory. Often the contention is that supporting the established regime of intellectual property is destructive to good ends and constructive to evil ends.
Indeed. And here in the USA, there is a well-established (unpatented;-) method for reform of evil laws. The technical term is "judicial review". What it means is that the court can decide that a law itself is illegal, and can declare the law invalid rather than enforcing it.
But there is a problem with the implementation: Unless you have "standing", you can't challenge a law. The judge will just say that the law doesn't affect you, and reject your case. Sometimes a judge will accept a challenge to a law, but this is rare unless you are rich and powerful. For the other 99% of us, the only way to challenge a law is to violate it, and hope that some authority arrests you and charges you with a violation.
This is a major part of the argument why, if you think that current copyright law is wrong, you are morally obligated to violate it by "pirating" copyrighted material, making infringing "derivative" works, etc. Unless some of us do this and are taken to court for the violations, there is no practical way to get the laws changed. The big-money publishers have the legislatures in their pockets, so we can't get a change that way. Our only recourse is to get the courts to toss out the laws. And we can only do that by being victims of the copyright laws, and persuading the judges that it's the laws that are the violations.
You'd think this would be fairly easy. After all, the US Constitution says that copyright and patent laws exist to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts. It's fairly obvious that copyright and patent are now primarily tools to block progress. This should be good grounds for judicial invalidation of the laws.
But it turns out to be not all that easy. And it's expensive. But in the long run, doing nothing is even more expensive, as the progress promised by the Constitution is slowly choked off as "standing on the shoulders of giants" is made illegal.
Sure, and I wonder why Amazon didn't just make a tiny change to the page source to break the add-on?
A related "I wonder..." topic of mine is that there must be a growing battle between the various price-comparison sites and the sites that they are mining for their data. Thus, I'd expect that Amazon already has a project going to study these sites' actions and find ways of defeating them. Technically speaking, this FF addon is just another example of price comparison, with the extra feature that it looks for sites offering a product for a price of zero.
And it does seem that, if they can get the courts to agree that this addon is illegal, they'll have won their battle. They can next order takedowns of all price-comparison information, on the grounds that it's the same thing as what Pirates of the Amazon was doing.
Is there actually some legal difference (other than the zero price) between this addon and what all of the price-comparison sites are doing? Is telling customers that they can get what they want for free at another store a serious crime, while telling them that the same thing is available elsewhere for $0.01 is legal? If so, the law is even weirder than I've ever imagined.
... but what about medical textbooks where they wouldn't normally be available or affordable?
Funny thing; about 5 years ago I was working on a software project in which we were trying to develop portable wireless access to various medical reference texts and databases, primarily using wireless "smart phones" as the hardware. The main thing that killed the project was that we developers needed access to the text for testing. My part in the project was writing decoding software that could understand the texts' formats and convert them to usable databases. But most of this work couldn't be tested, because we couldn't get access to the medical texts. The printers would only sell them to people with official medical credentials, and as software developers, we didn't qualify. The companies lawyers couldn't find a way to break this lockout, so eventually we had to give up. A number of doctors, mostly EMTs, didn't get the wireless access that we'd told them we could build.
This was a good lesson to all of us in what copyright is really about. The publishers and authors knew quite well what they were doing when they refused to even sell or lease their data to us. They made it quite clear that they understood what we were trying to do, and they weren't going to allow it.
It's, uh, interesting to see the concept of ethics tied into this.
And this policy goes right back to the beginnings of copyright law and the Catholic unhappiness with Bibles being printed in English.
Actually, the Catholic Church's unhappiness with bibles being printed outside their control goes back much further than the first English bibles. They generally wanted to control the availability of bibles, so that the general population couldn't read them easily and had to depend on the priests to read (selected passages) to their congregations.
A clear example of this happened in the 1220s, when the first Mongol expedition to the far west took along a team of Korean printers. As they traveled west, they first printed korans, then bibles, and sold them to the locals to help pay for the expedition. This was profitable, but it was very upsetting to the Church, which responded with a PR campaign to brand the Mongols as agents of the devil, and started spreading stories of large numbers of people who had been slaughtered along their path. (The actual slaughter, such as it was, came with later expeditions; the first one was explorers who took along soldiers as guards due to the rumors of how uncivilized and warlike those Westerners were.;-) There's a lot of evidence that the main reason the Mongols ran into so many attacks was the western rulers' discovery that they had brought a print shop along and were using it. This was a serious threat to the western rulers, whose control was based in part on keeping most of the population illiterate and ignorant.
Before this, the Church had frequent problems with various "heretical" groups printing their own bibles, which often didn't quite agree with the Church's bible in all its parts. This was a major part of why copyright was originally developed. The term "copyright" dates from before the western world had printing technology, when books were literally hand-copied by scribes, and only certain copy shops had the legal right to copy certain books.
What you're asking, is to be treated as an intelligent, independent Person.
Heh. I'm reminded of various "management" things I've read, ranging from grade-school teaching to top-level corporate levels, where it is pointed out that if you treat your charges like idiots, they'll act like idiots, and if you treat them as intelligent people, they'll magically become intelligent people.
But it's pretty rare to see this advice applied sensibly.
As to blaming customers for being stupid about user interfaces on everything from chain saws to computers, there is something to be said about proper training and for purchasing from sales outlets that provide that training.
Of course, with computers, a big part of the problem is that most of the settings, options, whatever, aren't documented anywhere that the user is likely to discover. And when something is documented, it's usually in the developers' obscure jargon that doesn't share any keywords with the description a typical user would give.
I recently stumbled across a useful example: I'd been frustrated for years that, good as firefox is, it didn't seem to have a way to do something obvious that was in all the other browsers (of the 12 on my Mac, for example) had right there in the obvious menu: I couldn't get it to open a group of bookmarks in tabs in a new window. I made all sorts of guesses, googled for it, and asked on various forums. A few people said that it was possible, but gave no clues as to how. Then suddenly, a few months ago, I mentioned it in a comment here in/., and someone answered with the key combo. It's shift-click on the menu item, in the OSX edition. Now, I used shift-click in a number of other situations, but I guess I hadn't accidentally tried it on a bookmarks group-level item. Of all the zillions of possible multi-key possibilities in the zillions of widgets I see on the screen, there was no particular reason to guess that it would do that in this widget. There's no metaphorical interpretation of the various shift-clicks that I know; they all seem to do something totally idiosyncratic when they do anything at all.
I just repeated a search through FF's Preferences stuff, and I can definitely say there's no clue there. Or if there is, it's couched it terms that make no sense to me. The "Tabs" window has only six items, and clearly none of them applies to this task. If it's hidden somewhere else, I can't spot it.
This isn't particularly a criticism of FF, of course. It's just a single recent instance of a universal problem with computer UIs: The user usually has no way of discovering most of the capabilities, other than in discussions like this, on line or via email or in person or however. Or by randomly hitting keys and trying to make sense of the responses.
This is especially frustrating, because you know that most apps have one or a small number of tables that handle the mapping of input to functions. It should be easy to present this table to the user, and let them edit it. I've seen this done in a few apps. I've written such config windows myself for several apps. But even in the few cases where this is done, it's usually nowhere near complete, so users remain ignorant of most of the hidden capabilities.
What's even more frustrating is that, as a developer, I've worked on several jobs where I was explicitly ordered not to write such an unneeded tool. "Customers aren't asking for it; don't waste your (billable) time on it." In other cases, it was written and widely used by developers during testing, but was removed as unneeded "debug" code in the deliverable.
So now, instead of such "unneeded" tools, we're reading about a much more complex config approach that doesn't educate the user, but instead enables a minimal subset that limits the user to what they understood during the initial installation. Somehow I'm not sure this is an improvement. I think I'd prefer something that tells me what is implemented, and maybe lets me configure it a bit to match any physical (or mental;-) limitations I may have.
I find it interesting that science based Phd students are able to be this creative - they are dealing with very intangible things, and correlating them to a form of communication that they are traditionally not known to be able to identify with.
In my experience, the association of the "hard" sciences and math with music and dance is well known, and qualifies as a stereotype. Since my college years as a math and CS student, I've been involved in music and dance, both classical and various "folk" varieties. In all of the groups, there has been a very obvious preponderance of techies. I've been involved in many discussions of this phenomenon, where people try to explain it.
But the explanation is illusive. I think it's because the discussions tend to break down into "The hell with this; let's dance!"
This association is hardly anything modern. It goes back centuries. Many of the best-known composers have been math geeks. Groups of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers routinely spin off music and dance groups.
My favorite example is an explanation of why the music recording industry has had so much grief from the advent of the Internet. The explanation suggests that you go find the people who built the original ARPAnet, and then find the much larger gang who expanded it into the Internet in the 1980s. Ask them what instrument(s) they play; they invariably tell you. They are all amateur musicians. And if you ask them why they became network programmers rather than musicians, they'll tell you that they realized at an early age that (for nearly a century now), it has been nearly impossible to make a living as a musician. It used to be possible, but the recording industry took control and claims almost all the money. But there was an alternative: These guys were also talented at math, and realized that computers would be a much better career choice. Then they went into network programming, and from at least the 1980s, they all realized that this was a way of killing the recording industry and returning control of music to its makers.
So there's a good chance that, if the recording industry had found a way of paying a good income to these geeks, they would have mostly become professional musicians, and there might never have been any Internet. But a musical career wasn't feasible, a computer career was and paid pretty well, so now all those would-be musicians are getting their revenge on a music industry that locked them out of their first career choice.
It's an interesting explanation, and it depends on the music/dance-math/science connection to be credible. If it's true, I wonder how we might discourage geeks in future decades from becoming musicians and/or dancers. Or will we find that our pool of talented math/science/computer geeks has dried up? (But we'll have a lot more talented musicians and dancers.;-)
I find it outrageous that still to this day we are trying to find new reasons for people to throw away their computers instead of actually encouraging them to KEEP THEM.
But what else could you possibly get from a system that judges a company solely on its sales? Our economic system provides strong incentives to build products that break in as short a time as possible, and can't be repaired, so you must buy a new one. Complain all you like (and we all do), but unless you're doing something to reward a company for durability, you're not solving the problem.
And yes you can always donate your computer to charity.
Doesn't this machine come with MS windows? We've already discussed the fact that, if you donate a Windows machine, the license for the software probably doesn't transfer along with it. Yes, I know the MS PR people claim that they have a way to transfer licenses. But I have a number of friends working for charitable organizations who will tell you about the grief and wasted time from trying to get permission to legally run the software. Mostly, they failed at this, and either paid the retail price for a license, or more often they just trashed the hardware. If you go to the web site for MS's Microsoft Open License for Charities, you'll see that they don't actually talk about transferring the original license. The site tells you how to purchase licenses at a special price.
So if you donate your computer to charity, you may be sticking that charity with the expense of a software license.
I did a quick search, and all the definitions I found involve DNA or organism.
You need to do a slower search.;-)
The terms "evolve" and "evolution" predate their 19th-century biological use by many centuries. Many dictionaries give the more general definitions, which deal with change over time. Biologists just adopted the term with a more specific technical meaning. This is something that scientists do all the time, adopting common terms and restricting them to a much narrower technical meaning.
The problem here is that people are wrongfully applying the biological definition to geology. Geologists, physicists, astronomers, and others have long used "evolve" to describe ongoing change in their subject matter. Google for "stellar evolution", for example.
OTOH, pick up just about any general-purpose dictionary, and you'll find the older, more general definitions. You can also ask google for "define:evolve", and you'll get a lot of versions of the biological definition, but you'll also see several non-biological definitons. There have been at least two music albums called "Evolve", for example.
Technically, the local government should be in charge of enforcing rules maintaining reasonable condition of properties, not HOAs.
And in reality, a HOA is a local government, under any meaningful interpretation of the phrase. What people are complaining about here are just examples of how governments can become dysfunctional. It's made worse by the way that people try to pretend that a HOA is something other than a level of government. Many of the problems could be solved by treating them explicitly as a level of government, and hold them responsible for all the laws that that restrict what governments can do you their citizens.
Of course, the courts don't have all that good a record of enforcing those laws...
Well, maybe. The main assumption was a fairly standard one: The human size difference between males and females is at least partly due to "sexual selection". That is, human females like big males and human males like small females. This seems to be somewhat of a universal among not just humans, but primates in general. And it probably came about because males are "expendable" and thus function as the primary defenders of a social group of primates. It matters if you lose females, but it matters less if you lose a few males. So males should be big and should hang out on the group's periphery, to be more effective defenders. This is so common in primates that the default assumption about an unknown primate species is that it follows this pattern. But couples in which the female is bigger do occur among humans, so we can't rely on it as any sort of universal rule; it's just a statistical preference.
Male preference for breast size is highly variable in humans (and weak or nonexistent in other primates), so we probably shouldn't make guesses about that, other than that permanently enlarged female breasts are a sexual dimorphism in humans. (And I do know several very attractive women with small breasts.;-)
Another problem with the hypothesis that the Cro Magnons wiped out the Neanderthals and didn't interbreed with them is that we really don't know anything about Neanderthal genes. Some scientists have point out that it's quite possible that some number of Neanderthal genes spread to Africa well before the Cro-Magnon invasion, and those genes are part of what we consider basic human (vs. chimp or gorilla) genes. We have no way of disproving this at present. Comparing fossil Neanderthal DNA with modern African DNA would do nothing to debunk this hypothesis.
Basically, the whole topic is something that we know little about, and the chances of actually learning much more are slight. Of course, this has to be true for some remote ancestors. If we do manage to get the data to show that the Neanderthals either were or were not among our ancestors, the problem would just move to the next-oldest extinct group of hominids. So the problem will always be with us.
Probably one of the reasons for the interest in the Neanderthals is that most of the known Neanderthal "features" do turn up in modern Europeans at a low rate. This doesn't prove anything, because those features could just be adaptations to conditions in Europe over the past 40,000 years; those features evolved in the Cro Magnons' descendants for the same reasons they evolved in Neanderthals. The existence of such a feature set is "interesting", and is most easily explained by interbreeding. But it doesn't really prove anything.
Of course, cloning a mammal is a lot more difficult than changing a file inside a computer. But I'd also note that whoever that "top scientist" was, he probably has cavemen as ancestors. And there are, technically speaking, a lot of "cavemen" in the world today. I had some friends in high school who liked to tell people that they lived in a cave. Their house was built against, and partly inside, a steep hillside. It faced south, and had mostly glass on the south side. It was one room deep and three rooms (stories) tall, i.e., a house sorta built on its side. It was a very nice house, and was cheap to heat and cool.
Considering that many people feel that Neanderthal DNA is integrated with human DNA, is there any point to this experiment?
Sure; it's the same reason that most scientific work is done. Some people may feel that our "modern" DNA includes Neanderthal DNA, but they don't actually have much evidence to support that hypothesis. Meanwhile, others (including, obviously, the author of TFA), feel that the Neanderthal people were a different species, but they have very little actual evidence to support their hypothesis.
The conventional scientific approach is to suggest experiments and observations that would produce evidence for or against either of these hypotheses. If we could actually extract enough fossil DNA to produce a viable clone of a Neanderthal, the question of whether they're the same species as us would be answered fairly quickly. OK, to be really sure, we'd have to wait until they're old enough to produce ovum or sperm cells. But that's a time scale that's comparable to some of our larger scientific efforts, such a designing and building particle accelerators or large telescopes.
The main problem with the article is that the idea that we'll soon have enough Neanderthal DNA is really just a wild conjecture. Nobody has that DNA in their lab yet, and we don't have any remains that can reasonably be expected to produce it. Maybe we will next year, as the article suggests.
Of course, one could respond to the whole thing with "Why bother?" Whether the Neanderthals were the same species as us is a question that has no obvious relevance to the modern world. But that line of reasoning is routinely used against most scientific work, We techies have long since learned to dismiss it out of hand, since if applied in the past, it would have prevented most important scientific discoveries. (It would have also prevented many inconsequential scientific discoveries, and also many dead ends that led to no discoveries. But in most cases we couldn't have known that beforehand.)
The scientific justification is "We want to know." But that wasn't the question. The question was more like "What would our religious/moral/ethical guardians say about such an experiment?" To nobody's surprise, here on/. opinion is divided.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't they bigger than us?
On average, yes, but that's probably because they were adapted to a cold climate. And if you compare the Neandert[h]als to the modern far-northern European populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia, most of the size difference disappears.
The other main possibility (which may be mentioned in subsequent messages that I haven't reached yet) is that they didn't disappear at all, but merged into the invading Cro Magnon population by interbreeding. Yeah, the media has made lots of fusses about claims that they were a different species. But the actual scientific evidence is very weak. It's mostly based on mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA), which is a tiny part of the genome and only inherited via the maternal line. If you understand much about genetics, you won't find this very convincing.
Actually, the question of whether the Neandertals are were a subspecies of Homo sapiens or a different species is likely a borderline case that will never be answered satisfactorily, due to incomplete fossil evidence. We don't have remains of very many of them, and DNA doesn't keep well. Unless there's a better-preserved specimen in the permafrost, and we find it before the permafrost is all gone, we will probably never know. It does seem like a lot of people are just assuming that they were a separate species and couldn't interbreed. Maybe they were. Or maybe they're a part of our ancestry. Further research is needed, as the scientific wording goes.
But it's easy to imagine a young Cro-Magnon woman meeting a big, hulking Conan-type Neandertal guy, and just swooning with delight. Their offspring would have only Cro-Magnon MtDNA, of course, which is consistent with what little DNA we have of them. Meanwhile, a slight Cro-Magnon men and a tall, stocky Neandertal woman wouldn't be nearly as attracted to each other, so Neandertal MtDNA would be much less likely to be passed on.
In any case, paleontologists have observed that if you could bring a Neandertal forward in your time machine, give him a shave and a haircut, dress him up in modern clothes, and drop him anywhere in modern Europe, nobody would give him a second glance. On average, they were physically somewhat different from the average European, but they were within the range of variation of the modern population. The public image is mostly a media creation, and has little to do with what we actually know from the fossil remains.
You try exposing your socket set to -269C and see how well it works. The steel will become brittle and shatter.
So where do you get that temperature (about 5K)? At the Earth's distance from the sun, the equilibrium temperature of a black body is 281K, about 8C. A steel socket set isn't a perfect black body, of course, but it's pretty close, much closer than you or I or our planet is. Also, a socket orbiting the Earth would be in the planet's shadow part of the time, so its temperature would be somewhat cooler. But the planet's IR radiation alone should keep it well above 5K.
Does anyone know the actual equilibrium temperature of a chunk of steel orbiting the Earth? Someone has to have collected the actual temperatures of various passive pieces of metal in low Earth orbits, but the obvious google keywords don't seem to find it. It shouldn't be much below 0C.
Could someone please explain this to me, why does Americans see the need to constantly surround themselves with US flags?
I think that's mostly a media image. I live in a house in a middle-class suburb of a major US city, and I just went outside and looked around. We're on a corner lot, so I can see block or two in four direction. I couldn't see any flags at all. I know that you can find a few flags if you drive around town, but you have to look for them. Most of them are at government-owned buildings, post offices and schools and such. The town hall has a set of 3 tall flagpoles with national, state and city flags. But that's about all.
I suspect that recent decades have produced an attitude in Americans that open displays of flags other than on the 4th of July are somewhat tasteless signs of an attitude that most of us would rather not be associated with. We don't own any flags, other than maybe a few images on some postage stamps. I don't recall ever entering any American home that had flags inside; people just don't decorate their homes' walls with flags. (Hmmm... Maybe I should try it. Nah; my wife would never allow it.;-)
Actually, I do have several photos of groups that I'm in, which have flags in the background. One shows a bunch of us on stage, playing music at a Scottish Country Dance, and the back of the stage had US, UK and Scottish flags on poles. Another shows some of us on stage at a local Finnish-American club, and at the corners of the stage were poles with US and Finnish flags. A third was at a local multi-ethnic festival, where we were playing music for dancers on a stage that was lined in back with a large number of national flags, most of which I can't identify. Such flag displays are sorta charming, I suppose, though I didn't really pay attention to the flags at the time. And I'd guess that such situations aren't what people are talking about when they discuss the display of American flags.
Yeah; that's a common misconception that has been shot down by the actual data for a number of online forums. But there are several processes at work that add to the poor correlation.
I've stumbled across one of the reasons here on/. and other places. I once had a somewhat lower UID, using more of my name but no digits. Then one day, it stopped working. A bit of poking around turned up that it was still valid, but my password didn't work for it. A question about it got no response, so I just shrugged, and made a new ID. That was long enough in the past that I no longer remember my original/. ID. But really, what does it matter?
I had an even funnier case a few years ago, when I was on several yahoo forums, and yahoo went through its rash of buying out zillions of smaller forums. I was on several of them, too. In the months of massive confusion that followed, I soon found that none of my login ids for any of them worked with yahoogroups. My original yahoo id also failed there. I did a bit of poking around (and sending unanswered queries), and found that no reasonable variant of my name was accepted as a new id. Finally, I tried respelling my name in French - and it was accepted. So now all my yahoogroups groups know me by my French name. A couple of years ago, I got an invitation to join QueTrad, a group about traditional Quebec music, and the people there were duly entertained by the story of why I used a French name online, when I barely speak French.
But again, what does it matter? It's a fact of life that online forums are a confused mess. They all mess up their accounts occasionally. They all have different (and sometimes changing) rules for what ids are acceptable. Once you're on several forums, you can never keep their policies straight. And you can never get responses from questions about your account, probably because the few people running a forum are too harried to answer. So we all have multiple aliases online, and they have to be changed occasionally.
And any meaning we might attribute to silly things like ID numbers is totally bogus.
You could be right, but I don't really know. She got XP from her employer's IT people, and validated it using the same VPN that she uses to work on it. So to XP's licensing stuff, her machine looks like it's on her office network. Presumably the company has a valid site license, though I have read stories about companies finding ways to install more instances than they've paid for. But I don't know if we could even validate that.
The idea that MS is a software company and thus shouldn't care what hardware you're using seems reasonable. But it doesn't seem to agree with all the stories about their attempts at strict controls. We've read a number of stories about MS's attempts to prevent running Windows and linux on the same machine. There have been similar stories recently about Apple, though our experience with XP on the iMac seems to show that at least our local Apple Store people openly support such things.
I even had a personal case some years back, when I had a new machine on which came with Windows, and I installed linux in a different partition. One day I needed to run something on Windows, so I booted it. When I shut it down and tried to boot linux, it wouldn't boot. Investigations showed that the linux partition was no longer marked as bootable. I took the radical approach of studying the docs, including the licenses, and I found the paragraph that explicitly stated that running Windows gave it permission to modify any disk partition. In another paragraph, the license actually said that Windows would "help" users by making non-Windows partitions unbootable. After figuring out how to make linux bootable again and verifying that it seemed undamaged otherwise, I wiped the Windows partition and reformatted it as ext2.
In any case, even if MS isn't selling the hardware, they do seem to sometimes take steps to sabotage competitors' software, especially competing OSs, that are on the same hardware. The above story isn't nearly the only one I've seen. And it wasn't the most vicious, since it seems to have only flipped the one bit, and didn't do any apparent damage otherwise. I've seen other cases (e.g. with WMP) where the MS software damaged competing software to the point that reinstallation was necessary. This wasn't on machines that I owned, though, since after the above booting problem, I've never allowed MS software to remain on my own linux machines.
'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written.
When my wife was asked to do half her work from home (and be much more productive that commuting to the office, it turns out), she had to look into replacing her ancient (4 years old;-) Windows box. It was running XP, and her office hasn't upgraded to Vista, so she was looking for a PC to run XP. She couldn't buy one, until she asked at an Apple store. They explained to her that she could indeed run XP on a Mac. She got an iMac, installed XP via Fusion, and it works fine. Now a number of other people at work want her to teach them how to do it.
This has gotta be one of the things that terrifies MS's management. They lost a customer to Apple because the customer couldn't use Vista (for work-related reasons), and a competitor's system can run a virtualized XP subsystem. You could probably do the same with Linux.
Back in the 1970s, when the VM OS was taking over the IBM mainframe world, IBM responded by adopting VM and supporting it. This radically improved the usefulness of IBM's mainframes to their customers, and helped them consolidate their stranglehold on the mainframe market. So far, MS has viewed virtualization as a threat to their business, and has tried to block it. Maybe we shouldn't tell them that they're making a huge mistake. If they keep fighting it, they'll never be able to duplicate the total takeover that IBM managed in the mainframe arena. Virtualization is just too useful to a large percent of the users. And if we can avoid that sort of monoculture in the desktop, laptop, etc parts of the industry, we'll have a much healthier industry that will continue to innovate.
So let's all encourage MS to continue to try to block this development. It's for the benefit of everyone (except for MS's main stockholders).
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A Spherical estimation is good enough for most purposes.
True, at least by the old engineer's rule of thumb that only three places are significant for practical purposes.
But there are some situations where it's not good enough. One is if you're dealing with the orbits of satellites. To the satellites, the Earth is decidedly lumpy, enough so to affect orbits on a time scale of weeks or months.
A fun case I ran across some years ago was a geography trivia question: Name the three "highest points on Earth", and for each, give the definition of "highest point" that it satisfies.
The only answer that most people know is Mount Everest, which is the point that's the highest above the local "geoid" (which is the extension of "sea level" to handle areas far from the closest open ocean).
Some people know another answer: Mauna Kea, which is the point that's the highest above the mean level of the surrounding land. Everest rises some 3,000 m above the surrounding land, the Tibetan Plateau, Mauna Kea rises from the bottom of the central Pacific Ocean, and it's a much taller pile of rock than Everest. Its peak is more than 10 km above its base.
Hardly anyone can even guess the third answer. It turns out to be Mount Chimborazo, which is on the equator in Ecuador, and is the point that's farthest from the Earth's center. It's a good-size volcano that rises some 2,500 m above the surrounding land, but its peak is estimated at 6,384.4 km above the Earth's center, several km higher than the peaks of Everest or Mauna Kea.
All of these "highest point" claims are mentioned in the wikipedia articles about them (which is where I checked the numbers). And you could probably find them reasonably quickly by googling for that phrase, though I haven't tried it. I also wonder if there are other definitions of "highest point" that have different answers.
(And Chimborazo is one of the answers to another trivia question that's fun in "global warming" discussions: What are the two places where there are glaciers on the equator? So far, nobody I've asked this one has got either answer right, though some people get close to the other answer. Both places' glaciers are retreating rapidly, and are predicted to disappear in a few decades.)
A few years ago, I read of a survey/study which concluded that 50% of the American population had never been more than 200 miles (that's about 300 km ;-) from where they were born. I did suspect that the "200" implied a lot of rounding, which is reasonable given the error bars on most people's guesses as to how far away from home they've been. But the number is probably useful for a rough guide.
And, of course, it implies that 50% of Americans have been more than 200 miles from where they were born.
I've had fun occasionally with visitors from Ireland, by saying that I'm about the same distance from where I was born as they are from Ireland - and I was born in the USA. This tends to get interesting reactions, because they usually have no feel at all for how big a country it is.
Anyway, I wonder if numbers like this are available for any other country? I suppose they'd be most meaningful for the larger countries, since politics tends to get in the way of travel across national borders.
In cooperation, we support each other and do not require institutions ... PROBLEM: cooperation requires the ability to kick out or kill non-cooperators, and it requires a strong innate culture, an "organic state."
Actually, in the primary example of social cooperation, raising children, this isn't true. There are hundreds of social species on this planet, and none of them expect their infants to contribute, or even "cooperate", for most of their childhood (however that's defined). Of course, part of the upbringing of species like ours is to teach the kids that cooperation and sharing are expected. Others (e.d., bees and ants) have builtin instincts that "force" them to cooperate when they become adults.
Of course, non-cooperating adults do tend to be evicted from social groups in most species. But "freeloaders" have been documented in many species. This may be a social inefficiency, but not necessarily. One could argue that, in software, it's advantageous to have freeloaders. They are regularly viewed by developers as testers. Software with lots of non-programmer users can be among the best, because such users can contribute bug reports ("complaints"), and this information can be used to improve the software. So the FOSS crowd doesn't kick out (or kill ;-) non-cooperators, they just relegate you to the status of guinea pig for software ideas.
I was suspended for writing software and sharing it with my friends. My own source code. The administration of my school told myself and my parents in no uncertain terms that I was breaking the law by writing software and giving it to others, and they were having none of it on school property.
What might have been a fun ploy: The next time a teacher assigned a writing task, you should have written it, and then refused to turn it in until the teacher paid you $10. After all, writing is something that writers do for a living, and the school suspended you for giving away what you'd written. It's clearly also illegal for you to give your English teacher something you wrote (in competition with commercial writers) unless you were paid for it.
It'd be fun to see how they reacted to this. Their obvious argument is that the English teacher is trying to teach you to write. But it should be equally obvious that programmers need to learn to write software, since it's a difficult task. If it's proper for students to learn to write English in school, why isn't it also proper for students to learn to write java or python in school?
This argument would be interesting, because it gets right to the point. That school's administration was actively suppressing attempts to learn to write software. This is directly contrary to why schools exist. They should be teaching programming just like they should be teaching, say, woodworking or auto shop classes. By punishing a student for trying to learn something that's useful in the job market, they have seriously interfered with their students' education. Writing coherently in both human and computer languages is important, and schools should be teaching both.
I'm not sure scientific research is all that safe from commercial concerns.
Of course it isn't. We're all familiar with the horror stories of commercial scientific "research" that is bogus science, run by marketers rather than scientists. And exactly the same problem exists in software, where most commercial products are "binary only" and contain all sorts of hidden code that the customers can't know about.
This is why the scientific community has developed the system of open publication and independent verification of results. Science can't be trusted unless it has been verified independently, and "science" that can't be verified (often because of patents) isn't valid science.
Again, this is similar to what FOSS software has done. It produces software that can be examined, tested, and verified independently, so there are rarely surprises. If you want reliable, trustworthy software, you need the same openness and verifiability that you need for valid science. You can't get this with private science or private software. It's often hard enough with open software; with binary-only software it's impossible.
A very large number of people hold that "piracy" is not only ethically permissible, it is ethically obligatory. Often the contention is that supporting the established regime of intellectual property is destructive to good ends and constructive to evil ends.
Indeed. And here in the USA, there is a well-established (unpatented ;-) method for reform of evil laws. The technical term is "judicial review". What it means is that the court can decide that a law itself is illegal, and can declare the law invalid rather than enforcing it.
But there is a problem with the implementation: Unless you have "standing", you can't challenge a law. The judge will just say that the law doesn't affect you, and reject your case. Sometimes a judge will accept a challenge to a law, but this is rare unless you are rich and powerful. For the other 99% of us, the only way to challenge a law is to violate it, and hope that some authority arrests you and charges you with a violation.
This is a major part of the argument why, if you think that current copyright law is wrong, you are morally obligated to violate it by "pirating" copyrighted material, making infringing "derivative" works, etc. Unless some of us do this and are taken to court for the violations, there is no practical way to get the laws changed. The big-money publishers have the legislatures in their pockets, so we can't get a change that way. Our only recourse is to get the courts to toss out the laws. And we can only do that by being victims of the copyright laws, and persuading the judges that it's the laws that are the violations.
You'd think this would be fairly easy. After all, the US Constitution says that copyright and patent laws exist to promote progress in the sciences and useful arts. It's fairly obvious that copyright and patent are now primarily tools to block progress. This should be good grounds for judicial invalidation of the laws.
But it turns out to be not all that easy. And it's expensive. But in the long run, doing nothing is even more expensive, as the progress promised by the Constitution is slowly choked off as "standing on the shoulders of giants" is made illegal.
Sure, and I wonder why Amazon didn't just make a tiny change to the page source to break the add-on?
A related "I wonder ..." topic of mine is that there must be a growing battle between the various price-comparison sites and the sites that they are mining for their data. Thus, I'd expect that Amazon already has a project going to study these sites' actions and find ways of defeating them. Technically speaking, this FF addon is just another example of price comparison, with the extra feature that it looks for sites offering a product for a price of zero.
And it does seem that, if they can get the courts to agree that this addon is illegal, they'll have won their battle. They can next order takedowns of all price-comparison information, on the grounds that it's the same thing as what Pirates of the Amazon was doing.
Is there actually some legal difference (other than the zero price) between this addon and what all of the price-comparison sites are doing? Is telling customers that they can get what they want for free at another store a serious crime, while telling them that the same thing is available elsewhere for $0.01 is legal? If so, the law is even weirder than I've ever imagined.
... but what about medical textbooks where they wouldn't normally be available or affordable?
Funny thing; about 5 years ago I was working on a software project in which we were trying to develop portable wireless access to various medical reference texts and databases, primarily using wireless "smart phones" as the hardware. The main thing that killed the project was that we developers needed access to the text for testing. My part in the project was writing decoding software that could understand the texts' formats and convert them to usable databases. But most of this work couldn't be tested, because we couldn't get access to the medical texts. The printers would only sell them to people with official medical credentials, and as software developers, we didn't qualify. The companies lawyers couldn't find a way to break this lockout, so eventually we had to give up. A number of doctors, mostly EMTs, didn't get the wireless access that we'd told them we could build.
This was a good lesson to all of us in what copyright is really about. The publishers and authors knew quite well what they were doing when they refused to even sell or lease their data to us. They made it quite clear that they understood what we were trying to do, and they weren't going to allow it.
It's, uh, interesting to see the concept of ethics tied into this.
And this policy goes right back to the beginnings of copyright law and the Catholic unhappiness with Bibles being printed in English.
Actually, the Catholic Church's unhappiness with bibles being printed outside their control goes back much further than the first English bibles. They generally wanted to control the availability of bibles, so that the general population couldn't read them easily and had to depend on the priests to read (selected passages) to their congregations.
A clear example of this happened in the 1220s, when the first Mongol expedition to the far west took along a team of Korean printers. As they traveled west, they first printed korans, then bibles, and sold them to the locals to help pay for the expedition. This was profitable, but it was very upsetting to the Church, which responded with a PR campaign to brand the Mongols as agents of the devil, and started spreading stories of large numbers of people who had been slaughtered along their path. (The actual slaughter, such as it was, came with later expeditions; the first one was explorers who took along soldiers as guards due to the rumors of how uncivilized and warlike those Westerners were. ;-) There's a lot of evidence that the main reason the Mongols ran into so many attacks was the western rulers' discovery that they had brought a print shop along and were using it. This was a serious threat to the western rulers, whose control was based in part on keeping most of the population illiterate and ignorant.
Before this, the Church had frequent problems with various "heretical" groups printing their own bibles, which often didn't quite agree with the Church's bible in all its parts. This was a major part of why copyright was originally developed. The term "copyright" dates from before the western world had printing technology, when books were literally hand-copied by scribes, and only certain copy shops had the legal right to copy certain books.
What you're asking, is to be treated as an intelligent, independent Person.
Heh. I'm reminded of various "management" things I've read, ranging from grade-school teaching to top-level corporate levels, where it is pointed out that if you treat your charges like idiots, they'll act like idiots, and if you treat them as intelligent people, they'll magically become intelligent people.
But it's pretty rare to see this advice applied sensibly.
As to blaming customers for being stupid about user interfaces on everything from chain saws to computers, there is something to be said about proper training and for purchasing from sales outlets that provide that training.
Of course, with computers, a big part of the problem is that most of the settings, options, whatever, aren't documented anywhere that the user is likely to discover. And when something is documented, it's usually in the developers' obscure jargon that doesn't share any keywords with the description a typical user would give.
I recently stumbled across a useful example: I'd been frustrated for years that, good as firefox is, it didn't seem to have a way to do something obvious that was in all the other browsers (of the 12 on my Mac, for example) had right there in the obvious menu: I couldn't get it to open a group of bookmarks in tabs in a new window. I made all sorts of guesses, googled for it, and asked on various forums. A few people said that it was possible, but gave no clues as to how. Then suddenly, a few months ago, I mentioned it in a comment here in /., and someone answered with the key combo. It's shift-click on the menu item, in the OSX edition. Now, I used shift-click in a number of other situations, but I guess I hadn't accidentally tried it on a bookmarks group-level item. Of all the zillions of possible multi-key possibilities in the zillions of widgets I see on the screen, there was no particular reason to guess that it would do that in this widget. There's no metaphorical interpretation of the various shift-clicks that I know; they all seem to do something totally idiosyncratic when they do anything at all.
I just repeated a search through FF's Preferences stuff, and I can definitely say there's no clue there. Or if there is, it's couched it terms that make no sense to me. The "Tabs" window has only six items, and clearly none of them applies to this task. If it's hidden somewhere else, I can't spot it.
This isn't particularly a criticism of FF, of course. It's just a single recent instance of a universal problem with computer UIs: The user usually has no way of discovering most of the capabilities, other than in discussions like this, on line or via email or in person or however. Or by randomly hitting keys and trying to make sense of the responses.
This is especially frustrating, because you know that most apps have one or a small number of tables that handle the mapping of input to functions. It should be easy to present this table to the user, and let them edit it. I've seen this done in a few apps. I've written such config windows myself for several apps. But even in the few cases where this is done, it's usually nowhere near complete, so users remain ignorant of most of the hidden capabilities.
What's even more frustrating is that, as a developer, I've worked on several jobs where I was explicitly ordered not to write such an unneeded tool. "Customers aren't asking for it; don't waste your (billable) time on it." In other cases, it was written and widely used by developers during testing, but was removed as unneeded "debug" code in the deliverable.
So now, instead of such "unneeded" tools, we're reading about a much more complex config approach that doesn't educate the user, but instead enables a minimal subset that limits the user to what they understood during the initial installation. Somehow I'm not sure this is an improvement. I think I'd prefer something that tells me what is implemented, and maybe lets me configure it a bit to match any physical (or mental ;-) limitations I may have.
I find it interesting that science based Phd students are able to be this creative - they are dealing with very intangible things, and correlating them to a form of communication that they are traditionally not known to be able to identify with.
In my experience, the association of the "hard" sciences and math with music and dance is well known, and qualifies as a stereotype. Since my college years as a math and CS student, I've been involved in music and dance, both classical and various "folk" varieties. In all of the groups, there has been a very obvious preponderance of techies. I've been involved in many discussions of this phenomenon, where people try to explain it.
But the explanation is illusive. I think it's because the discussions tend to break down into "The hell with this; let's dance!"
This association is hardly anything modern. It goes back centuries. Many of the best-known composers have been math geeks. Groups of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers routinely spin off music and dance groups.
My favorite example is an explanation of why the music recording industry has had so much grief from the advent of the Internet. The explanation suggests that you go find the people who built the original ARPAnet, and then find the much larger gang who expanded it into the Internet in the 1980s. Ask them what instrument(s) they play; they invariably tell you. They are all amateur musicians. And if you ask them why they became network programmers rather than musicians, they'll tell you that they realized at an early age that (for nearly a century now), it has been nearly impossible to make a living as a musician. It used to be possible, but the recording industry took control and claims almost all the money. But there was an alternative: These guys were also talented at math, and realized that computers would be a much better career choice. Then they went into network programming, and from at least the 1980s, they all realized that this was a way of killing the recording industry and returning control of music to its makers.
So there's a good chance that, if the recording industry had found a way of paying a good income to these geeks, they would have mostly become professional musicians, and there might never have been any Internet. But a musical career wasn't feasible, a computer career was and paid pretty well, so now all those would-be musicians are getting their revenge on a music industry that locked them out of their first career choice.
It's an interesting explanation, and it depends on the music/dance-math/science connection to be credible. If it's true, I wonder how we might discourage geeks in future decades from becoming musicians and/or dancers. Or will we find that our pool of talented math/science/computer geeks has dried up? (But we'll have a lot more talented musicians and dancers. ;-)
I find it outrageous that still to this day we are trying to find new reasons for people to throw away their computers instead of actually encouraging them to KEEP THEM.
But what else could you possibly get from a system that judges a company solely on its sales? Our economic system provides strong incentives to build products that break in as short a time as possible, and can't be repaired, so you must buy a new one. Complain all you like (and we all do), but unless you're doing something to reward a company for durability, you're not solving the problem.
And yes you can always donate your computer to charity.
Doesn't this machine come with MS windows? We've already discussed the fact that, if you donate a Windows machine, the license for the software probably doesn't transfer along with it. Yes, I know the MS PR people claim that they have a way to transfer licenses. But I have a number of friends working for charitable organizations who will tell you about the grief and wasted time from trying to get permission to legally run the software. Mostly, they failed at this, and either paid the retail price for a license, or more often they just trashed the hardware. If you go to the web site for MS's Microsoft Open License for Charities, you'll see that they don't actually talk about transferring the original license. The site tells you how to purchase licenses at a special price.
So if you donate your computer to charity, you may be sticking that charity with the expense of a software license.
I did a quick search, and all the definitions I found involve DNA or organism.
You need to do a slower search. ;-)
The terms "evolve" and "evolution" predate their 19th-century biological use by many centuries. Many dictionaries give the more general definitions, which deal with change over time. Biologists just adopted the term with a more specific technical meaning. This is something that scientists do all the time, adopting common terms and restricting them to a much narrower technical meaning.
The problem here is that people are wrongfully applying the biological definition to geology. Geologists, physicists, astronomers, and others have long used "evolve" to describe ongoing change in their subject matter. Google for "stellar evolution", for example.
OTOH, pick up just about any general-purpose dictionary, and you'll find the older, more general definitions. You can also ask google for "define:evolve", and you'll get a lot of versions of the biological definition, but you'll also see several non-biological definitons. There have been at least two music albums called "Evolve", for example.
Technically, the local government should be in charge of enforcing rules maintaining reasonable condition of properties, not HOAs.
And in reality, a HOA is a local government, under any meaningful interpretation of the phrase. What people are complaining about here are just examples of how governments can become dysfunctional. It's made worse by the way that people try to pretend that a HOA is something other than a level of government. Many of the problems could be solved by treating them explicitly as a level of government, and hold them responsible for all the laws that that restrict what governments can do you their citizens.
Of course, the courts don't have all that good a record of enforcing those laws ...
So how soon can I buy a Microsoft accordion?
Cue the jokes about how you'd play one ...
Well, maybe. The main assumption was a fairly standard one: The human size difference between males and females is at least partly due to "sexual selection". That is, human females like big males and human males like small females. This seems to be somewhat of a universal among not just humans, but primates in general. And it probably came about because males are "expendable" and thus function as the primary defenders of a social group of primates. It matters if you lose females, but it matters less if you lose a few males. So males should be big and should hang out on the group's periphery, to be more effective defenders. This is so common in primates that the default assumption about an unknown primate species is that it follows this pattern. But couples in which the female is bigger do occur among humans, so we can't rely on it as any sort of universal rule; it's just a statistical preference.
Male preference for breast size is highly variable in humans (and weak or nonexistent in other primates), so we probably shouldn't make guesses about that, other than that permanently enlarged female breasts are a sexual dimorphism in humans. (And I do know several very attractive women with small breasts. ;-)
Another problem with the hypothesis that the Cro Magnons wiped out the Neanderthals and didn't interbreed with them is that we really don't know anything about Neanderthal genes. Some scientists have point out that it's quite possible that some number of Neanderthal genes spread to Africa well before the Cro-Magnon invasion, and those genes are part of what we consider basic human (vs. chimp or gorilla) genes. We have no way of disproving this at present. Comparing fossil Neanderthal DNA with modern African DNA would do nothing to debunk this hypothesis.
Basically, the whole topic is something that we know little about, and the chances of actually learning much more are slight. Of course, this has to be true for some remote ancestors. If we do manage to get the data to show that the Neanderthals either were or were not among our ancestors, the problem would just move to the next-oldest extinct group of hominids. So the problem will always be with us.
Probably one of the reasons for the interest in the Neanderthals is that most of the known Neanderthal "features" do turn up in modern Europeans at a low rate. This doesn't prove anything, because those features could just be adaptations to conditions in Europe over the past 40,000 years; those features evolved in the Cro Magnons' descendants for the same reasons they evolved in Neanderthals. The existence of such a feature set is "interesting", and is most easily explained by interbreeding. But it doesn't really prove anything.
That sounds a lot like the demo a while back that changing the contents of files in some computerized voting machines was so simple that a chimp can do it. (Actually, I googled for "chimp voting machine", and the first hit was at foxnews.com, of all places. And there were about 133,000 hits, which seem to be mostly about this fun story. ;-)
Of course, cloning a mammal is a lot more difficult than changing a file inside a computer. But I'd also note that whoever that "top scientist" was, he probably has cavemen as ancestors. And there are, technically speaking, a lot of "cavemen" in the world today. I had some friends in high school who liked to tell people that they lived in a cave. Their house was built against, and partly inside, a steep hillside. It faced south, and had mostly glass on the south side. It was one room deep and three rooms (stories) tall, i.e., a house sorta built on its side. It was a very nice house, and was cheap to heat and cool.
Considering that many people feel that Neanderthal DNA is integrated with human DNA, is there any point to this experiment?
Sure; it's the same reason that most scientific work is done. Some people may feel that our "modern" DNA includes Neanderthal DNA, but they don't actually have much evidence to support that hypothesis. Meanwhile, others (including, obviously, the author of TFA), feel that the Neanderthal people were a different species, but they have very little actual evidence to support their hypothesis.
The conventional scientific approach is to suggest experiments and observations that would produce evidence for or against either of these hypotheses. If we could actually extract enough fossil DNA to produce a viable clone of a Neanderthal, the question of whether they're the same species as us would be answered fairly quickly. OK, to be really sure, we'd have to wait until they're old enough to produce ovum or sperm cells. But that's a time scale that's comparable to some of our larger scientific efforts, such a designing and building particle accelerators or large telescopes.
The main problem with the article is that the idea that we'll soon have enough Neanderthal DNA is really just a wild conjecture. Nobody has that DNA in their lab yet, and we don't have any remains that can reasonably be expected to produce it. Maybe we will next year, as the article suggests.
Of course, one could respond to the whole thing with "Why bother?" Whether the Neanderthals were the same species as us is a question that has no obvious relevance to the modern world. But that line of reasoning is routinely used against most scientific work, We techies have long since learned to dismiss it out of hand, since if applied in the past, it would have prevented most important scientific discoveries. (It would have also prevented many inconsequential scientific discoveries, and also many dead ends that led to no discoveries. But in most cases we couldn't have known that beforehand.)
The scientific justification is "We want to know." But that wasn't the question. The question was more like "What would our religious/moral/ethical guardians say about such an experiment?" To nobody's surprise, here on /. opinion is divided.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't they bigger than us?
On average, yes, but that's probably because they were adapted to a cold climate. And if you compare the Neandert[h]als to the modern far-northern European populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia, most of the size difference disappears.
The other main possibility (which may be mentioned in subsequent messages that I haven't reached yet) is that they didn't disappear at all, but merged into the invading Cro Magnon population by interbreeding. Yeah, the media has made lots of fusses about claims that they were a different species. But the actual scientific evidence is very weak. It's mostly based on mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA), which is a tiny part of the genome and only inherited via the maternal line. If you understand much about genetics, you won't find this very convincing.
Actually, the question of whether the Neandertals are were a subspecies of Homo sapiens or a different species is likely a borderline case that will never be answered satisfactorily, due to incomplete fossil evidence. We don't have remains of very many of them, and DNA doesn't keep well. Unless there's a better-preserved specimen in the permafrost, and we find it before the permafrost is all gone, we will probably never know. It does seem like a lot of people are just assuming that they were a separate species and couldn't interbreed. Maybe they were. Or maybe they're a part of our ancestry. Further research is needed, as the scientific wording goes.
But it's easy to imagine a young Cro-Magnon woman meeting a big, hulking Conan-type Neandertal guy, and just swooning with delight. Their offspring would have only Cro-Magnon MtDNA, of course, which is consistent with what little DNA we have of them. Meanwhile, a slight Cro-Magnon men and a tall, stocky Neandertal woman wouldn't be nearly as attracted to each other, so Neandertal MtDNA would be much less likely to be passed on.
In any case, paleontologists have observed that if you could bring a Neandertal forward in your time machine, give him a shave and a haircut, dress him up in modern clothes, and drop him anywhere in modern Europe, nobody would give him a second glance. On average, they were physically somewhat different from the average European, but they were within the range of variation of the modern population. The public image is mostly a media creation, and has little to do with what we actually know from the fossil remains.
You try exposing your socket set to -269C and see how well it works. The steel will become brittle and shatter.
So where do you get that temperature (about 5K)? At the Earth's distance from the sun, the equilibrium temperature of a black body is 281K, about 8C. A steel socket set isn't a perfect black body, of course, but it's pretty close, much closer than you or I or our planet is. Also, a socket orbiting the Earth would be in the planet's shadow part of the time, so its temperature would be somewhat cooler. But the planet's IR radiation alone should keep it well above 5K.
Does anyone know the actual equilibrium temperature of a chunk of steel orbiting the Earth? Someone has to have collected the actual temperatures of various passive pieces of metal in low Earth orbits, but the obvious google keywords don't seem to find it. It shouldn't be much below 0C.
Could someone please explain this to me, why does Americans see the need to constantly surround themselves with US flags?
I think that's mostly a media image. I live in a house in a middle-class suburb of a major US city, and I just went outside and looked around. We're on a corner lot, so I can see block or two in four direction. I couldn't see any flags at all. I know that you can find a few flags if you drive around town, but you have to look for them. Most of them are at government-owned buildings, post offices and schools and such. The town hall has a set of 3 tall flagpoles with national, state and city flags. But that's about all.
I suspect that recent decades have produced an attitude in Americans that open displays of flags other than on the 4th of July are somewhat tasteless signs of an attitude that most of us would rather not be associated with. We don't own any flags, other than maybe a few images on some postage stamps. I don't recall ever entering any American home that had flags inside; people just don't decorate their homes' walls with flags. (Hmmm ... Maybe I should try it. Nah; my wife would never allow it. ;-)
Actually, I do have several photos of groups that I'm in, which have flags in the background. One shows a bunch of us on stage, playing music at a Scottish Country Dance, and the back of the stage had US, UK and Scottish flags on poles. Another shows some of us on stage at a local Finnish-American club, and at the corners of the stage were poles with US and Finnish flags. A third was at a local multi-ethnic festival, where we were playing music for dancers on a stage that was lined in back with a large number of national flags, most of which I can't identify. Such flag displays are sorta charming, I suppose, though I didn't really pay attention to the flags at the time. And I'd guess that such situations aren't what people are talking about when they discuss the display of American flags.
UID does not really correlate with age.
Yeah; that's a common misconception that has been shot down by the actual data for a number of online forums. But there are several processes at work that add to the poor correlation.
I've stumbled across one of the reasons here on /. and other places. I once had a somewhat lower UID, using more of my name but no digits. Then one day, it stopped working. A bit of poking around turned up that it was still valid, but my password didn't work for it. A question about it got no response, so I just shrugged, and made a new ID. That was long enough in the past that I no longer remember my original /. ID. But really, what does it matter?
I had an even funnier case a few years ago, when I was on several yahoo forums, and yahoo went through its rash of buying out zillions of smaller forums. I was on several of them, too. In the months of massive confusion that followed, I soon found that none of my login ids for any of them worked with yahoogroups. My original yahoo id also failed there. I did a bit of poking around (and sending unanswered queries), and found that no reasonable variant of my name was accepted as a new id. Finally, I tried respelling my name in French - and it was accepted. So now all my yahoogroups groups know me by my French name. A couple of years ago, I got an invitation to join QueTrad, a group about traditional Quebec music, and the people there were duly entertained by the story of why I used a French name online, when I barely speak French.
But again, what does it matter? It's a fact of life that online forums are a confused mess. They all mess up their accounts occasionally. They all have different (and sometimes changing) rules for what ids are acceptable. Once you're on several forums, you can never keep their policies straight. And you can never get responses from questions about your account, probably because the few people running a forum are too harried to answer. So we all have multiple aliases online, and they have to be changed occasionally.
And any meaning we might attribute to silly things like ID numbers is totally bogus.
You could be right, but I don't really know. She got XP from her employer's IT people, and validated it using the same VPN that she uses to work on it. So to XP's licensing stuff, her machine looks like it's on her office network. Presumably the company has a valid site license, though I have read stories about companies finding ways to install more instances than they've paid for. But I don't know if we could even validate that.
The idea that MS is a software company and thus shouldn't care what hardware you're using seems reasonable. But it doesn't seem to agree with all the stories about their attempts at strict controls. We've read a number of stories about MS's attempts to prevent running Windows and linux on the same machine. There have been similar stories recently about Apple, though our experience with XP on the iMac seems to show that at least our local Apple Store people openly support such things.
I even had a personal case some years back, when I had a new machine on which came with Windows, and I installed linux in a different partition. One day I needed to run something on Windows, so I booted it. When I shut it down and tried to boot linux, it wouldn't boot. Investigations showed that the linux partition was no longer marked as bootable. I took the radical approach of studying the docs, including the licenses, and I found the paragraph that explicitly stated that running Windows gave it permission to modify any disk partition. In another paragraph, the license actually said that Windows would "help" users by making non-Windows partitions unbootable. After figuring out how to make linux bootable again and verifying that it seemed undamaged otherwise, I wiped the Windows partition and reformatted it as ext2.
In any case, even if MS isn't selling the hardware, they do seem to sometimes take steps to sabotage competitors' software, especially competing OSs, that are on the same hardware. The above story isn't nearly the only one I've seen. And it wasn't the most vicious, since it seems to have only flipped the one bit, and didn't do any apparent damage otherwise. I've seen other cases (e.g. with WMP) where the MS software damaged competing software to the point that reinstallation was necessary. This wasn't on machines that I owned, though, since after the above booting problem, I've never allowed MS software to remain on my own linux machines.
'You won't have to worry about Vista if you buy one of Apple Computer's Macintosh computers, which don't run Windows,' Mossberg had written.
When my wife was asked to do half her work from home (and be much more productive that commuting to the office, it turns out), she had to look into replacing her ancient (4 years old ;-) Windows box. It was running XP, and her office hasn't upgraded to Vista, so she was looking for a PC to run XP. She couldn't buy one, until she asked at an Apple store. They explained to her that she could indeed run XP on a Mac. She got an iMac, installed XP via Fusion, and it works fine. Now a number of other people at work want her to teach them how to do it.
This has gotta be one of the things that terrifies MS's management. They lost a customer to Apple because the customer couldn't use Vista (for work-related reasons), and a competitor's system can run a virtualized XP subsystem. You could probably do the same with Linux.
Back in the 1970s, when the VM OS was taking over the IBM mainframe world, IBM responded by adopting VM and supporting it. This radically improved the usefulness of IBM's mainframes to their customers, and helped them consolidate their stranglehold on the mainframe market. So far, MS has viewed virtualization as a threat to their business, and has tried to block it. Maybe we shouldn't tell them that they're making a huge mistake. If they keep fighting it, they'll never be able to duplicate the total takeover that IBM managed in the mainframe arena. Virtualization is just too useful to a large percent of the users. And if we can avoid that sort of monoculture in the desktop, laptop, etc parts of the industry, we'll have a much healthier industry that will continue to innovate.
So let's all encourage MS to continue to try to block this development. It's for the benefit of everyone (except for MS's main stockholders).