It's worth noting that isotope dating techniques had to prove themselves in the 1910's through '50s. They weren't just proclaimed as The Way by the Secret Evilutionist Cabal, as some have implied. 8^) --
If anything, it shows how unlikely evolution is. Through our reasarch we have: a) Shown that there is extra DNA that is unused (which is likely the source of changes in animals adapting to their situation, and no animal with or without scientist's help has ever crossed the species barrier, which would have happened a huge number of time in very few years for evolution to occur)...
Two points: Why do you think that finding inactivated genes in DNA is evidence against evolution? What about the cave creatures (newts, crickets, etc.) that have deactivated genes for producing eyes? Surely, not producing unneeded organs is an advantageous evolutionary step in the resource-starved enviornment of a cave.
Secondly, check out the following: Observed Instances of Speciation for dozens of examples of living things that "crossed the species barrier" without human help and 29 Evidences for Macroevolution (I hate the word "macroevolution". It is too often abused by people who don't know any better -- or worse, by those who should.)
... b) Shown how difficult it is to make changes to DNA...
Not really. Our DNA seems to contain all kinds of junk, probably inserted by retroviruses, which are sloppy replicators. Again, a point for evolution or other non-optimal processes in the genome. Definitely a point against creationism -- even a first year bio engr. student could produce a cleaner genome, let alone a deity.
... c) Shown that no natural mutation has ever been benefitial, and how unlikely an even slightly positive change is.
Now you're not even trying, just parroting things out of ICR tracts. ==Sigh==
There are a number of antibiotics that never existed until some chemist synthesized them. (Which ones? Don't remember; references not at hand.) You can't say that bacteria had enzymes to degrade them sitting around in "junk DNA" cold storage because they were totally new. Said antibiotics are remarkably effective for a couple years, or even decades. Eventually, some strains of strep evolve the ability to break down those antibiotics.
Bingo! Instant competitive advantage that is massively useful to the bacterium. It's more than just a "slight" positive change, it's a major breakthrough that gives that strain and all its decendents a big boost over competing strains of strep.
Is this too hard to imagine? But, you don't have to imagine it. Just read the reports on the antibiotic resistant strains of strep found around hospitals and shudder....
There is an amazing amount of fossil evidence for evolution.
Never has there been any remote evidence linking fossils with modern species. Therefore, it's quite possible those ape-looking creatures were in fact ae-looking create who probably lived along side Apes and Humans.
Really? I suppose the entire chain of fossils linking Hyracotherium (AKA Eohippus) to modern horses is all a product of my diseased imagination. Likewise, the fossil series for whales and other cetacians, lagomorphs (rabbits, etc.), condylarths (hoofed animals in general), etc.
My favorite example was the carbon dating of a body part from a living animal (may have been the gum of a sea lion but I read this 15 years ago so forgive my forgetfulness). This thing was measured at 30,000 years old or something equally ridicules.
Well, that would be the answer, then. Think of a pinniped that eats fish fattened on algae blooming from CO2 (and other nutrients) out of a deep water upwelling, like as the once fabulously fertile Grand Banks. Most of the C-14 in its food would already be several thousand years old. Not suprising that it would date older than expected.
You can get even more extreme results if you try to date shellfish growing around underwater oil seeps. The petroleum has dern near zero C-14 in it.
That's why there are well established rules on what can be successfully carbon dated.
IOW: ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. --
Moral: The stereotype that everyone in the OSS world is a cheapskate, pirating hippy with delusions of godhood who won't buy games is flat-out wrong; a lie straight from the FUD mines of the Dark Lords of Redmond.
One person does not break a stereotype. If anything, you can be considered the exception that proves the rule. If I had a dime for everytime I've heard, "Why should I buy applications/drivers/games/distributions for linux? Linux is free, so everything for linux should be free," I'd be able to buy a nice car, paying cash upfront.
Like it or not, there are a lot of morons out there that don't get the whole concept of "paying people for stuff they make, so those people can feed themselves and their families". Don't believe me? Go do a web search for warez. Look at all those results! Look at the popularity of Napster, and the upsurge of Napster replacements (different product domain, same concept. And don't give me bullshit about "the artists aren't getting money anyway", since they get at least something when you buy a CD, compared to the nothing they get when you download an mp3). Get on an IRC network (your pick, it really doesn't matter), and lurk in the warez channels. Or even lurk in the legitimate channels. Look at usenet once in a while. In short, the stereotype exists for a reason, and while it may be unfair, it's not untrue.
You're missing my point: the reason that stereotypes are considered bad is because they paint everyone in a group with a broad brush that only applies to some -- even to most -- in that group.
I provided a counterexample to the "prevailing wisdom" to demonstrate that it doesn't fairly represent the entire OSS world. Other posters in the thread did the same. Reread your response in that light, then ask yourself, "How can we change this impression and get more Linux games?"
But, I shouldn't be too hard on you. Plainly, most game makers are coming to the same conclusions. Aside from the pioneers like Loki, they don't seem to believe that they will make their investment back before the warez crowd floods the 'Net with pirated versions. This, despite the fact that the porting cost to a different platform can be much less than the original game development costs, especially if they made multi-platform part of their original design goals.
Again, how can we change this? The only way I know is to buy Linux games when they are released. I've done my part. How about the rest of you? --
I've bought every game that Loki has released except for Descent 3. (Still can't find it at Fry's Electronics.) Plus, I have bought some that Loki didn't port, like Terminus.
Moral: The stereotype that everyone in the OSS world is a cheapskate, pirating hippy with delusions of godhood who won't buy games is flat-out wrong; a lie straight from the FUD mines of the Dark Lords of Redmond. --
I certainly hope that Tribes 2 plays better under Linux than it does under windows. I can't count the number of problems I've had with it, not to mention how many my friends have had. That's one piece of software I regret buying.
There is at least game that does play better under Linux. I found that Terminus (http://www.vvisions.com/terminus/) ran better under Linux than WinXX. Despite applying the most recent patches, the Win32 version kept locking up on me. --
It doesn't mention anything about following the restrictions that one normally puts into place regarding self-replicating machinary!
What if some of this hardware was to evolve into a self replicating machine?
How is it going to self-replicate without a continuing supply of Xilinx programmable FPGA chips?
When a computer can overcome that little limitation, then we can start worrying.
(And yes, I can imagine ways it could happen, but they're all dern unlikely....) --
Selection Bias?? (Was: Re:If it saves one life...)
on
Surveillance Society
·
· Score: 1
Homicide is rarely an offense that is recommitted. See Sellin, The Penalty of Death (1980) at 103-114; see "Prison Homicides, Recidivist Murder, and Life Imprisonment," in The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies Bedau, 1997) at 176-182.
Among capital murderers, even those predicted by jurors to be dangerous, my research has found that less than five percent, and usually only about one percent, kill again. Marquart, supra at 462. See also Marquart and Sorensen, "A National Study of the Furman-Commuted Inmates: Assessing the Threat to Society from Capital Offenders," 23 Loy. of L.A.L.Rev. 5, 22-28 (1989); Sorensen, et al., "Two Decades After People v. Anderson," 24 Loy. of L.A.L.Rev. 45, 50-55 (1990).
Question: Could there be a certain amount of bias in those statistics? After all, you've only provided data on captured murders. What about those who aren't caught? What can be said about them?
I've lived in regions (S.F. Bay Area and the Pacific N.W.) that had too many (i.e. non-zero) unsolved murders. Somebody has to be killing and getting away with it. If so, do they repeat? --
Seriously, what's with the scientific community holding onto their discoveries until they're newsworthy? Makes me wonder how long ago the first of these 11 'newly discovered' planets were really found...
Read some of the linked pages. These planets are found by making very high precision measurements of their stars' spectra over a period of years. Naturally, the astronomers parallelize the process as much as possible and observe loads of stars over those years.
When they have enough observations to A) find a planet and B) pin down the planet's orbital parameters with enough accuracy to make their claim worth while, then C) they can announce.
Since the observations are parallelized and batched, the announcements are batched.
Well if that was him leaving those whiny messages on my machine grovelling about getting back together again, tell him to knock it off!
You don't have to put up with that kind of harassment. Tell the deity firmly and clearly that you are not interested in a relationship and to cease the unwanted contact.
If She/He/They/It still does not stop the harassment, a court injunction may be the next step....
IANAL but as I recall, USA mail order companies are only required to collect sales tax if they have a "significant presence" in the buyer's state. (What that means is open to legal interpetation (expensive!), but no presence obviously isn't "significant presence".)
Thus, national chains like Sears had to collect the tax for your state, but if you ordered from Bob's Worms By Mail on the other side of the country, Bob didn't have to tax you.
As far as I'm concerned, Internet sales should be treated just like any other mail order. Tax based on the buyer's destination and the seller's presence (if any) in that state. Obviously, international sales go through the usual Customs/import procedures with all the tariffs and what-not that entails.
And, USA states can quit whining for more money. It's embarassing....
--
Why do they keep trying this? The media moguls
must have spread serious money around for
immediate results, otherwise the
manufacturers would wait for a year or two,
until the heat was off. --
While I agree that the M$NBC article was the usual media fluff, in fact all conclusion and all evidence, that doesn't mean the evidence doesn't exist. I look forward to reading Lander's paper.
Nonetheless, you've made some errors in your post:
It has been found, proven, shown as fact, etc.
that dinosaur fossils of the exact same dinosaur
have been found in differing layers of rock that
differ according to carbon dating methods (which I
do not hold by millions upon millions of years.
Now if that doesn't offer evidence for a
catastrophy, like the Biblical worldwide
flood, I
don't know what does. And that same evidence has
caused evolutionists to totally revamp their
thoeries, because certainly that dinosaur had
already evolved to a different level by that
point, so they can't use that argument for that
situation.
Finding fossils in differing layers of rock is
not necessarily a problem. Different rock layers
formed at different locations. Even in the same
spot, some species lasted for a long time, long enough to be found in different strata, e.g. trilobites and many types of dinosaurs. Fossil cockroaches have been found, essentially unchanged for tens of millions of years. Does that mean that we currently are experiencing a "biblical" flood?
Carbon dating is of no use beyond, say, 10 or so half-lives of C14. No dinosaur fossils would be carbon dated. Where did you get this "information?"
Before you start expounding an International Evolution Conspiracy theory, why not consider the alternatives?
If your reference(s) for your posting came from the Institution for Creation Research then we need consider it no further. Those "liars for Jeeezus" are simply not reliable.
Other posters have addressed your poorly supported claims that "no beneficial mutation has ever been proven" (quick answer: antibiotic resistant bacteria evolve all the time and the mutation is quite beneficial to them -- bad news for us), "no fossil record" of transitional forms (consider the archeopteryx/protoavis, eohippus group, oconodons, sirenians, etc, etc, etc.), your interesting take on the scientific method vs. a historical science like paleontology (or astrophysics -- what do you do if we can't make supernovae to order in the lab, declare astrophysics a non-science?), etc.
--
While teflon had little to do with the space program (another poster mentioned it was due to the Manhattan Project), the Apollo project was a definite boost to integrated circuit development. The recent Apollo 11 Guidance Computer article points out how the AGCs consumed almost the entire world production of ICs (One Giant Leap: The Apollo Guidance Computer about 3/4ths of the way down).
Rocketry itself advanced from the "blow up on the pad" stage to "almost reliable, maybe.";^)
Then, there are the less measurable benefits. Surely it helped engineering practice in general to build such a complex device that absolutely, positively, must not fail.
Do you really think that weather, communications and navigation satellites would have progressed as fast as they did without Apollo pushing the state of the art? Yet, we benefit from those 'sats every day. Let's not forget the usual spin-off list: improvements in remote sensing, medical monitoring, materials science, transsonic aeronautics, etc.
What about the educational benefits? Didn't USA's 1960s school science programs get a big kick in the @$$ (and hike in the budget) because of the Space Race?
Sure, the moon program started out as political posturing and misdirection, but that doesn't mean that all we're left with is "a bunch of moon rocks." That's one common misconception I'd like to see die and be forgotten.
--
I wrote Mr. Clapp yesterday, after the original
mention of Pioneer. His reply indicates that
Pioneer is still a going (and apparently growing)
concern, though updating the web page to reflect
any of that is pretty low on the priority list.
Really? That's great! Although I would recommend that Mr. Clapp try to update the web page a bit more, even if it just means adding a note or two and bumping the revision date occasionally, to let everyone know that Pioneer is still making progress. He can think of it as part of the PR budget. 8^)
--
Why not just launch a second plane already full of
liquid oxygen, the do an in-flight refueling job
once they are both airborne? Seems much easier
than carrying around all that extra gear to
convert oxygen, and the extra fuel to fly around
for 3 hours generating it.
Yup, that's the idea behind Mitchell Burnside Clapp's Black Horse rocket plane. It was published in the 1995 Analog. I guess it made too much sense for NASA to even give it a try.
Rather than use LOX, his original plan called for burning JP-5 and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. That was the densest combination of propellants he could find, so would take the smallest amount of tankage. And, because it didn't involve any cryogens, it could use lighter non-insulated tanks. Lighter spacecraft == a chance at single stage to orbit. Here's an excerpt
from the Analog article:
Mission Profile
The Black Horse mission profile begins with a
takeoff from a conventional runway using the two
takeoff rocket engines for thrust. The aircraft is
loaded with all the fuel it needs for the climb
from the tanker to orbit. It also has fuel and
oxidizer aboard sufficient for 15 minutes of
atmospheric flight. The total weight of the
vehicle at takeoff is about 50,000 pounds, but by
the time it achieves tanker rendezvous at 43,000
feet and 0.85 Mach number its weight has dropped
to about 38,000 pounds. When the aircraft meets
the tanker it takes on about 147,000 pounds
of hydrogen peroxide. It then disconnects from the
tanker and climbs to space. As it inserts into
orbit, its weight has dropped to about 16,500
pounds. After performing its orbital mission, the
aircraft reenters and then glides to a normal
landing at a runway.
Because off-the-shelf rocket engines that use H2O2 are few and far between, he later changed his plans to use LOX. This would mean more changes in the tanker, but would avoid using unproven engines.
Clapp eventually founded a company to develop the concept, Pioneer Rocketplane, but I haven't heard much from it lately. That's too bad. It was (is) a great concept.
--
Face it... Linux has a lot of fragmentation (and
M$ made that point with that ad of the mutating
penguins) with lots of duplicated effort and
inconsistancies. I believe an "IBM Linux" distro
could be the one distro that everyone shoots for
and becomes a "defacto standard" much like the
"IBM PC" did for hardware. God knows the corporate
types would accept it.
There's two problems with the above.
One: IBM doesn't want to make their own distro.
They've said so themselves. This is a good thing.
Since they're playing fairly even handedly with
the top few major distros, folks haven't been
too jealous/frightened of the massive
resources and clout that IBM has.
Two: Linux doesn't have "a lot of fragmentation"
-- it has a lot of specialization. Buy Red Hat for
servers and Mandrake (or maybe Corel) for the
desktop. Buy SuSE or TurboLinux because they're
good solid distros and have the appropriate
language localizations. Choose Debian or Slackware
for OSS purity.;^) Select one of the scads of
specialized distros for routers, firewalls,
X-terms, and rescue floppies. Each distro tries to
find its own core competence and to fill its own
market niche. And yet, they are all Linux, running
a Linux kernel and the GNU libraries. There's less
variation between the different Linux distros than
there is between Windows 3.1, CE, 95, 98, ME, NT,
NT/Embedded, 2K, etc.
Also, don't forget that Linux is acting as to
defragment the *nix market. The *BSDs can
run nearly all Linux apps if you turn on the
appropriate kernel feature. SCO invented "lxrun",
a program that runs many Linux binaries without
kernel mods. IBM is porting its LAE (Linux
Application Environment), a package of
kernel+library interface changes, to most of its
product line, and has done the S390 VM port. Who's
left? Maybe HP and Sun will get into the act soon.
There will still be plenty of variety... but it
will be more focused. The GPL (and the fact that
IBM is largely a hardware company) will keep them
honest. If IBM wants to buy Redhat or Suse to get
up to speed, fine. IBM has already had good
success with their Websphere Server which uses
Apache.
They can do all that without releasing their own
distro, just by throwing their support behind the
appropriate standards bodies. IMHO, that would
accomplish the same thing with less
screaming/suspicion by the anti-corporate crowd.
--
Huh? Most of the major open source programs
I can think of are imitative rather than
innovative. Linux is an OS implementation
of Unix, Gnome and KDE are attempts to clone
MS Windows on Linux, etc.
The innovative OS programs I can
think of t(httpd, Mosaic, BSD) tend to come out
from universities and are more properly the side
benefits of research rather than the direct result
of the open source movement.
But, the Open Source Community was derived from
(or is closely related to -- take your pick) the
scientific and academic communities, just sharing
software instead of research, and updated to use
the Internet. ESR's essays touch upon this topic.
Check out: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/
Innovation is usually the result of
the work of a few people rather than the output of
the million monkeys of the Internet.
While I agree that true innovation (not M$FT's fake variety) does indeed happen on a personal level, why the elitism? Do you really think that only academics can innovate?
I suggest that the OSS process brings us back to the days (1600s - 1700s maybe?) in which anyone with a sound mind could contribute to science. You didn't have to go through a 4 to 8 year scholastic meat grinder and become a narrowly focused professional first. Likewise, now anyone who is a good programmer can pick a project and make significant progress. Those who aren't programmers but who can write, can help with the docs.
The "Next Big Thing" may come from someone in Bangladesh or outer Mongolia, yet they are some of your "million monkeys of the Internet".
Come to think of it, so am I. We need a new motto:
The many.
The proud.
Innovating in ways never thought possible before.
The million Internet monkeys.
Well, you'd need a lot more fuel to
get the thing back to Earth orbit. Presumably a
shuttle could go up and get it... but I am
guessing that the need to carry the return-trip
fuel out there would make the thing a heck of a
lot more expensive (because you'd also need more
fuel to carry that additional fuel).
But it would rock if they could do it.
Yeah, there's nowhere near enough fuel. I don't have the numbers for Eros, but coming back to Earth from the orbit of Deimos (High Mars Orbit) is about 1.8 km/sec. NEAR's initial fuel supply was only enough for 1.436 km/sec (not counting the reserve). And, that assumes aerobraking in our atmosphere. NEAR has no heat shield -- crispy critter! I have no idea how much fuel it would take, but:
NEAR massed about 800 kg at launch.
It would have to be using storable bi-propellants, (usually nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine) which aren't the most powerful fuels available, but don't need cryo-coolers.
If it had a heat shield, then NEAR would need a bit more fuel to circularize its orbit after aerobraking. Not too much, say enough for 100 meters/sec.
If no heat shield, then NEAR would need loads more fuel to match Earth's orbit. Sure, they could play some gravity deassist games with the Earth and Moon, but that's a lot of velocity to shed. It would still take burns with fuel that NEAR doesn't have.
Anyway, we really don't want NEAR back. Without any kind of sampling scoop, etc., odds are poor that any Eros dust would still be on its surface by the time we could pick it up. Even less so, if it aerobraked without a heat shield.;^)
PS: You're right about the cost of the extra fuel. The rocket equation is an exponential function. A little more starting mass requires lots more fuel for the entire mission.
--
While I haven't tried to install Oracle, I have overcome similar problems with other commercial programs. Back when StarOffice was commercial download-ware, I found it wouldn't work with Red Hat 6.2. It wanted previous versions of libc and friends. A few symlinks to the Red Hat libraries fixed that. They were backwards compatible.
If the differences are too great, you can always extract the correct version of the libraries from an old distro and store them in a handy directory. Then, point the program to the directory using the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable in a shell script wrapper. A number of packages use this method.
--
[ Is the lack of hot swapping of CPUs a limitation of the x86 architecture? ]
Hot swapping a CPU is possible, but takes extra hardware not usually found on motherboards.
Hot swapping memory also takes extra hardware, and is very difficult to do in a *nix kernel. (How do you force the kernel to realloc all the structs located in that memory, and find and update all pointers?) Marketing keeps putting this on their wish list, and we keep telling them how many programmer-years it will take to do it. Maybe it will happen someday....
Maybe Miller meant hot swapping PCI cards. That is comparatively easy. There's an IBM Netfinity box in the next room that can do that.
--
[ Paraphrase: Microwaves aren't ionizing
radiation; they can't directly alter chemical
bonds. Heating effects from the microwaves (at the
power level of cell phones) have less effect than
ordinary thermal Brownian Motion on your DNA.
]
Yup, I agree with you. For an in-depth look at the evidence, take a look at the Cellular
Phone Antennas (Base Stations) and Human
Health FAQ maintained by Dr. John E. Moulder,
Prof of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College
of Wisconsin. He goes through the available literature and issues in exhaustive detail. It may
be a while before the Epidemiology article
is included, though.
Short answer: There is no replicated and verified
risk factor found with the radiation from cell
phones. Enough studies have been done over the
years to limit any potential risk to a very small
value. The known risks due to distraction from
driving are much greater.
(Although I find the distraction from a cell phone
conversation much less than 2 or 3 kids fighting
in the back seat.;^)
Executive Summary of Short Answer: Don't worry
about it. It's not a problem. All the uproar is
just to sell books and push certain political
agendas.
--
[[ If I were a cell manufacturer, I'd add a
liability wavier with every phone. ]]
Maybe. Until there's any reason to think that cell
phones really do cause cancer, why give people
ideas?
Regardless, such a wavier could note that the
chances of future research revealing a non-zero
cancer risk can be bounded by present research to
be pretty dern low.
Slashdot Mirror
Well enough in practice. There's too much to talk about here. See Radiometric Dating and the Geological Time Scale for an overview of general dating, and Isochron Dating Methods on using multiple isotopes to cross-check each other. There are some class notes: Module 2 and Module 4, if you're interested in the grisly details.
It's worth noting that isotope dating techniques had to prove themselves in the 1910's through '50s. They weren't just proclaimed as The Way by the Secret Evilutionist Cabal, as some have implied. 8^)
--
Two points: Why do you think that finding inactivated genes in DNA is evidence against evolution? What about the cave creatures (newts, crickets, etc.) that have deactivated genes for producing eyes? Surely, not producing unneeded organs is an advantageous evolutionary step in the resource-starved enviornment of a cave.
Secondly, check out the following:
Observed Instances of Speciation for dozens of examples of living things that "crossed the species barrier" without human help and
29 Evidences for Macroevolution (I hate the word "macroevolution". It is too often abused by people who don't know any better -- or worse, by those who should.)
Not really. Our DNA seems to contain all kinds of junk, probably inserted by retroviruses, which are sloppy replicators. Again, a point for evolution or other non-optimal processes in the genome. Definitely a point against creationism -- even a first year bio engr. student could produce a cleaner genome, let alone a deity.
Now you're not even trying, just parroting things out of ICR tracts. ==Sigh==
There are a number of antibiotics that never existed until some chemist synthesized them. (Which ones? Don't remember; references not at hand.) You can't say that bacteria had enzymes to degrade them sitting around in "junk DNA" cold storage because they were totally new. Said antibiotics are remarkably effective for a couple years, or even decades. Eventually, some strains of strep evolve the ability to break down those antibiotics.
Bingo! Instant competitive advantage that is massively useful to the bacterium. It's more than just a "slight" positive change, it's a major breakthrough that gives that strain and all its decendents a big boost over competing strains of strep.
Is this too hard to imagine? But, you don't have to imagine it. Just read the reports on the antibiotic resistant strains of strep found around hospitals and shudder....
Really? I suppose the entire chain of fossils linking Hyracotherium (AKA Eohippus) to modern horses is all a product of my diseased imagination. Likewise, the fossil series for whales and other cetacians, lagomorphs (rabbits, etc.), condylarths (hoofed animals in general), etc.
Check out Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ or the less broad but more detailed Horse Evolution.
--
Well, that would be the answer, then. Think of a pinniped that eats fish fattened on algae blooming from CO2 (and other nutrients) out of a deep water upwelling, like as the once fabulously fertile Grand Banks. Most of the C-14 in its food would already be several thousand years old. Not suprising that it would date older than expected.
You can get even more extreme results if you try to date shellfish growing around underwater oil seeps. The petroleum has dern near zero C-14 in it.
That's why there are well established rules on what can be successfully carbon dated.
IOW: ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
--
You're missing my point: the reason that stereotypes are considered bad is because they paint everyone in a group with a broad brush that only applies to some -- even to most -- in that group.
I provided a counterexample to the "prevailing wisdom" to demonstrate that it doesn't fairly represent the entire OSS world. Other posters in the thread did the same. Reread your response in that light, then ask yourself, "How can we change this impression and get more Linux games?"
But, I shouldn't be too hard on you. Plainly, most game makers are coming to the same conclusions. Aside from the pioneers like Loki, they don't seem to believe that they will make their investment back before the warez crowd floods the 'Net with pirated versions. This, despite the fact that the porting cost to a different platform can be much less than the original game development costs, especially if they made multi-platform part of their original design goals.
Again, how can we change this? The only way I know is to buy Linux games when they are released. I've done my part. How about the rest of you?
--
Moral: The stereotype that everyone in the OSS world is a cheapskate, pirating hippy with delusions of godhood who won't buy games is flat-out wrong; a lie straight from the FUD mines of the Dark Lords of Redmond.
--
There is at least game that does play better under Linux. I found that Terminus (http://www.vvisions.com/terminus/) ran better under Linux than WinXX. Despite applying the most recent patches, the Win32 version kept locking up on me.
--
How is it going to self-replicate without a continuing supply of Xilinx programmable FPGA chips?
When a computer can overcome that little limitation, then we can start worrying.
(And yes, I can imagine ways it could happen, but they're all dern unlikely....)
--
I've lived in regions (S.F. Bay Area and the Pacific N.W.) that had too many (i.e. non-zero) unsolved murders. Somebody has to be killing and getting away with it. If so, do they repeat?
--
8^) Not red shift, but blue shift. And yes, that's how radar speed guns work.
--
Read some of the linked pages. These planets are found by making very high precision measurements of their stars' spectra over a period of years. Naturally, the astronomers parallelize the process as much as possible and observe loads of stars over those years.
When they have enough observations to A) find a planet and B) pin down the planet's orbital parameters with enough accuracy to make their claim worth while, then C) they can announce. Since the observations are parallelized and batched, the announcements are batched.
It's not a big deal.
--
You don't have to put up with that kind of harassment. Tell the deity firmly and clearly that you are not interested in a relationship and to cease the unwanted contact.
If She/He/They/It still does not stop the harassment, a court injunction may be the next step....
8^)
--
We definitely know that Mars has some water left. A few of the Viking lander photos showed dustings of frosting on the rocks.
Yes. I'd like future missions to answer some of those questions.
--
Thus, national chains like Sears had to collect the tax for your state, but if you ordered from Bob's Worms By Mail on the other side of the country, Bob didn't have to tax you.
As far as I'm concerned, Internet sales should be treated just like any other mail order. Tax based on the buyer's destination and the seller's presence (if any) in that state. Obviously, international sales go through the usual Customs/import procedures with all the tariffs and what-not that entails.
And, USA states can quit whining for more money. It's embarassing....
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Why do they keep trying this? The media moguls must have spread serious money around for immediate results, otherwise the manufacturers would wait for a year or two, until the heat was off.
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Nonetheless, you've made some errors in your post:
Other posters have addressed your poorly supported claims that "no beneficial mutation has ever been proven" (quick answer: antibiotic resistant bacteria evolve all the time and the mutation is quite beneficial to them -- bad news for us), "no fossil record" of transitional forms (consider the archeopteryx/protoavis, eohippus group, oconodons, sirenians, etc, etc, etc.), your interesting take on the scientific method vs. a historical science like paleontology (or astrophysics -- what do you do if we can't make supernovae to order in the lab, declare astrophysics a non-science?), etc.
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Rocketry itself advanced from the "blow up on the pad" stage to "almost reliable, maybe." ;^)
Then, there are the less measurable benefits. Surely it helped engineering practice in general to build such a complex device that absolutely, positively, must not fail.
Do you really think that weather, communications and navigation satellites would have progressed as fast as they did without Apollo pushing the state of the art? Yet, we benefit from those 'sats every day. Let's not forget the usual spin-off list: improvements in remote sensing, medical monitoring, materials science, transsonic aeronautics, etc.
What about the educational benefits? Didn't USA's 1960s school science programs get a big kick in the @$$ (and hike in the budget) because of the Space Race?
Sure, the moon program started out as political posturing and misdirection, but that doesn't mean that all we're left with is "a bunch of moon rocks." That's one common misconception I'd like to see die and be forgotten.
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Really? That's great! Although I would recommend that Mr. Clapp try to update the web page a bit more, even if it just means adding a note or two and bumping the revision date occasionally, to let everyone know that Pioneer is still making progress. He can think of it as part of the PR budget. 8^)
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Yup, that's the idea behind Mitchell Burnside Clapp's Black Horse rocket plane. It was published in the 1995 Analog. I guess it made too much sense for NASA to even give it a try.
Rather than use LOX, his original plan called for burning JP-5 and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. That was the densest combination of propellants he could find, so would take the smallest amount of tankage. And, because it didn't involve any cryogens, it could use lighter non-insulated tanks. Lighter spacecraft == a chance at single stage to orbit. Here's an excerpt from the Analog article:
Because off-the-shelf rocket engines that use H2O2 are few and far between, he later changed his plans to use LOX. This would mean more changes in the tanker, but would avoid using unproven engines.
Clapp eventually founded a company to develop the concept, Pioneer Rocketplane, but I haven't heard much from it lately. That's too bad. It was (is) a great concept.
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There's two problems with the above.
One: IBM doesn't want to make their own distro. They've said so themselves. This is a good thing. Since they're playing fairly even handedly with the top few major distros, folks haven't been too jealous/frightened of the massive resources and clout that IBM has.
Two: Linux doesn't have "a lot of fragmentation" -- it has a lot of specialization. Buy Red Hat for servers and Mandrake (or maybe Corel) for the desktop. Buy SuSE or TurboLinux because they're good solid distros and have the appropriate language localizations. Choose Debian or Slackware for OSS purity. ;^) Select one of the scads of
specialized distros for routers, firewalls,
X-terms, and rescue floppies. Each distro tries to
find its own core competence and to fill its own
market niche. And yet, they are all Linux, running
a Linux kernel and the GNU libraries. There's less
variation between the different Linux distros than
there is between Windows 3.1, CE, 95, 98, ME, NT,
NT/Embedded, 2K, etc.
Also, don't forget that Linux is acting as to defragment the *nix market. The *BSDs can run nearly all Linux apps if you turn on the appropriate kernel feature. SCO invented "lxrun", a program that runs many Linux binaries without kernel mods. IBM is porting its LAE (Linux Application Environment), a package of kernel+library interface changes, to most of its product line, and has done the S390 VM port. Who's left? Maybe HP and Sun will get into the act soon.
They can do all that without releasing their own distro, just by throwing their support behind the appropriate standards bodies. IMHO, that would accomplish the same thing with less screaming/suspicion by the anti-corporate crowd.
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But, the Open Source Community was derived from (or is closely related to -- take your pick) the scientific and academic communities, just sharing software instead of research, and updated to use the Internet. ESR's essays touch upon this topic. Check out: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/
While I agree that true innovation (not M$FT's fake variety) does indeed happen on a personal level, why the elitism? Do you really think that only academics can innovate?
I suggest that the OSS process brings us back to the days (1600s - 1700s maybe?) in which anyone with a sound mind could contribute to science. You didn't have to go through a 4 to 8 year scholastic meat grinder and become a narrowly focused professional first. Likewise, now anyone who is a good programmer can pick a project and make significant progress. Those who aren't programmers but who can write, can help with the docs.
The "Next Big Thing" may come from someone in Bangladesh or outer Mongolia, yet they are some of your "million monkeys of the Internet".
Come to think of it, so am I. We need a new motto:
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Yeah, there's nowhere near enough fuel. I don't have the numbers for Eros, but coming back to Earth from the orbit of Deimos (High Mars Orbit) is about 1.8 km/sec. NEAR's initial fuel supply was only enough for 1.436 km/sec (not counting the reserve). And, that assumes aerobraking in our atmosphere. NEAR has no heat shield -- crispy critter! I have no idea how much fuel it would take, but:
Anyway, we really don't want NEAR back. Without any kind of sampling scoop, etc., odds are poor that any Eros dust would still be on its surface by the time we could pick it up. Even less so, if it aerobraked without a heat shield. ;^)
PS: You're right about the cost of the extra fuel. The rocket equation is an exponential function. A little more starting mass requires lots more fuel for the entire mission.
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If the differences are too great, you can always extract the correct version of the libraries from an old distro and store them in a handy directory. Then, point the program to the directory using the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable in a shell script wrapper. A number of packages use this method.
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Hot swapping a CPU is possible, but takes extra hardware not usually found on motherboards.
Hot swapping memory also takes extra hardware, and is very difficult to do in a *nix kernel. (How do you force the kernel to realloc all the structs located in that memory, and find and update all pointers?) Marketing keeps putting this on their wish list, and we keep telling them how many programmer-years it will take to do it. Maybe it will happen someday....
Maybe Miller meant hot swapping PCI cards. That is comparatively easy. There's an IBM Netfinity box in the next room that can do that.
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Yup, I agree with you. For an in-depth look at the evidence, take a look at the Cellular Phone Antennas (Base Stations) and Human Health FAQ maintained by Dr. John E. Moulder, Prof of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He goes through the available literature and issues in exhaustive detail. It may be a while before the Epidemiology article is included, though.
Short answer: There is no replicated and verified risk factor found with the radiation from cell phones. Enough studies have been done over the years to limit any potential risk to a very small value. The known risks due to distraction from driving are much greater. (Although I find the distraction from a cell phone conversation much less than 2 or 3 kids fighting in the back seat. ;^)
Executive Summary of Short Answer: Don't worry about it. It's not a problem. All the uproar is just to sell books and push certain political agendas.
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Maybe. Until there's any reason to think that cell phones really do cause cancer, why give people ideas?
Regardless, such a wavier could note that the chances of future research revealing a non-zero cancer risk can be bounded by present research to be pretty dern low.
For details, see the FAQ file Cellular Phone Antennas (Base Stations) and Human Health maintained by Doc Moulder, prof of Radiation Oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
(There are a number of other useful EMF FAQs available at the same site.)
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