The majority of our oxygen is NOT made by plants. Especially not by forests on land (they are in equilibrium, and produce as much CO2 as they break down)
Most of our oxygen is already produced by bacteria and other single celled algae in the top 10 meters of our oceans.
The reason why we have such an incredibly low CO2 concentration in our atmosphere (a fraction of a percent) is because these algae have optimised this process (called photosynthesis) to perfection over the estimated 3 billion years that they have existed.
The only difference is that if you run the emission of a smoke stack through a bubble bath of cyano bacteria, the CO2 gets fixed before it enters the atmosphere, and not after, which is good, because CO2 emissions apparently cause their 'harm' by changing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Change is evil and scary after all.
And this doesn't happen in the US? Maybe a guy like Dutroux wouldn't have made it past the local news there, being just another run of the mill serial killer. Or would he have become a media celebrity, admired by many, like Geoffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson? Point your finger at your own belly button. Or aren't you American?
Law in Belgium is not made by 'precedents' like in the US. In fact, I don't know of any other country in the world where court rulings make laws. Laws are usually proposed by governments, and then amended, rejected or approved by parliament, if I'm not mistaken. (I am not a lawyer)
Nonsense, you are 100% perfectly free to download all music you want, no matter how illegal the copy is. As long as you don't DISTRIBUTE it, you're home free. Be a selfish napster user, and don't share your files.:P
I live in a country where the only rocks to be found are of the powdery dune forming variety. My ancestors had to build their pyramids from wood and mud, so we have not much to show for them. I'm still looking for wooden geodes.
The csh has been replaced by tcsh in the stable releases, but on all my boxes I replaced I use a statically linked version of bash as rootshell.
Drivers DO cause problems sometimes. The PCM driver for instance worked perfectly for mostowners of a SB-Live card, just on my particular hardware configuration it caused a kernel panic. Recently fixed in release 4.2. This kind of bugs are spotted and thus fixed sooner with moer widely used OS-es like linux.
It's very common among people who have been used to being 'superior' to their peers for as long as they can remember. Great athletes, unusually intelligent people, great artists etc very often turn out to be arrogant assholes, with little or no patience for people they consider less talented. It is just a bit more pronounced in good coders, because a highly analytical mind often comes with a lack of interest/talent for empathy and social interaction.
What religious war? They're just 3 different OS-es for different situations. FreeBSD sacrifices some portability for better performance and ease of use on the intel PC. NetBSD sacrifices some raw performance and ease of use for the broadest possible portability, and OpenBSD sacrifices some performace, ease of use and new- or exotic hardware support for more guaranteed security.
It is nothing like windows versus linux, or linux distro A versus linux distro B. When lots of people say they don't like Theo de Raadth, that doesn't make it a holy war.
It wouldn't be used in the atmosphere, or withing the direct gravitational pull of the earth. It wouldn't even work. They would have to boost the thing into orbit with a conventional rocket first.
Just like with the ion propelled rocket, the power doesn't lie in immensely high thrust but in the ability to sustain the thrust over the space of weeks or months, instead of short bursts of no more than a few minutes.
The nuclear engine would continue accellerating the vehicle slowly but steadily for weeks, accellerating it to a velocity far higher than a conventional engine, which requires you to drag a fuel tanks the size of a house along, which will be used up in a matter of minutes.
So don't worry about a nuclear rocket leaving a great radioactive mushroom cloud in it's tail.
That is largely an artifact of the fact that america did not have neighbours/competitors of similar or greater power, not an inherent moral superiority.
In any case, western europe and the US are not that different today. There are a few more rules and regulations here in Europe, but there have to be, since the population is very much denser here. Twice the number of people on half the area.
And before you all start flaming, yes, I am very pleased we were liberated by the Americans, and not by the Russians in 1945.
But you didn't follow the rules! You must give all your work away for free, along with the copyrights , especially to teenagers who don't have the skill to type 'make install', but need all the sources anyway.
It is very important that when you use the word 'operating system', you only refer to versions of unix. You must understand that linux is superior to all other unixes, but that the operating system that was the great pure evil and the companies that were the great satan in the eighties (IBM, HP, Sun and SGI) are now cool. Some people even seem to think Apple is now coolish, because it does something with a free unix.
Examples of things that are NOT and operating system: windows (32 bit patch on a graphical userinterface for an obsolete interrupt handler ripped off from cp/m), the driver software of gamig consoles (no unix shell), NT (a vms rip-off, which wasn't a real OS anyway, because we don't understand how the shell works).
If you don't follow these rules, you are not showing your dedication to linux and open source. Remember how compaq were slagged off for offering the linux binaries for the DEC fortran compiler free for download? "Where are the sources?!!" and "This is a deliberate attempt to torpedo the vastly superior but non commercial gnu f77 project" and "How dare they pollute linux with a compiler for an inferior language"
If you are still reading: I was quite impressed with the athena demo. I hope it will run independant of X11 soon.
When an article states that a fish has the same genes as humans, the meaning of 'the same' is best compared to: A rabbit has all 'the same' organs and limbs as a human: liver, heart,lungs, skin, eyes, arms, feet etc.
Patenting genes is not about patenting a sequence of base pairs. A bit of DNA on its own just isn't useful. The interesting bit, is the protein the gene codes for. I'd be very much surprised if the fugu had any genes identical to their human equivalent.
Gaming on Linux makes about as much sense as running a web server on windows 98. Especially since there are such easy alternatives available, such as dual booting. We all got a windows 9x licence with our PC when we bought it after all, even if we didn't want it, and all new games worth playing (afaik) have a w9x version.
Linux needs a lot of work to even come close to the support both for older and for the latest bleeding edge graphics and sound hardware. All this work isn't going to be done unless it becomes commercially viable, and it can't become commercially viable until all that work has been done.
Shrink-wrapped software that could have a chance on the linux platform would be scientific packages, professional compilers, perhaps server software if someone doesn't trust apache. And even in those cases, shrink-wrapper CD-roms don't make sense. With a T1 line or better, downloading a CD-image and documentation in PDF format is a so much more efficient distribution method.
Yeah, where all this nitrogen in the form of atmospheric N2 comes from is an interesting question. In our biospere, N2 is both produced and consumed (to form nitrates, amonia, organic molecules such as amino acid) by bacteria and an endless cycle. I don't know if this means you need life to have an atmosphere rich in N2.
Who is talking about molecular oxygen or carbon dioxide boiling off? I mentioned hydrogen nuclei (protons) blowing off with the solar wind. Imagine the upper part of an atmosphere that is very sparse to begin with, under high energy (unfiltered solar radiation) conditions. Atomic oxygen, hydrogen etc, and a myriad of charged molecule fragments aren't as uncommon under these conditions as they are here on the earth's surface.
If the oxygen part of the reaction remains in the upper atmosphere, the reaction eventually reaches an equilibrium. If the oxygen binds to materials on the surface, and is effectively taken out of the reaction, the reaction keeps going one way, until water stops reaching the upper atmospere...
The water was probably split into loose hydrogen atoms (or protons) and oxygen by solar radiation in the upper atmosphere. The protons drifted off wit hthe solar wind and the oxygen bound to metals in the planet's crust. Water vapour is very heavy, and probably wouldn't escape so easily.
Because for life to evolve that mebaolises sugars, the sugars have to be there in the first place. And in abundance. You can't have garbage pail dwellers without a city and a garbage pail either. It just strikes me as somewhat similar to assuming alien intelligence will probably speak english, because it is such a simple, common language, easy to learn for everyone.
I can't access that science paper from home, and since it is sunday, I'll just take your word for it that a trajectory of 2 to 3 years is very likely.
Maybe your opinion is biased by wanting to believe we are all martians, just like mine is biased by wanting to believe life will originate independently just about anywhere, as long as there is carbon, liquid water and an energy source for prolonged periods of time.
Not really. Why would an organism evolve with an enzyme that fits either stereo isomer of a molecule made by life on earth like a glove? If you find this, you have found an organism that is adapted to metabolising a sugar.
Stereo-selectivity isn't an inherent property of katalysts (if only!). The stereo selectivity of an enzyme is the result of millions or even billions of years of evolution, fine tuning the enzyme for that one specific task.
Having organisms that metabolise dextrose (or sinstrose), also implies that you have organisms that produce those molecules. Non biological processes that produce these molecules are rare, and not stereo selective. An organism doesn't evolve an enzyme finely tuned to metabolising an isomer that isn't there.
My personal opinion is that if there is life to be found on mars, it is of the chemo lithotrophic variety deep below the surface, or perhaps photosynthesising organisms in the polar ice caps. The surface (where the samples were taken) is a very unlikely place. Anything containing water is going to be freeze-dried at those conditions (low temperature and extremely low pressure). If they are there, please please please let them be discovered during my lifetime.
I agree that it is not completely unthinkable that spores of some earth bacteria could survive whatever violent process ejected them from the earth with a velocity of at least 11 kilometers per second, millions of years in deep space and impact on mars. Some organisms from earth could even survive there, but not on metabolising dextrose.
If you did find cells capable of burning dextrose and not sinstrose on mars, you had positive proof of having found earth bacteria.
How likely would it be that an organism that originated and evolved on mars would use a molecule that is the product of living organisms that originated and evolved on earth as a substrate,
and
use oxygen to burn this molecule (which on earth is the product of organisms that originated and evolved on earth, and is very rare in the martian atmosphere),
and
evolved the same preference for a certain stereo isomer? Organisms like that would be extremely ill-adapted to conditions on mars, yet very adapted to life on earth.
If you found organisms like that on mars, you have found proof that bacteria from earth contaminated your experiment.
The experiment (the way the article describes it) was bogus anyway. There is no conceivable reason why martian life, if it exists, would be able to live on burning organic nutrients. Simply because there would be nothing for them to eat on mars, and no oxygen to burn it with.
If there is life at all (I don't believe it, but I don't exclude the possibility. If it is there, it is extremely unlikely to be in the freeze-dried and irradiated surface layer, where the soil samples were taken from), it will be of the CO2 reducing variety (i.e. taking water and CO2 gas, and making organic molecules from that).
Do you have any idea how many carrots you would have to eat to ingest a high enough dose of beta carotene to stain your skin orange?:)
It _is_ commonly used to dye foods that people do ingest in great quantities, like lemonade.
Remember Phthalidomide (sp?)? That was tested to the standards of its time, and deemed safe
You can't compare these things. When we still thought that the earth was flat, we had absolutely no clue what was on the other side. You can't use that to argue that now that we can fly all the way around it, we still can't be absolutely sure about the shape of the earth, because me made false assumptions about it earlier.
Anyway, I am not arguing that genetic engineering is perfectly safe, but neither are traditional crop improvement techniques. My point is that people will only listen if you talk about the potential dangers, no matter how far fetched, and they are willing to believe any story, even very very rediculous ones, as long as they are negative. No wonder that as a result people are scared!
Thalidomide probably was one of the reasons for this. It was one of the first chemically engineered medicines (as opposed to derived from plant material), but done in a time when not a lot was known about the structure of molecules at all. It is sad, but not surprising that as a result people will not believe us anymore when we claim that we do know enough about the structure of molecules now...
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The majority of our oxygen is NOT made by plants. Especially not by forests on land (they are in equilibrium, and produce as much CO2 as they break down)
Most of our oxygen is already produced by bacteria and other single celled algae in the top 10 meters of our oceans.
The reason why we have such an incredibly low CO2 concentration in our atmosphere (a fraction of a percent) is because these algae have optimised this process (called photosynthesis) to perfection over the estimated 3 billion years that they have existed.
The only difference is that if you run the emission of a smoke stack through a bubble bath of cyano bacteria, the CO2 gets fixed before it enters the atmosphere, and not after, which is good, because CO2 emissions apparently cause their 'harm' by changing the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Change is evil and scary after all.
And this doesn't happen in the US? Maybe a guy like Dutroux wouldn't have made it past the local news there, being just another run of the mill serial killer. Or would he have become a media celebrity, admired by many, like Geoffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson? Point your finger at your own belly button. Or aren't you American?
Law in Belgium is not made by 'precedents' like in the US. In fact, I don't know of any other country in the world where court rulings make laws. Laws are usually proposed by governments, and then amended, rejected or approved by parliament, if I'm not mistaken. (I am not a lawyer)
Nonsense, you are 100% perfectly free to download all music you want, no matter how illegal the copy is. As long as you don't DISTRIBUTE it, you're home free. Be a selfish napster user, and don't share your files. :P
I live in a country where the only rocks to be found are of the powdery dune forming variety. My ancestors had to build their pyramids from wood and mud, so we have not much to show for them. I'm still looking for wooden geodes.
Don't do to a cat what your cat wouldn't do to you if you were mouse sized. Erm.. wait a minute...
The csh has been replaced by tcsh in the stable releases, but on all my boxes I replaced I use a statically linked version of bash as rootshell.
Drivers DO cause problems sometimes. The PCM driver for instance worked perfectly for mostowners of a SB-Live card, just on my particular hardware configuration it caused a kernel panic. Recently fixed in release 4.2. This kind of bugs are spotted and thus fixed sooner with moer widely used OS-es like linux.
It's very common among people who have been used to being 'superior' to their peers for as long as they can remember. Great athletes, unusually intelligent people, great artists etc very often turn out to be arrogant assholes, with little or no patience for people they consider less talented. It is just a bit more pronounced in good coders, because a highly analytical mind often comes with a lack of interest/talent for empathy and social interaction.
What religious war? They're just 3 different OS-es for different situations. FreeBSD sacrifices some portability for better performance and ease of use on the intel PC. NetBSD sacrifices some raw performance and ease of use for the broadest possible portability, and OpenBSD sacrifices some performace, ease of use and new- or exotic hardware support for more guaranteed security.
It is nothing like windows versus linux, or linux distro A versus linux distro B. When lots of people say they don't like Theo de Raadth, that doesn't make it a holy war.
Here's what I wrote about the liftoff issues earlier.
It wouldn't be used in the atmosphere, or withing the direct gravitational pull of the earth. It wouldn't even work. They would have to boost the thing into orbit with a conventional rocket first.
Just like with the ion propelled rocket, the power doesn't lie in immensely high thrust but in the ability to sustain the thrust over the space of weeks or months, instead of short bursts of no more than a few minutes.
The nuclear engine would continue accellerating the vehicle slowly but steadily for weeks, accellerating it to a velocity far higher than a conventional engine, which requires you to drag a fuel tanks the size of a house along, which will be used up in a matter of minutes.
So don't worry about a nuclear rocket leaving a great radioactive mushroom cloud in it's tail.
That is largely an artifact of the fact that america did not have neighbours/competitors of similar or greater power, not an inherent moral superiority.
In any case, western europe and the US are not that different today. There are a few more rules and regulations here in Europe, but there have to be, since the population is very much denser here. Twice the number of people on half the area.
And before you all start flaming, yes, I am very pleased we were liberated by the Americans, and not by the Russians in 1945.
But you didn't follow the rules! You must give all your work away for free, along with the copyrights , especially to teenagers who don't have the skill to type 'make install', but need all the sources anyway.
It is very important that when you use the word 'operating system', you only refer to versions of unix. You must understand that linux is superior to all other unixes, but that the operating system that was the great pure evil and the companies that were the great satan in the eighties (IBM, HP, Sun and SGI) are now cool. Some people even seem to think Apple is now coolish, because it does something with a free unix.
Examples of things that are NOT and operating system: windows (32 bit patch on a graphical userinterface for an obsolete interrupt handler ripped off from cp/m), the driver software of gamig consoles (no unix shell), NT (a vms rip-off, which wasn't a real OS anyway, because we don't understand how the shell works).
If you don't follow these rules, you are not showing your dedication to linux and open source. Remember how compaq were slagged off for offering the linux binaries for the DEC fortran compiler free for download? "Where are the sources?!!" and "This is a deliberate attempt to torpedo the vastly superior but non commercial gnu f77 project" and "How dare they pollute linux with a compiler for an inferior language"
If you are still reading: I was quite impressed with the athena demo. I hope it will run independant of X11 soon.
When an article states that a fish has the same genes as humans, the meaning of 'the same' is best compared to: A rabbit has all 'the same' organs and limbs as a human: liver, heart ,lungs, skin, eyes, arms, feet etc.
Patenting genes is not about patenting a sequence of base pairs. A bit of DNA on its own just isn't useful. The interesting bit, is the protein the gene codes for. I'd be very much surprised if the fugu had any genes identical to their human equivalent.
Gaming on Linux makes about as much sense as running a web server on windows 98. Especially since there are such easy alternatives available, such as dual booting. We all got a windows 9x licence with our PC when we bought it after all, even if we didn't want it, and all new games worth playing (afaik) have a w9x version.
Linux needs a lot of work to even come close to the support both for older and for the latest bleeding edge graphics and sound hardware. All this work isn't going to be done unless it becomes commercially viable, and it can't become commercially viable until all that work has been done.
Shrink-wrapped software that could have a chance on the linux platform would be scientific packages, professional compilers, perhaps server software if someone doesn't trust apache. And even in those cases, shrink-wrapper CD-roms don't make sense. With a T1 line or better, downloading a CD-image and documentation in PDF format is a so much more efficient distribution method.
Yeah, where all this nitrogen in the form of atmospheric N2 comes from is an interesting question. In our biospere, N2 is both produced and consumed (to form nitrates, amonia, organic molecules such as amino acid) by bacteria and an endless cycle. I don't know if this means you need life to have an atmosphere rich in N2.
Are you sure mars had large amounts of nitrogen to begin with?
Who is talking about molecular oxygen or carbon dioxide boiling off? I mentioned hydrogen nuclei (protons) blowing off with the solar wind. Imagine the upper part of an atmosphere that is very sparse to begin with, under high energy (unfiltered solar radiation) conditions. Atomic oxygen, hydrogen etc, and a myriad of charged molecule fragments aren't as uncommon under these conditions as they are here on the earth's surface.
If the oxygen part of the reaction remains in the upper atmosphere, the reaction eventually reaches an equilibrium. If the oxygen binds to materials on the surface, and is effectively taken out of the reaction, the reaction keeps going one way, until water stops reaching the upper atmospere...
The water was probably split into loose hydrogen atoms (or protons) and oxygen by solar radiation in the upper atmosphere. The protons drifted off wit hthe solar wind and the oxygen bound to metals in the planet's crust. Water vapour is very heavy, and probably wouldn't escape so easily.
Because for life to evolve that mebaolises sugars, the sugars have to be there in the first place. And in abundance. You can't have garbage pail dwellers without a city and a garbage pail either. It just strikes me as somewhat similar to assuming alien intelligence will probably speak english, because it is such a simple, common language, easy to learn for everyone.
I can't access that science paper from home, and since it is sunday, I'll just take your word for it that a trajectory of 2 to 3 years is very likely.
Maybe your opinion is biased by wanting to believe we are all martians, just like mine is biased by wanting to believe life will originate independently just about anywhere, as long as there is carbon, liquid water and an energy source for prolonged periods of time.
Not really. Why would an organism evolve with an enzyme that fits either stereo isomer of a molecule made by life on earth like a glove? If you find this, you have found an organism that is adapted to metabolising a sugar.
Stereo-selectivity isn't an inherent property of katalysts (if only!). The stereo selectivity of an enzyme is the result of millions or even billions of years of evolution, fine tuning the enzyme for that one specific task.
Having organisms that metabolise dextrose (or sinstrose), also implies that you have organisms that produce those molecules. Non biological processes that produce these molecules are rare, and not stereo selective. An organism doesn't evolve an enzyme finely tuned to metabolising an isomer that isn't there.
My personal opinion is that if there is life to be found on mars, it is of the chemo lithotrophic variety deep below the surface, or perhaps photosynthesising organisms in the polar ice caps. The surface (where the samples were taken) is a very unlikely place. Anything containing water is going to be freeze-dried at those conditions (low temperature and extremely low pressure). If they are there, please please please let them be discovered during my lifetime.
I agree that it is not completely unthinkable that spores of some earth bacteria could survive whatever violent process ejected them from the earth with a velocity of at least 11 kilometers per second, millions of years in deep space and impact on mars. Some organisms from earth could even survive there, but not on metabolising dextrose.
How likely would it be that an organism that originated and evolved on mars would use a molecule that is the product of living organisms that originated and evolved on earth as a substrate,
- and
use oxygen to burn this molecule (which on earth is the product of organisms that originated and evolved on earth, and is very rare in the martian atmosphere),- and
evolved the same preference for a certain stereo isomer? Organisms like that would be extremely ill-adapted to conditions on mars, yet very adapted to life on earth.If you found organisms like that on mars, you have found proof that bacteria from earth contaminated your experiment.
The experiment (the way the article describes it) was bogus anyway. There is no conceivable reason why martian life, if it exists, would be able to live on burning organic nutrients. Simply because there would be nothing for them to eat on mars, and no oxygen to burn it with.
If there is life at all (I don't believe it, but I don't exclude the possibility. If it is there, it is extremely unlikely to be in the freeze-dried and irradiated surface layer, where the soil samples were taken from), it will be of the CO2 reducing variety (i.e. taking water and CO2 gas, and making organic molecules from that).
Do you have any idea how many carrots you would have to eat to ingest a high enough dose of beta carotene to stain your skin orange? :)
It _is_ commonly used to dye foods that people do ingest in great quantities, like lemonade.
Remember Phthalidomide (sp?)? That was tested to the standards of its time, and deemed safe
You can't compare these things. When we still thought that the earth was flat, we had absolutely no clue what was on the other side. You can't use that to argue that now that we can fly all the way around it, we still can't be absolutely sure about the shape of the earth, because me made false assumptions about it earlier.
Anyway, I am not arguing that genetic engineering is perfectly safe, but neither are traditional crop improvement techniques. My point is that people will only listen if you talk about the potential dangers, no matter how far fetched, and they are willing to believe any story, even very very rediculous ones, as long as they are negative. No wonder that as a result people are scared!
Thalidomide probably was one of the reasons for this. It was one of the first chemically engineered medicines (as opposed to derived from plant material), but done in a time when not a lot was known about the structure of molecules at all. It is sad, but not surprising that as a result people will not believe us anymore when we claim that we do know enough about the structure of molecules now...