Guess what... you just talked yourself out of the contract. No company is going to put up any of its own assets to put your mind at ease. They'll just go with the next highest bidder who doesn't want them to jump through so many hoops.
You're completely wrong. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction is a perfectly valid scientific theory. How do you disprove it? Find an action which does not produce an equal and opposite reaction.
You're confusing the idea of testability with the ability to prove a theory correct. No scientific theory can be proven absolutely (i.e. how do we know that when we drop the apple THIS time it won't go up instead of down!), however a good scientific theory makes a prediction, and has a way of disproving it (in this case finding a counter-example).
It is true that none (or very few) of the stars which make up the two galaxies will collide. But the gas will collide (often leading to starformation, or the stripping of gas from galaxies).
Also, all components are interacting gravitationally, so the structure of the galaxies does not survive "cleanly." Instead there are very interesting features, tidal tails, spherical shells, and usually the major fractions of the two galaxies settle down into a single system very different from the two progenitors (assuming the two initial galaxies are roughly the same size).
The simplistic explanation doesn't take gravity into account. Think of it as ants walking around on the surface of a balloon which is being blown up.
So if the ants stand still, they all get further away from each other (the classic analogy).
Next level of complexity: the ants are walking around with some random direction and speed. Some will be getting closer to each other, as long as their velocity is greater than the spread of the balloon's surface between them (i.e. distance grows by one inch, but they walked an inch and a half, so the two ants are now half an inch closer than they were initially).
Now you add in gravity (I don't know how to express this with ants... let's just say they feel some desire to walk towards each other, and that desire is related to their distance). So nearby ants feel some force which causes them to walk towards each other. If they are sufficiently close, this force will cause them to move faster towards each other than the inflation of the balloon is moving them apart (as in the second case).
This is why the stars in galaxies don't fly apart as the universe expands. The gravitational force at those scales is much greater than the expansion.
It's pretty hard to take up the argument that the conditions for life on say Mars are better than Earth. Earth has vast forests, billions of species... seems pretty conducive to life, huh? Mars, on the other hand, may or may not have microbial life... pretty dull.
All the conditions you listed off, instable tectonic plates, atmospheric disturbances, etc are all wonderful sources of energy, and most likely helped the formation of life on Earth, rather than hindered it.
My GeForce 2 was supported enough to run the graphical install. I chose not to configure X during the install, and instead booted into a command prompt, downloaded the Nvidia src rpm's and installed them. Then I configured X, changed my runlevel to 5, and X popped right up.
The whole procedure took less than 15 minutes.
Check the Nvidia linux drivers forum, there's often good information there on installing the driver and configuring X.
The real problem with discussing natural selection is it assumes we're smart enough to understand the ENTIRE picture...
If a horse evolved a saddle, no, it doesn't provide the horse with an advantage in the wild, but if it helps it be adopted by humans and through that relationship fed, protected from predetors, and allowed to breed, then the saddle was a beneficial adaptation by the horse.
Look at aphids and ants... the ability to secrete sugar is not a particularly useful ability for the aphid, but the ants then enter into a symbiotic relationship, helping protect and nurture the aphids.
Another good example is the breeding of dogs. There are many breeds which now are totally unsuited for life in the wild (short legs, terrible arthritic joints, etc). These are not traits which are inherently useful to the dog, but we seem to like them. Just because we were the ones selecting the properties we liked, and not a life/death struggle in the wild, doesn't make it any less evolution.
Nature doesn't care how (or why!) the organism survives and procreates, only that it does.
Yes, and nothing prevented people from installing netscape when microsoft started shipping IE with their OS.
Yes, some people did install netscape. Some people still have netscape installed. But IE now controls the marketplace.
Most users just use what's given to them, most of those don't even know they have options, the rest just don't care.
So the fact that technically you have options doesn't change the fact that Redhat has a lot of power when it makes these decisions, and taking someone's hard work and intentionally hiding it in the name of "ease of use" is unfair and abusive.
The only problem with self-selection like this is humans tend to select for silly and trivial traits... resulting in highly-arthritic and frankly pathetic breeds like the poodle.
Right. I realize it's a different culture (both in physical space and internet space), but in my mind, proper use of language is a sign of professionalism. It's hard for me to read what they send me without feeling like I'm talking to teenagers.
No kidding! I've had some dealings with programmers in India, and they all use horrible chatroom-speak. Besides the annoying shortcuts, I don't think I've ever gotten a complete sentence out of them.
How much time does it really take to type 3 letters instead of 1? (u->you and r->are)!
Disclaimer: I'm a theorist, so everything I say is probably wrong:)
When I was at Santa Cruz for a graduate prospective visit I heard a talk about this project.
Essentially the idea is you assign amateur astronomers stars to examine (kind of like SETI@Home's work units). They take exposures of the star, and reduce their own data. Each night's work reduces to a single point, essentially the luminosity of the star at that time.
The way you detect transiting planets (or transiting binaries for that matter) is by detecting shifts in luminosity of the star.
The central project then uses the data points from multiple observers over time to detect the transit.
The talk essentially was a proof of concept, they did their own observations, then made monte carlo simulations of observations, including scatter and bad data to try and simulate amateur mistakes. They used this on a known transiting planet and determined that they could detect the planet with this system.
The nice thing about making this a distributed project is that you hopefully gather enough data to survive different places being clouded out, and you don't have to worry about getting telescope time on bigger telescopes until you think you've detected something.
I don't think you could prove it, but you can certainly make good arguments.
I doubt IBM would put a huge amount of effort into something which was under a BSD type license. Why should they invest large amounts of effort just to have their work stolen by their compeditors. The GPL at least allows IBM to benefit from the work of the others who use their software.
Exactly. I don't care if your profile of some person shows that they are 99.99999% likely to commit a crime. Until they do, they should have the freedom to choose whether or not to commit that crime, and thus become an actual criminal. Profiling in this manner removes that freedom by presuming you know their destiny and acting towards them accordingly.
There are two reasons why fortran generally outperforms c...
1) Language differences: when you use pointers in c it is always difficult and sometimes impossible for a compiler to know in advance what you are doing, and thus can't necessarily optimize it. Fortran also has constructs which are easily vectorized and parallelized, taking better advantage of the hardware.
2) the fortran compilers on most platforms are more mature, and the optimizing algorithms for fortran are well documented and have been studied for longer.
1) it's been the standard scientific computing language for so long, that every platform has a compiler, and that compiler is likely to be very mature (i.e. stable, and produces fast code).
2) since it's been a standard for so long, everyone has routines written in it which have been debugged and work, no sense rewriting them and introducing errors.
3) the language itself lacks complicated constructs, so it is very simple to optimize. This, with (1) makes fortran still outperform c, thanks to the compilers.
That said, I HATE fortran with a passion, mostly because it's ugly. 6 character variable names are impossible to deal with. Couple this with capitalization and indentation rules left over from the punch card era and you have code which is literally painful to read.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what... you just talked yourself out of the contract. No company is going to put up any of its own assets to put your mind at ease. They'll just go with the next highest bidder who doesn't want them to jump through so many hoops.
Doug
I can see the bumper sticker now...
Down with argument by slogan!
Doug
Burns: Model?
Yeah, I guess I wasn't clear about that... I AM dual booting, in fact I'm posting from linux on my laptop right now.
I only have windows dual booting since I paid for it... if I had had the option, I never would have even bought it.
Doug
The only reason I even have XP installed on my laptop is because I was forced to pay for it, so I might as well have it if I need it.
My home computer and my work computer are both Linux, and I only boot my laptop into windows ~1/month.
Doug
Yes, it's that big. Many sunspots are twice the diameter of the earth.
The real reason they are "dark" is that they are cooler than the gas aronud them. Not that they are cold of course. From one of my astro textbooks:
Temperature of sunspot: 3900K
Temperature of surrounding photosphere: 5780K
Resulting in approximately 1/5 the flux (bolometric flux goes as T^4).
Doug
You're completely wrong. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction is a perfectly valid scientific theory. How do you disprove it? Find an action which does not produce an equal and opposite reaction.
You're confusing the idea of testability with the ability to prove a theory correct. No scientific theory can be proven absolutely (i.e. how do we know that when we drop the apple THIS time it won't go up instead of down!), however a good scientific theory makes a prediction, and has a way of disproving it (in this case finding a counter-example).
Doug
It is true that none (or very few) of the stars which make up the two galaxies will collide. But the gas will collide (often leading to starformation, or the stripping of gas from galaxies).
Also, all components are interacting gravitationally, so the structure of the galaxies does not survive "cleanly." Instead there are very interesting features, tidal tails, spherical shells, and usually the major fractions of the two galaxies settle down into a single system very different from the two progenitors (assuming the two initial galaxies are roughly the same size).
Doug
The simplistic explanation doesn't take gravity into account. Think of it as ants walking around on the surface of a balloon which is being blown up.
So if the ants stand still, they all get further away from each other (the classic analogy).
Next level of complexity: the ants are walking around with some random direction and speed. Some will be getting closer to each other, as long as their velocity is greater than the spread of the balloon's surface between them (i.e. distance grows by one inch, but they walked an inch and a half, so the two ants are now half an inch closer than they were initially).
Now you add in gravity (I don't know how to express this with ants... let's just say they feel some desire to walk towards each other, and that desire is related to their distance). So nearby ants feel some force which causes them to walk towards each other. If they are sufficiently close, this force will cause them to move faster towards each other than the inflation of the balloon is moving them apart (as in the second case).
This is why the stars in galaxies don't fly apart as the universe expands. The gravitational force at those scales is much greater than the expansion.
Doug
It's pretty hard to take up the argument that the conditions for life on say Mars are better than Earth. Earth has vast forests, billions of species... seems pretty conducive to life, huh? Mars, on the other hand, may or may not have microbial life... pretty dull.
All the conditions you listed off, instable tectonic plates, atmospheric disturbances, etc are all wonderful sources of energy, and most likely helped the formation of life on Earth, rather than hindered it.
Doug
My GeForce 2 was supported enough to run the graphical install. I chose not to configure X during the install, and instead booted into a command prompt, downloaded the Nvidia src rpm's and installed them. Then I configured X, changed my runlevel to 5, and X popped right up.
The whole procedure took less than 15 minutes.
Check the Nvidia linux drivers forum, there's often good information there on installing the driver and configuring X.
Doug
The real problem with discussing natural selection is it assumes we're smart enough to understand the ENTIRE picture...
If a horse evolved a saddle, no, it doesn't provide the horse with an advantage in the wild, but if it helps it be adopted by humans and through that relationship fed, protected from predetors, and allowed to breed, then the saddle was a beneficial adaptation by the horse.
Look at aphids and ants... the ability to secrete sugar is not a particularly useful ability for the aphid, but the ants then enter into a symbiotic relationship, helping protect and nurture the aphids.
Another good example is the breeding of dogs. There are many breeds which now are totally unsuited for life in the wild (short legs, terrible arthritic joints, etc). These are not traits which are inherently useful to the dog, but we seem to like them. Just because we were the ones selecting the properties we liked, and not a life/death struggle in the wild, doesn't make it any less evolution.
Nature doesn't care how (or why!) the organism survives and procreates, only that it does.
Doug
Yes, and nothing prevented people from installing netscape when microsoft started shipping IE with their OS.
Yes, some people did install netscape. Some people still have netscape installed. But IE now controls the marketplace.
Most users just use what's given to them, most of those don't even know they have options, the rest just don't care.
So the fact that technically you have options doesn't change the fact that Redhat has a lot of power when it makes these decisions, and taking someone's hard work and intentionally hiding it in the name of "ease of use" is unfair and abusive.
Doug
The only problem with self-selection like this is humans tend to select for silly and trivial traits... resulting in highly-arthritic and frankly pathetic breeds like the poodle.
Doug
Right. I realize it's a different culture (both in physical space and internet space), but in my mind, proper use of language is a sign of professionalism. It's hard for me to read what they send me without feeling like I'm talking to teenagers.
Doug
No kidding! I've had some dealings with programmers in India, and they all use horrible chatroom-speak. Besides the annoying shortcuts, I don't think I've ever gotten a complete sentence out of them.
How much time does it really take to type 3 letters instead of 1? (u->you and r->are)!
Doug
If someone else broke it, yeah!
Doug
Disclaimer: I'm a theorist, so everything I say is probably wrong :)
When I was at Santa Cruz for a graduate prospective visit I heard a talk about this project.
Essentially the idea is you assign amateur astronomers stars to examine (kind of like SETI@Home's work units). They take exposures of the star, and reduce their own data. Each night's work reduces to a single point, essentially the luminosity of the star at that time.
The way you detect transiting planets (or transiting binaries for that matter) is by detecting shifts in luminosity of the star.
The central project then uses the data points from multiple observers over time to detect the transit.
The talk essentially was a proof of concept, they did their own observations, then made monte carlo simulations of observations, including scatter and bad data to try and simulate amateur mistakes. They used this on a known transiting planet and determined that they could detect the planet with this system.
The nice thing about making this a distributed project is that you hopefully gather enough data to survive different places being clouded out, and you don't have to worry about getting telescope time on bigger telescopes until you think you've detected something.
Doug
Talk about stating the obvious... Microsoft doesn't engineer for security, stability, or efficiency.
They engineer for features and for maintaining monopoly control over the OS and word processing market.
Doug
I don't think you could prove it, but you can certainly make good arguments.
I doubt IBM would put a huge amount of effort into something which was under a BSD type license. Why should they invest large amounts of effort just to have their work stolen by their compeditors. The GPL at least allows IBM to benefit from the work of the others who use their software.
Doug
Quick poll: Who still uses .gif's?
Slashdot for one... all those nice topic icons
are gif's, all those friend indicators are gifs...
The ad currently running at the top of my post
comment screen is a gif... the slashdot
title is a gif...
Clearly slashdot has dropped gif's for jpegs..
Doug
Exactly. I don't care if your profile of some person shows that they are 99.99999% likely to commit a crime. Until they do, they should have the freedom to choose whether or not to commit that crime, and thus become an actual criminal. Profiling in this manner removes that freedom by presuming you know their destiny and acting towards them accordingly.
Doug
Hehehe... I find it ironic that your username is truckdriver.
I have a friend at MIT who told me they call the bus to Wellesley the "fuck truck to Wellesley."
Doug
There are two reasons why fortran generally outperforms c...
1) Language differences: when you use pointers in c it is always difficult and sometimes impossible for a compiler to know in advance what you are doing, and thus can't necessarily optimize it. Fortran also has constructs which are easily vectorized and parallelized, taking better advantage of the hardware.
2) the fortran compilers on most platforms are more mature, and the optimizing algorithms for fortran are well documented and have been studied for longer.
Doug
Fortran has several things going for it...
1) it's been the standard scientific computing language for so long, that every platform has a compiler, and that compiler is likely to be very mature (i.e. stable, and produces fast code).
2) since it's been a standard for so long, everyone has routines written in it which have been debugged and work, no sense rewriting them and introducing errors.
3) the language itself lacks complicated constructs, so it is very simple to optimize. This, with (1) makes fortran still outperform c, thanks to the compilers.
That said, I HATE fortran with a passion, mostly because it's ugly. 6 character variable names are impossible to deal with. Couple this with capitalization and indentation rules left over from the punch card era and you have code which is literally painful to read.
Doug