All that aside, why would I want to buy a device that will not let me install whatever I want on my computer?
Perhaps because that's the only way it's available? I remember a decade or so back, when Microsoft tried to introduce their first tablet (which pretty much failed), and the news came out that it was available with linux installed in Asia, but not in the US. I didn't believe for a second that this was due to the Asian suppliers refusing to sell linux systems to Americans. We all knew what the real reason was.
Another possible reason: I have four linux boxes here in my office. One of them I bought. The other 3 started life as Windows boxes, but were discarded because the latest Windows upgrades wouldn't run properly on them. So I got them for free, installed linux, and years later they're still running fine, doing their jobs as assorted servers. This sort of recycling won't be possible with these new tablets, unless someone works out a reliable exploit that'll break Microsoft's lock on the hardware.
Is there some environment where sinkers get more nutrients and floaters get eaten or killed?
This is saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used to make beer. Brewers have been selecting for floculent yeast since long before scientists started playing with them.
Or more generally, for anything living in a lake or other body of water (at least those shallow enough that light reaches the bottom), there's an obvious selection for travel to the bottom: More nutrients are available in the bottom mud than higher up in the clear water. So we'd expect all sorts of aquatic single-cell life forms to evolve ways to find the bottom. Gravity is much less effective in water than in air, but it's a gradient that will lead you to the bottom. Pressure and light intensity are two other gradients that will get you there.
OTOH, algae like light and build most of their mass out of the water and dissolved CO2, with the help of incoming photons, so they have selective pressure to be at the top of the water.
It's not just yeast researchers; similar studies on other microorganisms should take into account the possibility that they're already selected for vertical motion through the water column.
Showing that single-cell organisms aren't hiding a clumping ability in their genome is tricky. This is part of why scientists say it's difficult to study the development of multicellularity. Every living thing on the planet has billions of years of ancestry, and we aren't even close to being able to ferret out all the obscure adaptations hiding in a critter's genome but not expressed in the samples that you're studying.
Such complexities are why scientists have learned to be skeptical until there has been significant replication of observations.
That's nonsense, it's all over the web, all over in books for decades
Right. And in another current topic you may have heard of, the US Congress is currently considering two bills that would impose huge fines plus jail terms for the people engaging in just this sort of "piracy". This is exactly the sort of stuff they're trying to get shut down, in the name of "protecting the poor starving artists" whose commercial rights to their (or their ancestor's) work is being infringed.
It may be "nonsense", but governments have been known to seriously punish people who engage in public nonsense. The SOPA/PIPA discussion includes some links to stories about the US government attacking and shutting down comic-book stores and publishers back in the 1950s, and blacklisting their owners for years after. People have been and can be severely punished for "nonsense".
The US Constitution has a minimum age and citizenship requirements for the president and members of Congress; we need an Amendment requiring that they also have a sense of humor...
I'm perfectly fine with Slashdot remaining neutral on the matter.
Yeah, me too. (First time ever I've been tempted to do a "me too" post.;-)
As others have pointed out, readers of/. hardly need to be told about this topic. We've been told about it every third day or so for the past month or so. And blacking out/. wouldn't even be noticed by the folks in the US Congress or the rest of the political system.
OTOH, it's useful to have a place dedicated to news and discussions on current tech "nerd" topics. The blacked-out sites aren't very good sources of any breaking stories, such as the fake tabling of SOPA and its resurrection already (and it's not even the third day).
Maybe a front-page list of good sites with actual information on the two bills would be in order.
Donaldson and Dunfee, Ethics in Business and Economics, is $680 on Amazon. (But it ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping!) Gotta love the combination of price and title.
Isn't that one of the prime contestants for the title of World's Thinnest Books?
It's from the USA. The laws under discussion today would make such violation of the King family's IP illegal in the US , subject to heavy fines and jail time for the perpetrators.
Re:Really? I found it on youtube in about 10 secon
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Yeah, and if the SOPA/PIPA acts are passed by Congress, youtube and everyone else will presumably have to remove such infringements or face some serious fines (and jail time for the criminals who expose us to such speech).
Gamma radiation I could see, but X-Rays have a GREAT deal of difficulty penetrating metal.
Hmmm... Both of our cars seem to have a good portion of their surface made of glass, not metal. The area is enough to expose roughly half of our bodies to radiation (like the visual spectrum) that can penetrate glass. Do car windows also block X-rays? How about gamma-rays?
And where do you get a car that's made entirely of metal? They don't seem to be for sale hereabouts.
That will only happen, if you use biometrics to authenticate ( which is stupid) . Use it to identify , and there is no reason anyone should cut off your fingers, because they would still need your password. And as I said, biometrics can fail , so there should always be a fallback system.
So the plan is that they'll beat the password out of you, and then they'll cut off your fingers, right?
Buying the instrument a ticket makes a lot of sense for the larger instruments. I've taken a few small instruments in my carry-on bag.
One of those cases produced a fun anecdote. I had a pennywhistle in my carry-on, and the guy at the X-ray machine was very suspicious. He took it out and asked me what it was. I took it out of his hand, and started playing a nice, lively jig. Everyone around broke out into smiles, and a couple of people started doing Irish jig steps. They waved me through, with smiles on their faces.
It occurred to me afterward, though, that if you look at a pennywhistle closely, it's a small tube of thin steel (or sometimes brass, or tin-plated other metals). It would make a serviceable stiletto, and you could do a lot of damage to someone if you used it to "take a core sample" (as a forest biologist might say). Of course, you might not want to play it afterward, until you've cleaned it up well. But I didn't mention this to the airline people.
There have been a few funny stories about people on an airplane realizing that they'd brought along serious weapons without the security folks noticing. One I read a while ago was a physician who used obsidian blades in his scalpels, and had a packet of them in his pocket. These are among the sharpest blades that exist, good for making fast, clean cuts, and a person comfortable with handling them could kill a lot of people very quickly. Of course, he used them professionally, to save people's lives. But they were still a serious violation of the rules, since they're much more dangerous than box cutters l. He also didn't report himself to the airline security people. But he blogged about it, and NPR interviewed him.
Yeah, that one got a lot of attention. They did a really good job with it (and the "recycled" melody;-). I wonder how many other good ones like this are lurking out there? I've seen a few blog comments along the same line, but no song quite as good as this one.
(I have wondered if they got any actual airline employees to help in that video. There have to be some musicians among the employees, and you just know how they must have felt about all this.)
I might add that a number of people have written about another strategy for preventing "loss" of luggage or contents: Sending important/valuable luggage to your destination (typically a hotel) via any of the package delivery services (postal, FedEx, etc). This has become especially common since airlines started charging extra for more than one small piece of luggage. All the package delivery services have faster and more reliable service than the airlines, and it often costs less. They'll deliver it to any address, and it's likely to arrive before you do (so you may want to tell the hotel to be on the lookout for it;-).
I know a number of musicians who have sent their instruments this way, after reading all the horror stories of what airlines do to fragile instruments.
Never leave anything valuable in your checked bags. Take it as carryon, leave it at home, mail it, or check it with a gun since those bags are inspected in front of you then kept locked and tracked for the whole trip.
Or you can do as Bruce Schneier does, and many others have reported: Include a starter pistol in your luggage, and declare it. It seems the TSA's rules include starter pistols as "weapons", and if you have one, they'll inspect your luggage before your eyes, lock it, and store it in a separate part of the airplane. Bruce and others have reported that this not only works; it also reduces the "loss" of luggage (or valuable contents like cameras and computers) to around zero. In effect, for the cost of a starter pistol, you are using the security folks to lock and guard your luggage and guarantee delivery.
I see that another reply deals with New York's stringent gun laws. Does anyone know whether a starter pistol (or stage pistols that just fire smoke) are considered "weapons" in New York or other states? If so, it might be interesting to push for Federal registration of such pseudo-guns, to avoid the hassle of trying to register them with the bureaucracies of N different states.
Anyway, if you try this gimmick, you might want to write up your experiences. And you might want to thank the TSA "agents" for their assistance in making the flight safe for you and your belongings.;-)
Or maybe we'll find a world of catgirls. If they're like our planet's Carnivora, each of them would have 8 boobs. Of course, if they're furry Amazons, they'd probably amputate 2 of them.
With crystals growing in a liquid, matter which is dissolved in the surrounding liquid gets added to the crystal. There is no real chemical change that takes place, the dissolved particulates just coalesce on something else. When the liquid and its particulates is removed the crystal no longer grows, but the crystal itself does not take the particulates out of the liquid. The particulates simply adhere to the crystal (or any other structure on which the crystal starts).
Hmm... That needs a bit of rewriting. It reads a whole lot like a description of most of the higher plants growing out in our garden. They require much of their nutrition from the water that pervades their soil (and they die if that water is removed). They even get their carbon from the CO2 that has dissolved in the water in their tissues; they don't take it directly from the atmosphere. They absorb the nutrients from the water, transport them via diffusion and capillary action (two things that are normal with inorganic chemistry), and then let them "adhere" to whatever chemical substances they encounter. The nutrients remain in a water solution the whole time, except when they attach chemically to a part of the non-water constituents of the plant. There's really nothing there that distinguishes an inorganic crystal from a living plant. They're both formed by complex deposition processes that occur in water. (Except for crystals formed deep underground, only some of which need water to form.)
And note that most natural crystals are formed from atoms or radicals that weren't attached to each other while in solution. A crystal is a large molecule that typically bears little resemblance to the dissolved particles that it incorporated.
We animals do have a special capability: We can reach out, grab our food, and ingest it into our chemical reaction input processor (which is also mostly water). Crystals and plants are pretty much stuck with sitting still and waiting for water to come along bearing dissolved nutrients. But even for us, our tissues are made by deposition from a water solution, as with plants and (most) crystals).
Of course, there are a few plants that have evolved the ability to grab their prey. The fly-traps and bladderworts have two very different mechanisms for catching their food. But the rest of the plants, under the above description, sound a lot like extremely complex mixtures of crystalline substances, formed in a watery cellular environment from atoms dissolved in their water. How would a visiting alien recognize that they're alive?
(This is mostly in jest, of course. I'm just pointing out that a good definition is a lot trickier than that. There's a real danger of either deciding that hardly anything on Earth is alive, or that most of our geology is made of living things.)
In the specific case of Mozilla, it has about 60x more employees now than in 2002 (and 3x what it had in 2009). It would be _really_ odd if improvement rate were actually slower as a result,...
It wouldn't surprise me. One of the long-standing rules in software development is "Adding people to a late project makes it later". The more people working on it, the longer it'll take.
Management never seems to understand this, though in my experience, all their data supports it -- at least when you have >2 people involved in any component. Two people have a chance of communicating; 3 or more people make a committee, and we all know what happens in committee meetings.
They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive.
This is likely to trigger red flags in the minds of a lot of people with biological training. Just what is "organic carbon"? That's a media phrase that isn't too well defined in scientific circles. There's a great variety in the "organic" carbon chemistry of our world. But we should expect that any life on other worlds, even if it uses carbon, will produce compounds and radicals that are different and/or more varied than what we see here.
Another problem is that astronomers long ago pointed out a probable path for Earth bacteria colonizing the rest of our solar system, and possibly beyond. Earth has a thin "dust tail" produced by the same solar light pressure that produces comet tails. This is a problem for some kinds of astronomical observations in the plane of the solar system, since our dust tail reflects back back to us. Anyway, back in the 1970s, satellite and upper-atmosphere probes verified the presence of both fine dust particles and bacterial spores at all altitudes. The planet's dust tail thus contains such dust and spores. So the Earth has been contaminating the outer solar system with bacterial spores, presumably for some billions of years. We don't know whether any of those bacteria can survive on the outer planets. But the default assumption should be that some of them have, and have adapted to some degree over those billions of years to their new environments. Maybe they have; maybe they haven't. But if we find Earth-like bacteria out there, they probably came from here.
Some astronomers have also calculated out that part of our dust tail (and comets' tails) escapes the solar system. So we've been contaminating the galaxy with bacterial spores for billions of years. A billion years is around 4 or 5 orbits of the galaxy, up to 20 or so orbits since life arose here. The chaotic nature of galactic dynamics mean that our dust has spread through the entire galaxy, as has the dust from other planets with atmospheres.
This argument is more often used by the "panspermia" supporters, who point out that life from anywhere else in the galaxy could have colonized Earth in its early years, since the galaxy is around 13 billion years old, while our solar system is only about 1/3 that age. But some astronomers use it to explain how earthly life could have colonized the rest of the galaxy before humans evolved here. And, of course, both could be true.
Of course, the main problem with all this is that we have no data on how well bacterial spores can survive the millennia in interstellar space. Probably not well, but it doesn't take a whole ecosystem to establish a colony. For bacteria, it only requires one spore (and hundreds of millions of years;-).
Probably the best prediction is that eventually, some probe will find a few bacteria on Mars and/or other planets, and they'll be somewhat similar to bacteria on our planet. This will raise more questions than it answers, as is common in most scientific fields.
So... fire is alive by your definition and a bumble bee drone isn't.
Huh? A (bumble)bee drone reproduces. Essentially, that's the only thing it does, and then it dies. But its descendants live on, starting from the fertilized eggs inside the drone's mate(s).
Fire does sorta throw water on the definition, though. It definitely "feeds", and reproduces in the sense of expanding. So do crystal formations, which aren't considered alive.
Methinks this definition needs a bit of revision. Maybe some actual biologists could chime in with something with better wording.
People felt that the Aether should exist because the existing theories at the time governing the physical laws of the universe predicted that it ought to exist. and its nonexistence would mean that those theories were wrong (and they were). What is particularly interesting about proving the non-existance of the Aether (who says you can't prove that something doesn't exist?) is that it was accomplished without adequately forming another explanation for what was expected to happen...
In contrast to this, I've read explanations in a number of physics and other scientific textbooks that, strictly speaking, Einstein didn't disprove the existence of the aether at all. His new theory simply ignored the aether. When it turned out that Einstein's equations were better predictors of the universe's behavior than previous equations, physicists didn't insist that there was no aether; they also simply stopped mentioning it. It became irrelevant.
Of course, the distinction here is probably a bit too subtle for most people. In popular/media speech, it makes sense to say that physicists had shown that space was empty, and the aether doesn't exist. But it's more accurate to say that they showed that they didn't need the aether to explain the universe. Something like it might exist, but our measurements aren't yet good enough to detect its effects. It may exist, but it's irrelevant.
The same approach could be used with "dark matter". At the moment, it's a useful concept that works better than previous concepts to explain some observations (such as galactic lensing and the rotation speeds of galaxies). But, as with the aether, someone may come up with an alternate concept (plus appropriate equations) that work better. Or maybe the new concept that works will be a refinement of "dark matter" that supports its existence. We don't know yet, so stay tuned.
It has been argued that the above approach is also a good explanation of scientific attitudes towards God (or gods). Science hasn't shown that there's no god in our universe. Rather, they have shown that they can get better explanations of the universe's behavior if they simply ignore the concept of gods, and only work with things like photons, electrons, quarks, etc. Adding a god (or an aether) to scientific theories adds no further explanatory power, so it's best to just put such concepts on the shelf of history and ignore them. They're irrelevant to understanding the universe. At present, we don't have a better concept than dark matter, so it's sitting on the "active hypotheses" shelf.
Maybe I was a bit too subtle. What I was thinking of was the old slogan "Kill them all and let God sort them out." You sometimes run across variants of this, all of the form "_____ them all and let _____ sort them out." It's sorta the ultimate trope for cynical characterization of someone else's attitude toward a problem.
For the current topic, we might similarly suggest that the approach of the big corporations amounts to "Patent everything and let our teams or corporate lawyers sort it out in court."
Sometimes I think the USPTO approves this kind of patent as a sort of protest; just to get attention and force Congress to give them rules allowing them to reject "obvious" inventions and reference prior art other than publications.
Actually, the Patent Office folks have explained this publicly in the past. Their motive isn't to get rules and definitions from Congress. They agree that such things should be the Patent Office's job. Their motive is to get Congress to fund the required work. Some years back, when Congress passed the laws that radically expanded what could be patented, Congress also cut back on Patent Office funding. The Patent Office can't do the "obvious" checking of patent applications, because they can't legally hire (and train) the people that the job has required for the past decade or so. The flood of patent applications has become an astronomical number.
The Patent Office folks made it pretty clear back then that their only possible approach was something that historians will find familiar: Approve them all, and let the Courts sort them out. Essentially, funding for patent examination has been moved into the Private Sector, aka the lawyers. This has, of course, radically increased the cost of a patent application, because the court system simply wasn't designed for this sort of task, and patent lawyers cost a lot more than patent examiners.
As long as our political system remains in its current "privatization is the way to go" state, this is not likely to change. And if you're complaining about the way that the current patent system is a dead weight on economic development, you should understand that that's exactly its function. A patent is a tool for limiting use of a bit of technology to someone who can afford to defend the patent. That's intentional, and it has always been used by the big guys against the little guys. The only way to fix it is to limit what can be patented. A decade back, the US Congress took exactly the opposite approach, and radically expanded what was patentable. They did this knowingly, to limit access to technology to the big guys (aka campaign contributors;-). This isn't going to be fixed as long as the crowd that did that is still running the US Congress.
(Well, OK, there's an outside chance that the courts might cancel those laws on obvious Constitutional grounds. Anyone want to make a wager on when that might happen, how much the appeal process will cost, or how many years it'll take?;-)
As someone else pointed out here, numerical methods for our own probes give good results to roughly one month out, and they all need course correction every week or three to hit their targets. More precise measurements don't increase this much, because the basic problem isn't precision. A bigger problem is that we don't have very accurate maps of gravitational potential in most of the solar system. Tiny variations in gravity can have huge effects over the course of months and years. That's what chaos theory is all about. The projected error bars for a rock like this in an orbit like this, will grow indefinitely. This is why stories about whether a given rock will hit the Earth the next time around so often give a probability, not just "Yes" or "No".
Also, the earlier comment that "This is Newtonian mechanics" is wrong for intervals past a few months. To get enough accuracy to predict whether it'll hit us in its next (or Nth) pass years from now, you need relativistic mechanics. After all, the GPS system requires relativity to get its meter-level accuracy, and it's dealing with things of known mass that are very close to the Earth.
Funny, when I read "fracking poisons the water by dumping 254 chemicals into the ground", my first thought (being a computer geek) was that they were obviously using some very old computer equipment, or for some unstated reason were storing the number as an 8-bit signed integer (char for us C programmers). This would explain the number, since when they attempted to add one more to the list, the software reported that -1 chemicals were in the list. This couldn't be right, so they stopped the testing with the last one that the software could handle properly. Then someone else came along and reported that 254 as the total number.
Then, of course, I decided that this was just me being overly silly. But now I'm not so sure. When you see overly-precise looking numbers, and they're "magic" numbers in their binary representation, there's a really good chance that they did come about due to some specific software hiccup that's an artifact of the binary representation.
Anyone know where that 254 actually came from? It is actually the right number, in any sense of "right"? It's just too suspicious to be accepted as real in a computer-geek environment.
Slashdot Mirror
All that aside, why would I want to buy a device that will not let me install whatever I want on my computer?
Perhaps because that's the only way it's available? I remember a decade or so back, when Microsoft tried to introduce their first tablet (which pretty much failed), and the news came out that it was available with linux installed in Asia, but not in the US. I didn't believe for a second that this was due to the Asian suppliers refusing to sell linux systems to Americans. We all knew what the real reason was.
Another possible reason: I have four linux boxes here in my office. One of them I bought. The other 3 started life as Windows boxes, but were discarded because the latest Windows upgrades wouldn't run properly on them. So I got them for free, installed linux, and years later they're still running fine, doing their jobs as assorted servers. This sort of recycling won't be possible with these new tablets, unless someone works out a reliable exploit that'll break Microsoft's lock on the hardware.
Is there some environment where sinkers get more nutrients and floaters get eaten or killed?
This is saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used to make beer. Brewers have been selecting for floculent yeast since long before scientists started playing with them.
Or more generally, for anything living in a lake or other body of water (at least those shallow enough that light reaches the bottom), there's an obvious selection for travel to the bottom: More nutrients are available in the bottom mud than higher up in the clear water. So we'd expect all sorts of aquatic single-cell life forms to evolve ways to find the bottom. Gravity is much less effective in water than in air, but it's a gradient that will lead you to the bottom. Pressure and light intensity are two other gradients that will get you there.
OTOH, algae like light and build most of their mass out of the water and dissolved CO2, with the help of incoming photons, so they have selective pressure to be at the top of the water.
It's not just yeast researchers; similar studies on other microorganisms should take into account the possibility that they're already selected for vertical motion through the water column.
Showing that single-cell organisms aren't hiding a clumping ability in their genome is tricky. This is part of why scientists say it's difficult to study the development of multicellularity. Every living thing on the planet has billions of years of ancestry, and we aren't even close to being able to ferret out all the obscure adaptations hiding in a critter's genome but not expressed in the samples that you're studying.
Such complexities are why scientists have learned to be skeptical until there has been significant replication of observations.
That's nonsense, it's all over the web, all over in books for decades
Right. And in another current topic you may have heard of, the US Congress is currently considering two bills that would impose huge fines plus jail terms for the people engaging in just this sort of "piracy". This is exactly the sort of stuff they're trying to get shut down, in the name of "protecting the poor starving artists" whose commercial rights to their (or their ancestor's) work is being infringed.
It may be "nonsense", but governments have been known to seriously punish people who engage in public nonsense. The SOPA/PIPA discussion includes some links to stories about the US government attacking and shutting down comic-book stores and publishers back in the 1950s, and blacklisting their owners for years after. People have been and can be severely punished for "nonsense".
The US Constitution has a minimum age and citizenship requirements for the president and members of Congress; we need an Amendment requiring that they also have a sense of humor ...
I'm perfectly fine with Slashdot remaining neutral on the matter.
Yeah, me too. (First time ever I've been tempted to do a "me too" post. ;-)
As others have pointed out, readers of /. hardly need to be told about this topic. We've been told about it every third day or so for the past month or so. And blacking out /. wouldn't even be noticed by the folks in the US Congress or the rest of the political system.
OTOH, it's useful to have a place dedicated to news and discussions on current tech "nerd" topics. The blacked-out sites aren't very good sources of any breaking stories, such as the fake tabling of SOPA and its resurrection already (and it's not even the third day).
Maybe a front-page list of good sites with actual information on the two bills would be in order.
Donaldson and Dunfee, Ethics in Business and Economics, is $680 on Amazon. (But it ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping!) Gotta love the combination of price and title.
Isn't that one of the prime contestants for the title of World's Thinnest Books?
It's from the USA. The laws under discussion today would make such violation of the King family's IP illegal in the US , subject to heavy fines and jail time for the perpetrators.
Yeah, and if the SOPA/PIPA acts are passed by Congress, youtube and everyone else will presumably have to remove such infringements or face some serious fines (and jail time for the criminals who expose us to such speech).
If /. is just trade rag bullshit, then why even come here?
Because it's all put into perspective by people like you.
Gamma radiation I could see, but X-Rays have a GREAT deal of difficulty penetrating metal.
Hmmm ... Both of our cars seem to have a good portion of their surface made of glass, not metal. The area is enough to expose roughly half of our bodies to radiation (like the visual spectrum) that can penetrate glass. Do car windows also block X-rays? How about gamma-rays?
And where do you get a car that's made entirely of metal? They don't seem to be for sale hereabouts.
That will only happen, if you use biometrics to authenticate ( which is stupid) . Use it to identify , and there is no reason anyone should cut off your fingers, because they would still need your password. And as I said, biometrics can fail , so there should always be a fallback system.
So the plan is that they'll beat the password out of you, and then they'll cut off your fingers, right?
Buying the instrument a ticket makes a lot of sense for the larger instruments. I've taken a few small instruments in my carry-on bag.
One of those cases produced a fun anecdote. I had a pennywhistle in my carry-on, and the guy at the X-ray machine was very suspicious. He took it out and asked me what it was. I took it out of his hand, and started playing a nice, lively jig. Everyone around broke out into smiles, and a couple of people started doing Irish jig steps. They waved me through, with smiles on their faces.
It occurred to me afterward, though, that if you look at a pennywhistle closely, it's a small tube of thin steel (or sometimes brass, or tin-plated other metals). It would make a serviceable stiletto, and you could do a lot of damage to someone if you used it to "take a core sample" (as a forest biologist might say). Of course, you might not want to play it afterward, until you've cleaned it up well. But I didn't mention this to the airline people.
There have been a few funny stories about people on an airplane realizing that they'd brought along serious weapons without the security folks noticing. One I read a while ago was a physician who used obsidian blades in his scalpels, and had a packet of them in his pocket. These are among the sharpest blades that exist, good for making fast, clean cuts, and a person comfortable with handling them could kill a lot of people very quickly. Of course, he used them professionally, to save people's lives. But they were still a serious violation of the rules, since they're much more dangerous than box cutters l. He also didn't report himself to the airline security people. But he blogged about it, and NPR interviewed him.
Yeah, that one got a lot of attention. They did a really good job with it (and the "recycled" melody ;-). I wonder how many other good ones like this are lurking out there? I've seen a few blog comments along the same line, but no song quite as good as this one.
(I have wondered if they got any actual airline employees to help in that video. There have to be some musicians among the employees, and you just know how they must have felt about all this.)
I might add that a number of people have written about another strategy for preventing "loss" of luggage or contents: Sending important/valuable luggage to your destination (typically a hotel) via any of the package delivery services (postal, FedEx, etc). This has become especially common since airlines started charging extra for more than one small piece of luggage. All the package delivery services have faster and more reliable service than the airlines, and it often costs less. They'll deliver it to any address, and it's likely to arrive before you do (so you may want to tell the hotel to be on the lookout for it ;-).
I know a number of musicians who have sent their instruments this way, after reading all the horror stories of what airlines do to fragile instruments.
Never leave anything valuable in your checked bags. Take it as carryon, leave it at home, mail it, or check it with a gun since those bags are inspected in front of you then kept locked and tracked for the whole trip.
Or you can do as Bruce Schneier does, and many others have reported: Include a starter pistol in your luggage, and declare it. It seems the TSA's rules include starter pistols as "weapons", and if you have one, they'll inspect your luggage before your eyes, lock it, and store it in a separate part of the airplane. Bruce and others have reported that this not only works; it also reduces the "loss" of luggage (or valuable contents like cameras and computers) to around zero. In effect, for the cost of a starter pistol, you are using the security folks to lock and guard your luggage and guarantee delivery.
I see that another reply deals with New York's stringent gun laws. Does anyone know whether a starter pistol (or stage pistols that just fire smoke) are considered "weapons" in New York or other states? If so, it might be interesting to push for Federal registration of such pseudo-guns, to avoid the hassle of trying to register them with the bureaucracies of N different states.
Anyway, if you try this gimmick, you might want to write up your experiences. And you might want to thank the TSA "agents" for their assistance in making the flight safe for you and your belongings. ;-)
Or maybe we'll find a world of catgirls. If they're like our planet's Carnivora, each of them would have 8 boobs. Of course, if they're furry Amazons, they'd probably amputate 2 of them.
With crystals growing in a liquid, matter which is dissolved in the surrounding liquid gets added to the crystal. There is no real chemical change that takes place, the dissolved particulates just coalesce on something else. When the liquid and its particulates is removed the crystal no longer grows, but the crystal itself does not take the particulates out of the liquid. The particulates simply adhere to the crystal (or any other structure on which the crystal starts).
Hmm ... That needs a bit of rewriting. It reads a whole lot like a description of most of the higher plants growing out in our garden. They require much of their nutrition from the water that pervades their soil (and they die if that water is removed). They even get their carbon from the CO2 that has dissolved in the water in their tissues; they don't take it directly from the atmosphere. They absorb the nutrients from the water, transport them via diffusion and capillary action (two things that are normal with inorganic chemistry), and then let them "adhere" to whatever chemical substances they encounter. The nutrients remain in a water solution the whole time, except when they attach chemically to a part of the non-water constituents of the plant. There's really nothing there that distinguishes an inorganic crystal from a living plant. They're both formed by complex deposition processes that occur in water. (Except for crystals formed deep underground, only some of which need water to form.)
And note that most natural crystals are formed from atoms or radicals that weren't attached to each other while in solution. A crystal is a large molecule that typically bears little resemblance to the dissolved particles that it incorporated.
We animals do have a special capability: We can reach out, grab our food, and ingest it into our chemical reaction input processor (which is also mostly water). Crystals and plants are pretty much stuck with sitting still and waiting for water to come along bearing dissolved nutrients. But even for us, our tissues are made by deposition from a water solution, as with plants and (most) crystals).
Of course, there are a few plants that have evolved the ability to grab their prey. The fly-traps and bladderworts have two very different mechanisms for catching their food. But the rest of the plants, under the above description, sound a lot like extremely complex mixtures of crystalline substances, formed in a watery cellular environment from atoms dissolved in their water. How would a visiting alien recognize that they're alive?
(This is mostly in jest, of course. I'm just pointing out that a good definition is a lot trickier than that. There's a real danger of either deciding that hardly anything on Earth is alive, or that most of our geology is made of living things.)
In the specific case of Mozilla, it has about 60x more employees now than in 2002 (and 3x what it had in 2009). It would be _really_ odd if improvement rate were actually slower as a result, ...
It wouldn't surprise me. One of the long-standing rules in software development is "Adding people to a late project makes it later". The more people working on it, the longer it'll take.
Management never seems to understand this, though in my experience, all their data supports it -- at least when you have >2 people involved in any component. Two people have a chance of communicating; 3 or more people make a committee, and we all know what happens in committee meetings.
They are looking for organic carbon, which life on Earth produces and, in some cases, can feed on to survive.
This is likely to trigger red flags in the minds of a lot of people with biological training. Just what is "organic carbon"? That's a media phrase that isn't too well defined in scientific circles. There's a great variety in the "organic" carbon chemistry of our world. But we should expect that any life on other worlds, even if it uses carbon, will produce compounds and radicals that are different and/or more varied than what we see here.
Another problem is that astronomers long ago pointed out a probable path for Earth bacteria colonizing the rest of our solar system, and possibly beyond. Earth has a thin "dust tail" produced by the same solar light pressure that produces comet tails. This is a problem for some kinds of astronomical observations in the plane of the solar system, since our dust tail reflects back back to us. Anyway, back in the 1970s, satellite and upper-atmosphere probes verified the presence of both fine dust particles and bacterial spores at all altitudes. The planet's dust tail thus contains such dust and spores. So the Earth has been contaminating the outer solar system with bacterial spores, presumably for some billions of years. We don't know whether any of those bacteria can survive on the outer planets. But the default assumption should be that some of them have, and have adapted to some degree over those billions of years to their new environments. Maybe they have; maybe they haven't. But if we find Earth-like bacteria out there, they probably came from here.
Some astronomers have also calculated out that part of our dust tail (and comets' tails) escapes the solar system. So we've been contaminating the galaxy with bacterial spores for billions of years. A billion years is around 4 or 5 orbits of the galaxy, up to 20 or so orbits since life arose here. The chaotic nature of galactic dynamics mean that our dust has spread through the entire galaxy, as has the dust from other planets with atmospheres.
This argument is more often used by the "panspermia" supporters, who point out that life from anywhere else in the galaxy could have colonized Earth in its early years, since the galaxy is around 13 billion years old, while our solar system is only about 1/3 that age. But some astronomers use it to explain how earthly life could have colonized the rest of the galaxy before humans evolved here. And, of course, both could be true.
Of course, the main problem with all this is that we have no data on how well bacterial spores can survive the millennia in interstellar space. Probably not well, but it doesn't take a whole ecosystem to establish a colony. For bacteria, it only requires one spore (and hundreds of millions of years ;-).
Probably the best prediction is that eventually, some probe will find a few bacteria on Mars and/or other planets, and they'll be somewhat similar to bacteria on our planet. This will raise more questions than it answers, as is common in most scientific fields.
So... fire is alive by your definition and a bumble bee drone isn't.
Huh? A (bumble)bee drone reproduces. Essentially, that's the only thing it does, and then it dies. But its descendants live on, starting from the fertilized eggs inside the drone's mate(s).
Fire does sorta throw water on the definition, though. It definitely "feeds", and reproduces in the sense of expanding. So do crystal formations, which aren't considered alive.
Methinks this definition needs a bit of revision. Maybe some actual biologists could chime in with something with better wording.
People felt that the Aether should exist because the existing theories at the time governing the physical laws of the universe predicted that it ought to exist. and its nonexistence would mean that those theories were wrong (and they were). What is particularly interesting about proving the non-existance of the Aether (who says you can't prove that something doesn't exist?) is that it was accomplished without adequately forming another explanation for what was expected to happen...
In contrast to this, I've read explanations in a number of physics and other scientific textbooks that, strictly speaking, Einstein didn't disprove the existence of the aether at all. His new theory simply ignored the aether. When it turned out that Einstein's equations were better predictors of the universe's behavior than previous equations, physicists didn't insist that there was no aether; they also simply stopped mentioning it. It became irrelevant.
Of course, the distinction here is probably a bit too subtle for most people. In popular/media speech, it makes sense to say that physicists had shown that space was empty, and the aether doesn't exist. But it's more accurate to say that they showed that they didn't need the aether to explain the universe. Something like it might exist, but our measurements aren't yet good enough to detect its effects. It may exist, but it's irrelevant.
The same approach could be used with "dark matter". At the moment, it's a useful concept that works better than previous concepts to explain some observations (such as galactic lensing and the rotation speeds of galaxies). But, as with the aether, someone may come up with an alternate concept (plus appropriate equations) that work better. Or maybe the new concept that works will be a refinement of "dark matter" that supports its existence. We don't know yet, so stay tuned.
It has been argued that the above approach is also a good explanation of scientific attitudes towards God (or gods). Science hasn't shown that there's no god in our universe. Rather, they have shown that they can get better explanations of the universe's behavior if they simply ignore the concept of gods, and only work with things like photons, electrons, quarks, etc. Adding a god (or an aether) to scientific theories adds no further explanatory power, so it's best to just put such concepts on the shelf of history and ignore them. They're irrelevant to understanding the universe. At present, we don't have a better concept than dark matter, so it's sitting on the "active hypotheses" shelf.
Yeah; I thought of adding that to my comment. But then I decided to let someone else have the honor. ;-)
Maybe I was a bit too subtle. What I was thinking of was the old slogan "Kill them all and let God sort them out." You sometimes run across variants of this, all of the form "_____ them all and let _____ sort them out." It's sorta the ultimate trope for cynical characterization of someone else's attitude toward a problem.
For the current topic, we might similarly suggest that the approach of the big corporations amounts to "Patent everything and let our teams or corporate lawyers sort it out in court."
Sometimes I think the USPTO approves this kind of patent as a sort of protest; just to get attention and force Congress to give them rules allowing them to reject "obvious" inventions and reference prior art other than publications.
Actually, the Patent Office folks have explained this publicly in the past. Their motive isn't to get rules and definitions from Congress. They agree that such things should be the Patent Office's job. Their motive is to get Congress to fund the required work. Some years back, when Congress passed the laws that radically expanded what could be patented, Congress also cut back on Patent Office funding. The Patent Office can't do the "obvious" checking of patent applications, because they can't legally hire (and train) the people that the job has required for the past decade or so. The flood of patent applications has become an astronomical number.
The Patent Office folks made it pretty clear back then that their only possible approach was something that historians will find familiar: Approve them all, and let the Courts sort them out. Essentially, funding for patent examination has been moved into the Private Sector, aka the lawyers. This has, of course, radically increased the cost of a patent application, because the court system simply wasn't designed for this sort of task, and patent lawyers cost a lot more than patent examiners.
As long as our political system remains in its current "privatization is the way to go" state, this is not likely to change. And if you're complaining about the way that the current patent system is a dead weight on economic development, you should understand that that's exactly its function. A patent is a tool for limiting use of a bit of technology to someone who can afford to defend the patent. That's intentional, and it has always been used by the big guys against the little guys. The only way to fix it is to limit what can be patented. A decade back, the US Congress took exactly the opposite approach, and radically expanded what was patentable. They did this knowingly, to limit access to technology to the big guys (aka campaign contributors ;-). This isn't going to be fixed as long as the crowd that did that is still running the US Congress.
(Well, OK, there's an outside chance that the courts might cancel those laws on obvious Constitutional grounds. Anyone want to make a wager on when that might happen, how much the appeal process will cost, or how many years it'll take? ;-)
As someone else pointed out here, numerical methods for our own probes give good results to roughly one month out, and they all need course correction every week or three to hit their targets. More precise measurements don't increase this much, because the basic problem isn't precision. A bigger problem is that we don't have very accurate maps of gravitational potential in most of the solar system. Tiny variations in gravity can have huge effects over the course of months and years. That's what chaos theory is all about. The projected error bars for a rock like this in an orbit like this, will grow indefinitely. This is why stories about whether a given rock will hit the Earth the next time around so often give a probability, not just "Yes" or "No".
Also, the earlier comment that "This is Newtonian mechanics" is wrong for intervals past a few months. To get enough accuracy to predict whether it'll hit us in its next (or Nth) pass years from now, you need relativistic mechanics. After all, the GPS system requires relativity to get its meter-level accuracy, and it's dealing with things of known mass that are very close to the Earth.
Funny, when I read "fracking poisons the water by dumping 254 chemicals into the ground", my first thought (being a computer geek) was that they were obviously using some very old computer equipment, or for some unstated reason were storing the number as an 8-bit signed integer (char for us C programmers). This would explain the number, since when they attempted to add one more to the list, the software reported that -1 chemicals were in the list. This couldn't be right, so they stopped the testing with the last one that the software could handle properly. Then someone else came along and reported that 254 as the total number.
Then, of course, I decided that this was just me being overly silly. But now I'm not so sure. When you see overly-precise looking numbers, and they're "magic" numbers in their binary representation, there's a really good chance that they did come about due to some specific software hiccup that's an artifact of the binary representation.
Anyone know where that 254 actually came from? It is actually the right number, in any sense of "right"? It's just too suspicious to be accepted as real in a computer-geek environment.