I can't imagine the problems this ass-hat idea would cause if put into effect, especially wrt international time differences which will now vary according to the time of year (those parts of the year when the US will now be on Bush time vs world time).
I'm sure multinational businesses, airlines, etc, are going to have a ball with this.
What next? Bush passes law to make everyone wear orange on tuesdays and walk backwards on the weekend?!
I disagree... Once the browser has established an HTTP connection to the server, the server can then indefinitely send sporadic (multi-part MIME) responses (e.g. XML data/updates/commands) on that connection as it pleases... The fact that the server connection had to be initially set up by the browser/client is irrelevant since the client anyway has to know that the server will potentially by sending it unsolicited responses on such a channel.
Well, remember that at least half of the American population (presumably at least the half that voted to reelect Bush) believed that there was an Iraq-9-11 connection, and that Iraq had WMDs that could be used to attack us at any moment... despite the fact that all available facts pointed to the contrary, and that there was a paper trail going back years of the Neocons wanting to attack Iraq.
Not all browsers support all features needed, but if you look at the documentation for the Google Maps API, you'll see that they go to quite some effort to replacing missing fucntionality. For example they provide a Java script XML parser as a fallback if the browser doesn't have it's own. Ditto XSLT. They aso hide the difference between IE and every-other-browsr XmlHttpRequest.
So, I'd say Google have gone to quite some effort to support all browsers, never mind how feature deficient they are!
It's meaningless to guess how many OPS/FLOPS it's take to simulate a human brain (or any other physical object) without stating what type of simulation you're talking about. In the case of a brain, a molecular simulation is going to take many orders more OPS/FLOPS than a neuron-by-neuron simulation, whcih would in turn take many orders more OPS/FLOPS than a neural assembly (e.g. cortical microcolumn) simultion, etc, etc. If we actually knew how the brain functioned in high level terms, then we could perform a behavioral simulation which would be most OP/FLOP efficient of all, and could likely be well within reach even today.
1) You seem to have innovation and evangelicism/marketing confused.
2) Tim Berners Lee didn't write early WWW software in his spare time - he did it as a paid professional, as did those who followed him at NSCA and elsewhere.
3) If U. Berkly wrote the first TCP/IP stack, then doesn't that make you wonder how TCP/IP was deployed by Vince Cerf et al a few years ealier? (Clue: Berkley designed the first stack *for Unix*, not the first stack ever).
4) SNOBOL was not an OOL. It was a string based language for pattern matching and symbolic processing.
5) C++ was never in competition with SmallTalk, nor was SmallTalk in it's day ever meant for the type of low level programming that C/C++ can be used for. C++ is popular because it's an extension to an already (non-OO) popular language - C.
6) I'm more of McVoy's generation than your own (obviously ignorant of computer history), and built my first computer (back when that required a soldering iron and a bag of components) back in the late 70s when you were still nothing but a pinhole in your Dad's condom. Unlike you I don't swoon at the mention of EMACS becuase I've written a number of commerical editors myself.
Innnovation means coming up with the idea in the first place, not copying it or enhacing it.
The Web was not an innovation of open source. Ethernet was a product of Xerox; ARPANet (which became the Internet) and TCP/IP were military projects funder by tax dollars; the WWW was funded by Tim Berner's Lee employer CERN labs, Apache was based on HTTP Daemon from NCSA labs, etc, etc.
Most of modern computing, including networking, bitmapped displays, mice, windows, object orientated programming (SmallTalk), all originated at Xerox.
What Stallman's FSF has given us isn't innovation, but rather what he wanted to give us - free softare and specifically a free COPY of Unix and all it's utilities.
Now, there HAS been some innovation by the open source community, but for the most part open source is about people reinventing the wheel (OS, compiler, desktop, office suite, etc, etc) and giving it away for free.
I'm not knocking the utility of gcc, just the fact that it has no claim to innovation that I'm aware of. Seperating front and back ends is fundamental to good compiler design, and can be read about in text books going back to the 70's.
For that matter, GCC, in version 4.0, is only now just starting to adopt code optimization techniques that have been around for decades.
The goal of the whole GNU project was never to be innovative - quite the opposite. The goal was to copy Unix and all it's tools (incl. with lex, yacc, cc).
It's hard to tell whether you're being sarcastic or not, since your list contains a mix of non-innovative (gcc - yet another compiler, which still doesn't stand up to it's commercial counterparts in terms of code optimization), innovative (bittorrent - I'm not aware of an commercial precursor), and other stuff that falls inbetween (not truly innovative, nor truly immitative - Apache, Elnightenment).
There's nothing special about the creation of new species - it's just a continuum of variation within species, and nothing more significant than a matter of definition.
The definition of different vs same species is simply that different species can't successfully interbreed, while same species can.
The definition of species is useful and significant because while you'd never notice when speciation is occuring (i.e. the first point at which a genetic mutation has occurred that means successful interbreeding is impossible), it does represent a point of no return, and a point from which divergence (due to lack of ability to breed and re-mix the gene pool) is inevitable.
People often claim that we have never seen speciation occuring, but that is simply wrong - it is absolutely all around us in various stages...
1) There are species taking the first step of forming different sub-groups such as forest and plains elephants (similar DNA, but where "cultural" seperation means that the DNA is diverging due to lack of interbreeding, and they are on their way), or similarly perhaps human races where interbreeding is again limited for cultural reasons. Of course cultural seperation isn't the only species formation initiator, but it's probably more common than the more obvious physical isolation (e.g. between continents as movements of the earth's tectonic plates seperate portions of the same species).
2) There are species where the cultural seperation (step one) has persisted long enough that fairly major genetic differences are present, and visually we may even think of them as different species despite their still having the ability to interbreed (e.g. lion & tiger, wolf & chihuahua).
3) There are species that have JUST crossed the point of no return, such as horse & donkey. They are still able to interbreed in the sense of producing offspring, but the offspring (a mule) are themselves unable to breed, so the point of no return has already been crossed.
4) There are species who crossed the point of no return a while ago and although still similar genetically have accumulated enough change to start to be quite different - e.g. homo sapiens and chimpanzees, and interbreeding is no longer viable.
5) Finally there are species who crossed the point of no return (speciation) so long ago that have diverged radically, typically somewhat comessurate with the length of time that has passed.
When people claim we don't see speciation occuring they are typically only referring to group 5), and obviously ignoring the cladistic tree derived from the fossil record informing us of the speciation sequence and interrelationships.
Evolution isn't a theory - it's merely stating the obvious that if traits are hereditory then competition to survive, prosper & procreate will leave the next generation better able to compete. It has to be so - simple logic.
I guess you could say that back when Darwin proposed this it WAS a theory since he was merely hypothesing that traits are hereditory, but since the discovery of DNA we know this to be a fact, and calling it a theory is simply wrong.
Nowadays we can even simulate evolution via genetic algorithms where we can see that random changes (genetic mutation and variation) fed into a competetive hereditory survival process will have "beneficial" (seemingly designed) results rather than random ones... not very surprising to be sure, but still nice to see the process at work in seconds rather the tedious observation of nature that Darwin undertook.
Identical twins are actually closer than clones, since they not only share nuclear DNA, but also Mitochrondrial DNA (from their mother). A clones's Mitochrondrial DNA comes from the egg, not the DNA donor.
You don't need clones for that - identical twins suit the same purpose, and humans make rather better study subjects.
In many cases, even when separated at birth (e.g. adoptions where twins are separated), identical twins show freakish similarities in things that you'd assume would be more a matter of "free will" or nurture.
Yep - even his buddy doesn't seem very confident.. I loved his quote: "If Jeb lands the wing-suit without a parachute and survives--he is going to be my hero".
The trouble is that it's extremely difficult to judge your distance to ground, and I assume that the precise distance for his flare maneuver would be pretty critical.
Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly
I find that rather hard to believe... If you directly impact a hard surface, then you are going to decelerate from free fall of approx. 120 mph to 0 mph in a distance of approx a foot (the width of your body).
From one of the equations of motion we have:
Vt^2 = Vo^2 + 2 a s
Which gives a = - 4795 m/s^2 or ~489g
Which I'd have to hazzard would turn your brain to puree rather effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine the problems this ass-hat idea would cause if put into effect, especially wrt international time differences which will now vary according to the time of year (those parts of the year when the US will now be on Bush time vs world time).
I'm sure multinational businesses, airlines, etc, are going to have a ball with this.
What next? Bush passes law to make everyone wear orange on tuesdays and walk backwards on the weekend?!
Same reason that one radio station doesn't obliterate another - different frequencies.
I disagree... Once the browser has established an HTTP connection to the server, the server can then indefinitely send sporadic (multi-part MIME) responses (e.g. XML data/updates/commands) on that connection as it pleases... The fact that the server connection had to be initially set up by the browser/client is irrelevant since the client anyway has to know that the server will potentially by sending it unsolicited responses on such a channel.
Huh? What about server-push?
There's no restriction on what the content of a multipart-MIME message can be - could be JPEGS or could be chunks of XML data or whatever.
So - no reason an AJAX web page can't open an HTTP connection to a server and then respond to server initiated messages over this established channel.
Also Hussein, by way of running one of the few secular governments in the middle east, was one of bin Ladens biggest enemies.
:-(
Certainly bin Laden must be extremely grateful to Bush for all he has done, by way of reaction to 9-11, to further his goals!
Well, remember that at least half of the American population (presumably at least the half that voted to reelect Bush) believed that there was an Iraq-9-11 connection, and that Iraq had WMDs that could be used to attack us at any moment... despite the fact that all available facts pointed to the contrary, and that there was a paper trail going back years of the Neocons wanting to attack Iraq.
Not all browsers support all features needed, but if you look at the documentation for the Google Maps API, you'll see that they go to quite some effort to replacing missing fucntionality. For example they provide a Java script XML parser as a fallback if the browser doesn't have it's own. Ditto XSLT. They aso hide the difference between IE and every-other-browsr XmlHttpRequest.
So, I'd say Google have gone to quite some effort to support all browsers, never mind how feature deficient they are!
It's interesting to note the the "Google Maps API" contains some goodies that make it into a nice cross platform AJAX toolkit as well as a maps API.
m lHttp_code_
Take a look at the GXmlHttp, GXml and GXslt classes:
http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/#GX
So if Microsoft limit their recently announced AJAX toolkit to IE only, then it seems Google are ready to offer an alternative!
What's an adaptive backoff lock?
This one's got Microsoft innovation built in - Clippy support.
"I see you're downloading from iTunes - would you like to switch to MSMusak.com instead?"
It's meaningless to guess how many OPS/FLOPS it's take to simulate a human brain (or any other physical object) without stating what type of simulation you're talking about. In the case of a brain, a molecular simulation is going to take many orders more OPS/FLOPS than a neuron-by-neuron simulation, whcih would in turn take many orders more OPS/FLOPS than a neural assembly (e.g. cortical microcolumn) simultion, etc, etc. If we actually knew how the brain functioned in high level terms, then we could perform a behavioral simulation which would be most OP/FLOP efficient of all, and could likely be well within reach even today.
1) You seem to have innovation and evangelicism/marketing confused.
2) Tim Berners Lee didn't write early WWW software in his spare time - he did it as a paid professional, as did those who followed him at NSCA and elsewhere.
3) If U. Berkly wrote the first TCP/IP stack, then doesn't that make you wonder how TCP/IP was deployed by Vince Cerf et al a few years ealier? (Clue: Berkley designed the first stack *for Unix*, not the first stack ever).
4) SNOBOL was not an OOL. It was a string based language for pattern matching and symbolic processing.
5) C++ was never in competition with SmallTalk, nor was SmallTalk in it's day ever meant for the type of low level programming that C/C++ can be used for. C++ is popular because it's an extension to an already (non-OO) popular language - C.
6) I'm more of McVoy's generation than your own (obviously ignorant of computer history), and built my first computer (back when that required a soldering iron and a bag of components) back in the late 70s when you were still nothing but a pinhole in your Dad's condom. Unlike you I don't swoon at the mention of EMACS becuase I've written a number of commerical editors myself.
Innnovation means coming up with the idea in the first place, not copying it or enhacing it.
The Web was not an innovation of open source. Ethernet was a product of Xerox; ARPANet (which became the Internet) and TCP/IP were military projects funder by tax dollars; the WWW was funded by Tim Berner's Lee employer CERN labs, Apache was based on HTTP Daemon from NCSA labs, etc, etc.
Most of modern computing, including networking, bitmapped displays, mice, windows, object orientated programming (SmallTalk), all originated at Xerox.
What Stallman's FSF has given us isn't innovation, but rather what he wanted to give us - free softare and specifically a free COPY of Unix and all it's utilities.
Now, there HAS been some innovation by the open source community, but for the most part open source is about people reinventing the wheel (OS, compiler, desktop, office suite, etc, etc) and giving it away for free.
I'm not knocking the utility of gcc, just the fact that it has no claim to innovation that I'm aware of. Seperating front and back ends is fundamental to good compiler design, and can be read about in text books going back to the 70's.
For that matter, GCC, in version 4.0, is only now just starting to adopt code optimization techniques that have been around for decades.
The goal of the whole GNU project was never to be innovative - quite the opposite. The goal was to copy Unix and all it's tools (incl. with lex, yacc, cc).
It's hard to tell whether you're being sarcastic or not, since your list contains a mix of non-innovative (gcc - yet another compiler, which still doesn't stand up to it's commercial counterparts in terms of code optimization), innovative (bittorrent - I'm not aware of an commercial precursor), and other stuff that falls inbetween (not truly innovative, nor truly immitative - Apache, Elnightenment).
Ho hum.
There's obviously a goldmine waiting for whoever can first patent people as objects, telephone numbers as objects, sandwich types as objects...
Lemme try to fire up my creative juices...
class Person {
std::string name;
}
Whoopee! Patent office here I come!!!!!
Yes, and for that matter they also retrieved moon rocks robotically a long time ago (1970s?).
There's nothing special about the creation of new species - it's just a continuum of variation within species, and nothing more significant than a matter of definition.
The definition of different vs same species is simply that different species can't successfully interbreed, while same species can.
The definition of species is useful and significant because while you'd never notice when speciation is occuring (i.e. the first point at which a genetic mutation has occurred that means successful interbreeding is impossible), it does represent a point of no return, and a point from which divergence (due to lack of ability to breed and re-mix the gene pool) is inevitable.
People often claim that we have never seen speciation occuring, but that is simply wrong - it is absolutely all around us in various stages...
1) There are species taking the first step of forming different sub-groups such as forest and plains elephants (similar DNA, but where "cultural" seperation means that the DNA is diverging due to lack of interbreeding, and they are on their way), or similarly perhaps human races where interbreeding is again limited for cultural reasons. Of course cultural seperation isn't the only species formation initiator, but it's probably more common than the more obvious physical isolation (e.g. between continents as movements of the earth's tectonic plates seperate portions of the same species).
2) There are species where the cultural seperation (step one) has persisted long enough that fairly major genetic differences are present, and visually we may even think of them as different species despite their still having the ability to interbreed (e.g. lion & tiger, wolf & chihuahua).
3) There are species that have JUST crossed the point of no return, such as horse & donkey. They are still able to interbreed in the sense of producing offspring, but the offspring (a mule) are themselves unable to breed, so the point of no return has already been crossed.
4) There are species who crossed the point of no return a while ago and although still similar genetically have accumulated enough change to start to be quite different - e.g. homo sapiens and chimpanzees, and interbreeding is no longer viable.
5) Finally there are species who crossed the point of no return (speciation) so long ago that have diverged radically, typically somewhat comessurate with the length of time that has passed.
When people claim we don't see speciation occuring they are typically only referring to group 5), and obviously ignoring the cladistic tree derived from the fossil record informing us of the speciation sequence and interrelationships.
Evolution isn't a theory - it's merely stating the obvious that if traits are hereditory then competition to survive, prosper & procreate will leave the next generation better able to compete. It has to be so - simple logic.
I guess you could say that back when Darwin proposed this it WAS a theory since he was merely hypothesing that traits are hereditory, but since the discovery of DNA we know this to be a fact, and calling it a theory is simply wrong.
Nowadays we can even simulate evolution via genetic algorithms where we can see that random changes (genetic mutation and variation) fed into a competetive hereditory survival process will have "beneficial" (seemingly designed) results rather than random ones... not very surprising to be sure, but still nice to see the process at work in seconds rather the tedious observation of nature that Darwin undertook.
Well, there is universal radio hardware out there, such as GNUradio...
So, reversing the topic, I wonder if you can do 802.X with GNUradio?! I would assume so if it's within the supported frequencey range.
Identical twins are actually closer than clones, since they not only share nuclear DNA, but also Mitochrondrial DNA (from their mother). A clones's Mitochrondrial DNA comes from the egg, not the DNA donor.
You don't need clones for that - identical twins suit the same purpose, and humans make rather better study subjects.
In many cases, even when separated at birth (e.g. adoptions where twins are separated), identical twins show freakish similarities in things that you'd assume would be more a matter of "free will" or nurture.
Yep - even his buddy doesn't seem very confident.. I loved his quote: "If Jeb lands the wing-suit without a parachute and survives--he is going to be my hero".
The trouble is that it's extremely difficult to judge your distance to ground, and I assume that the precise distance for his flare maneuver would be pretty critical.
Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly
I find that rather hard to believe... If you directly impact a hard surface, then you are going to decelerate from free fall of approx. 120 mph to 0 mph in a distance of approx a foot (the width of your body).
From one of the equations of motion we have:
Vt^2 = Vo^2 + 2 a s
Which gives a = - 4795 m/s^2 or ~489g
Which I'd have to hazzard would turn your brain to puree rather effectively.