The only problem I have with SSDs is the inability to securely erase shit without blanking the entire drive.
There are so many urban legends about file erasing...
In the case of a spinning disk HDD: If someone is really worried about someone examining their discarded disks with a scanning tunneling microscope, an entirely theoretical possibility that, even if feasible in practice, would take years and 7 figure sums of money, I seriously wonder what they're trying to hide...
In the case of an SSD, if you have TRIM enabled (mount -o discard), which you should do, because it increases the performance and lifespan of your SSD, all blocks occupied by a file are blanked when the file is deleted. There is no known process, theoretical or practical, to recover data from an SSD once it has been overwritten.
OK, here it is: nationalise the pharma industry. People's lives and health shouldn't be dictated by corporate greed.
This is naive. Treating patients without getting rid of either the plasmodium parasite or the mosquito vector is not going to solve the malaria problem, because people keep getting sick. You don't just get malaria once and then either get cured or die, like with a virus. You keep getting it, getting cured, getting sick again, getting cured again etc, and build up very little resistance to it. This disease is fundamentally different from a viral or bacterial infection.
May I be controversial and point out that saving lives on an overpopulated planet may in itself not be ethical?
No, of course I don't think we should let people just die; and I think it is possible to perform animal experiments in an ethical way. But I think we need a major rethinking and refocusing of our perspectives. Things like religiously based notions about "the sanctity of life" and the perhaps equally religious notion of "the sanctity of the profit margin" are poor guidelines for any research, and the pharmaceuticals spend a huge proportion of their research on relatively inconsequential problems as a consequence. That is why they have neglected really serious problems like malaria, and instead like to concentrate on chronic diseases. The thing about eg malaria is that 1) those affected are poor, and 2) if you cure it, you make no more money. Chronic patients, on the other hand, will keep paying all of their, hopefully, long lives.
so to summarize?
unless there's an easy and effective cure already available, don't treat them. Don't prolong people's lives by just suppressing symptoms or delaying death, it's not worth it.
Trust me, malaria is not a neglected problem. It might surprise you to hear that it is a difficult problem to fix. Killing bacteria is relatively easy - they are sufficiently different from us to allow substances that are deadly poisons to them but not to the patient. The plasmodium parasite is so much more similar to our own cells that it is very difficult to come up with a deadly posion for them that isn't harmful to the patient. Malaria was finally eradicated in our parts during the 1950's by draining swamps and copious spraying with DDT to bring the mosquito population down, while aggressively treating patients with quinine. This effectively cut the plasmodium parasite off from its human hosts. After a few years of this, the malaria prasite went extinct in Europe and north America. The malaria mosquito is back, but as the parasite is gone, the mosquitos are now harmless.
The same would probably work in Africa: we could aggressively drain swamps and spray all wetlands with vast amounts of DDT to kill most insect life. Malaria incidence would drop, potentially below minimum levels for the parasite to survive. I think it should be obvious to you that it is not primarily lack of money or lack of interest that prevents this strategy from being used in 2012. Draining swamps and eradicating insect life is no longer considered a good thing.
You just do exactly what it says in the support contract. You did sign a support contract with the customer, right? You don't sell our service for lump sum X, but for lump sum less than X, plus monthly or yearly fee Y. It's a steady source of income, and repeat business, and protect both you and the customer from having to sue each other.
Without such a contract, the customer might expect you to support the product free of charge for ever, or sue you if the product has flaws that weren't in the sales contract. They'll probably win too.
The article said nothing about any mechanism. When I read a headline like this, my first thought is that either the early symptoms of Alzheimer make people drink less coffee, or whatever biological trait causes Alzheimer also causes people to drink less coffee. Unless they can propose a mechanism, supported by evidence, I'm not inclined to believe in the magical, medicinal properties of a common beverage.
What a bunch of bullshit. If the Netherlands put criteria into their constitutions that prohibit ACTA-like legislations, it will be impossible to introduce it, unless you have a large majority to retract the amendment to the constitution.
The Netherlands, like many oldish countries, does not have a constitution the way Americans understand it. There is a document they call 'constitution', which is difficult to change, but it is merely a long legalese document outlining government institutions and such - not a founding principle of the legal system. Once a law has been passed and ratified, its constitutionality can no longer be challenged. In other words, ordinary laws are more important than this document that they call a constitution.
No matter what the legal status of a constitution, I can't imagine any country would bother to change their constitution for something as frivolous as ACTA or anti-ACTA regulation.
The author of that 'old fogies' article explains how he used to agree old (over 40) programmers were laughable, but now that he's reached that age, he seems to feel that experience superior to youth and well worth the extra money.
Now, In my experience, this is only true up to a point. There seems to be very little difference in productivity beyond say 5 to 10 years of experience, while an additional 10 years of experience in a technology phased out years ago and not at all used in a company's current projects is simply doesn't add enough to warrant a higher hourly rate.
A good techie stays up to date on the latest technology, but if you are hiring for a project based on scala, and have the choice between two programmers with 5 years of scala experience, but one of the two has an additional 15 years of C++ experience and demands twice the hourly rate, hiring the more experienced guy would simply not make sense. It's not ageism, it's common sense. If they cost the same, I'd almost certainly pick the older one, but alas.
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.
It's clear that you've never met any Dutch people, or maybe just one extremely atypical outlier and based your opinion of Dutch people on that.
Sit at a cafe? Eat at a restaurant? Have a fine wine? Socialize with people? American culture does a lot more of that than Dutch culture. In fact, I get the impression that the Dutch are among the least interested in those sort of thing in the developed world, and Americans among the most.
A more likely explanation of the difference is that the Dutch tend to be thrifty, bordering on cheap.
ARM, on the other hand, has not yet tried to compete in PC or server markets
Actually, they have. And they succeeded for many years. They used to be known as Acorn, and provided processors for *many* systems in the 1980's and early 1990's. The very first generation known as ARM was powering the BBC Micro in 1987, and there's several other computers made around that time that used Acorn hardware.
The BBC micro was powered by the CMOS 6502, not related in any way to the ARM. There was a line of PC's based on ARM, the Archimedes. At the time, the selling point was that this RISC cpu ran faster and at a higher clockspeed than the intel chips in MSDOS PC's, and the Archimedes came with a more advanced OS. What it did not come with however was the ability to run PC software natively, and it was very expensive. It could not be described as 'succeeding', the company went under and only the spun off CPU business lives on, these days selling as cheaper and more power efficient than intel chips.
By the way, I typed this on an ARM based laptop. It took me a long time, because it's pretty slow, and android just laughs at the concept of an attached keyboard.
Why does everyone seem to read "outsourcing" as "outsourcing to a low wage country" ?
Should a bakery or a used car dealership have its own software department? Their own plumbing department? Any time you find an outside company to do custom work for you, you are outsourcing this work. Whether you are having it done by your local software company down town or by a far away software company in Bangalore, it's all outsourcing.
By the way, all this complaining about outsourcing (meaning outsourcing to low wage countries) seems petty and weak to me. 25 years ago, when factory workers complained that their jobs were moving overseas, you techies had no sympathy. "You should have gone to college and gotten real marketable skills then". Now that it's happening to people who went to college and got skills that were marketable 20 years ago, it's suddenly an outrage.
My understanding is that Russia could trivially overwhelm anything but a completely sky-saturating missile defence, which one defence base isn't. So why the hysterics from the Russians, this isn't useful against anything but rogue states. I'd be more understanding if there were a string of hundreds of them being built.
The missile defense shield has exactly one purpose: mopping up as much as possible of any retalliatory strikes with whatever is left of the Russian missiles after a successful first strike on them.
The nuclear arsenal is of limited political value as it is right now, because any threat is balanced with an equivalent counter threat from their arsenal. When you change the equation in a way that nukes could be used in a first strike with strongly limited repercussions, its threat once again gains you political leverage.
Rogue states are not the target here. Their precious few nukes are extremely valuable to them in an unexploded form, but lose all of their value once exploded. They don't have ICBMs and a satelite guidance network, and if a rogue organisation did plan a nuclear attack, they use a more fail safe and accurate delivery system such as a truck, airplane or ship.
Apparently not. Of course, that link ignores nuclear winter, which would do sufficient damage to Earth's ecosystem to most likely wipe out humanity along with most other species, although some very radiation-hardened otherwise hardy life would probably survive.
My generation was brought up with the common knowledge that there were enough nukes to destroy all life on the planet many times over, and that the radiation of a nuclear blast would make a spot uninhabitable for thousands of years.
I remember how shocked and surprised I was as a teenager (don't laugh, there were no discovery channel, google or wikipedia) when I learned that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki are abandoned lifeless nuclear wastelands today. An important part of the common knowledge was clearly based in fact. As that informationisbeautiful link you quoted shows, a simple thought experiment quickly shows that the part about destroying all life on the planet is bogus too.
This puts the whole MAD meme in a different light. The only way to win is not to play? The military probably did the same calcs on a paper napkin and came to a different conclusion. They never stopped planning to fight and win a nuclear war.
I take all common knowledge with a grain of salt these days. For lots of things everybody 'knows' there is actually no evidence, or even evidence to the contrary (see the health benefits of vitamin C supplements or dietary fiber).
I don't know about that... The people you refer to have their first child at a younger age, but do they have more of them in the end? A lot of high earning techies at my company have 3, 4 even 5 kids. They can afford it, you see. They're making enough money to reduce their work hours or for their spouses to take a few years off work...
You're counting deaths, but they are irrelevant. What's relevant is counting healthy offspring that go on to reproduce. Death can reduce that number, but so can other factors. One person has no children, another has four.
The Netherlands are a notorious corporate tax haven. You are looking at income tax. The 52% is just the highest tax bracket, not a lot of people make enough money to have a significant portion of their income taxed at that level (I get to keep about 70% of my income). But corporations don't pay income tax. Corporate taxes are on the low side (lower than in the US), and multinationals in particular have a loophole they can use to pay even less.
Mono allows you to use visual studio to develop Linux applications. It does not help you run applications written for windows on Linux, because so much of the API has not been ported yet, or doesn't have an equivalent on Linux at all.
Java is huge in the kind of stuff that doesn't make the news very often.
More importantly, a lot of these systems are so large that "switching to.NET" isn't really a practical option.
Even if all Java development ceased tommorow.. I suspect Java would still be around for a long, long time. Java could become the next COBOL!
Java is also huge in the kind of stuff that does make the news. It's either the #1 or #2 most used programming language for applications, depending on what you try to measure.
The reason why switching to.NET isn't practical doesn't have anything to do with size. There is nothing preventing anyone from developing a Java-to-CLR compiler (google says http://www.janetdev.org/ but I haven't tried it), and writing any new parts of your application in some other CLR language. I think the biggest hurdle would be switching the IT infrastructure to windows and then being committed to sticking with that choice for ever.
By the way, if you think all COBOL development has ceased, you are wrong.
Where are all these women who are being excluded? At the last place where I worked, every single female candidate for programming positions was hired. Yes, all two of them. One was very good, the other was hmm, maybe average on a good day, but with such a tiny sample size that is pretty meaningless.
My gut feeling has always been that it's simply a job most women aren't interested in. For a job that requires a college degree, coding doesn't pay very well, and has a rather low social status. A woman who is smart enough for a programming job, is also smart enough for a much better job, I reckon.
Feather impressions would be scrutinized under microscopic detail. And a known forgery Archeoraptor, wasn't from a fake feather impressions, but two slabs from two different species(top and bottom half), presented as one, and it was suspect because it had no counter-slab of the reverse side.
I read that this particular specimen was bought in the market. They're not even sure exactly where it was found. I'm sure the imprints are of real feathers, but were they 125 million year old dinosaur down, or contemporary chicken down?
My (certainly amateur) reading of the literature indicates that it's likely that all therapods were feathered, albeit mostly with thin insulating feathers that don't fossilize well. How is this unexpected?
But fossil skin imprints of later therapods (t-rex) indicate that they had scales...
For some reason, apart from the archaeopteryx (which is a far older fossil), the feathered dinosaurs all seem to have lived in that one area in present day China. I'm certainly not an expert, but I'm not convinced any of them are entirely real. Many of these, apparently including this fossil, were not dug up and prepared by paleontologists, but by local artisans. The ones with feather imprints or looking like transitional species fetch a much higher price. How difficult would it be for a local artisan to add some feather or down imprints to a fossil to increase its value?
Why do we make art? It's not for money. It's not for social prestige. We make art as an act of self expression and as a way of passing the time when we're not engaged in activities necessary for our own survival.
Speak for yourself. Self expression and artistic merit are just a means to an end. The end being prestige, money and girls. Sometimes the 'self expression' thing is the best way to achieve that (maybe you're not terribly charismatic or skilled), and sometimes the artistic angle is the way to get there (maybe you like college girls with glasses) but only in so far as they get the job done.
Foreign actors simply don't cost as much as American ones with a similar talent and experience level, and UK ones have the added advantage that they're able to speak English.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem I have with SSDs is the inability to securely erase shit without blanking the entire drive.
There are so many urban legends about file erasing...
In the case of a spinning disk HDD: If someone is really worried about someone examining their discarded disks with a scanning tunneling microscope, an entirely theoretical possibility that, even if feasible in practice, would take years and 7 figure sums of money, I seriously wonder what they're trying to hide...
In the case of an SSD, if you have TRIM enabled (mount -o discard), which you should do, because it increases the performance and lifespan of your SSD, all blocks occupied by a file are blanked when the file is deleted. There is no known process, theoretical or practical, to recover data from an SSD once it has been overwritten.
OK, here it is: nationalise the pharma industry. People's lives and health shouldn't be dictated by corporate greed.
This is naive. Treating patients without getting rid of either the plasmodium parasite or the mosquito vector is not going to solve the malaria problem, because people keep getting sick. You don't just get malaria once and then either get cured or die, like with a virus. You keep getting it, getting cured, getting sick again, getting cured again etc, and build up very little resistance to it. This disease is fundamentally different from a viral or bacterial infection.
May I be controversial and point out that saving lives on an overpopulated planet may in itself not be ethical?
No, of course I don't think we should let people just die; and I think it is possible to perform animal experiments in an ethical way. But I think we need a major rethinking and refocusing of our perspectives. Things like religiously based notions about "the sanctity of life" and the perhaps equally religious notion of "the sanctity of the profit margin" are poor guidelines for any research, and the pharmaceuticals spend a huge proportion of their research on relatively inconsequential problems as a consequence. That is why they have neglected really serious problems like malaria, and instead like to concentrate on chronic diseases. The thing about eg malaria is that 1) those affected are poor, and 2) if you cure it, you make no more money. Chronic patients, on the other hand, will keep paying all of their, hopefully, long lives.
so to summarize?
unless there's an easy and effective cure already available, don't treat them. Don't prolong people's lives by just suppressing symptoms or delaying death, it's not worth it.
Trust me, malaria is not a neglected problem. It might surprise you to hear that it is a difficult problem to fix. Killing bacteria is relatively easy - they are sufficiently different from us to allow substances that are deadly poisons to them but not to the patient. The plasmodium parasite is so much more similar to our own cells that it is very difficult to come up with a deadly posion for them that isn't harmful to the patient. Malaria was finally eradicated in our parts during the 1950's by draining swamps and copious spraying with DDT to bring the mosquito population down, while aggressively treating patients with quinine. This effectively cut the plasmodium parasite off from its human hosts. After a few years of this, the malaria prasite went extinct in Europe and north America. The malaria mosquito is back, but as the parasite is gone, the mosquitos are now harmless.
The same would probably work in Africa: we could aggressively drain swamps and spray all wetlands with vast amounts of DDT to kill most insect life. Malaria incidence would drop, potentially below minimum levels for the parasite to survive. I think it should be obvious to you that it is not primarily lack of money or lack of interest that prevents this strategy from being used in 2012. Draining swamps and eradicating insect life is no longer considered a good thing.
Now, why don't you come up with a better plan?
You just do exactly what it says in the support contract. You did sign a support contract with the customer, right? You don't sell our service for lump sum X, but for lump sum less than X, plus monthly or yearly fee Y. It's a steady source of income, and repeat business, and protect both you and the customer from having to sue each other.
Without such a contract, the customer might expect you to support the product free of charge for ever, or sue you if the product has flaws that weren't in the sales contract. They'll probably win too.
The article said nothing about any mechanism. When I read a headline like this, my first thought is that either the early symptoms of Alzheimer make people drink less coffee, or whatever biological trait causes Alzheimer also causes people to drink less coffee. Unless they can propose a mechanism, supported by evidence, I'm not inclined to believe in the magical, medicinal properties of a common beverage.
What a bunch of bullshit. If the Netherlands put criteria into their constitutions that prohibit ACTA-like legislations, it will be impossible to introduce it, unless you have a large majority to retract the amendment to the constitution.
The Netherlands, like many oldish countries, does not have a constitution the way Americans understand it. There is a document they call 'constitution', which is difficult to change, but it is merely a long legalese document outlining government institutions and such - not a founding principle of the legal system. Once a law has been passed and ratified, its constitutionality can no longer be challenged. In other words, ordinary laws are more important than this document that they call a constitution.
No matter what the legal status of a constitution, I can't imagine any country would bother to change their constitution for something as frivolous as ACTA or anti-ACTA regulation.
The author of that 'old fogies' article explains how he used to agree old (over 40) programmers were laughable, but now that he's reached that age, he seems to feel that experience superior to youth and well worth the extra money.
Now, In my experience, this is only true up to a point. There seems to be very little difference in productivity beyond say 5 to 10 years of experience, while an additional 10 years of experience in a technology phased out years ago and not at all used in a company's current projects is simply doesn't add enough to warrant a higher hourly rate.
A good techie stays up to date on the latest technology, but if you are hiring for a project based on scala, and have the choice between two programmers with 5 years of scala experience, but one of the two has an additional 15 years of C++ experience and demands twice the hourly rate, hiring the more experienced guy would simply not make sense. It's not ageism, it's common sense. If they cost the same, I'd almost certainly pick the older one, but alas.
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.
It's clear that you've never met any Dutch people, or maybe just one extremely atypical outlier and based your opinion of Dutch people on that.
Sit at a cafe? Eat at a restaurant? Have a fine wine? Socialize with people? American culture does a lot more of that than Dutch culture. In fact, I get the impression that the Dutch are among the least interested in those sort of thing in the developed world, and Americans among the most.
A more likely explanation of the difference is that the Dutch tend to be thrifty, bordering on cheap.
ARM, on the other hand, has not yet tried to compete in PC or server markets
Actually, they have. And they succeeded for many years. They used to be known as Acorn, and provided processors for *many* systems in the 1980's and early 1990's. The very first generation known as ARM was powering the BBC Micro in 1987, and there's several other computers made around that time that used Acorn hardware.
The BBC micro was powered by the CMOS 6502, not related in any way to the ARM. There was a line of PC's based on ARM, the Archimedes. At the time, the selling point was that this RISC cpu ran faster and at a higher clockspeed than the intel chips in MSDOS PC's, and the Archimedes came with a more advanced OS. What it did not come with however was the ability to run PC software natively, and it was very expensive. It could not be described as 'succeeding', the company went under and only the spun off CPU business lives on, these days selling as cheaper and more power efficient than intel chips.
By the way, I typed this on an ARM based laptop. It took me a long time, because it's pretty slow, and android just laughs at the concept of an attached keyboard.
Why does everyone seem to read "outsourcing" as "outsourcing to a low wage country" ?
Should a bakery or a used car dealership have its own software department? Their own plumbing department? Any time you find an outside company to do custom work for you, you are outsourcing this work. Whether you are having it done by your local software company down town or by a far away software company in Bangalore, it's all outsourcing.
By the way, all this complaining about outsourcing (meaning outsourcing to low wage countries) seems petty and weak to me. 25 years ago, when factory workers complained that their jobs were moving overseas, you techies had no sympathy. "You should have gone to college and gotten real marketable skills then". Now that it's happening to people who went to college and got skills that were marketable 20 years ago, it's suddenly an outrage.
My understanding is that Russia could trivially overwhelm anything but a completely sky-saturating missile defence, which one defence base isn't. So why the hysterics from the Russians, this isn't useful against anything but rogue states. I'd be more understanding if there were a string of hundreds of them being built.
The missile defense shield has exactly one purpose: mopping up as much as possible of any retalliatory strikes with whatever is left of the Russian missiles after a successful first strike on them.
The nuclear arsenal is of limited political value as it is right now, because any threat is balanced with an equivalent counter threat from their arsenal. When you change the equation in a way that nukes could be used in a first strike with strongly limited repercussions, its threat once again gains you political leverage.
Rogue states are not the target here. Their precious few nukes are extremely valuable to them in an unexploded form, but lose all of their value once exploded. They don't have ICBMs and a satelite guidance network, and if a rogue organisation did plan a nuclear attack, they use a more fail safe and accurate delivery system such as a truck, airplane or ship.
Apparently not. Of course, that link ignores nuclear winter, which would do sufficient damage to Earth's ecosystem to most likely wipe out humanity along with most other species, although some very radiation-hardened otherwise hardy life would probably survive.
The Criticism and debate section is the most interesting part...
My generation was brought up with the common knowledge that there were enough nukes to destroy all life on the planet many times over, and that the radiation of a nuclear blast would make a spot uninhabitable for thousands of years.
I remember how shocked and surprised I was as a teenager (don't laugh, there were no discovery channel, google or wikipedia) when I learned that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki are abandoned lifeless nuclear wastelands today. An important part of the common knowledge was clearly based in fact. As that informationisbeautiful link you quoted shows, a simple thought experiment quickly shows that the part about destroying all life on the planet is bogus too.
This puts the whole MAD meme in a different light. The only way to win is not to play? The military probably did the same calcs on a paper napkin and came to a different conclusion. They never stopped planning to fight and win a nuclear war.
I take all common knowledge with a grain of salt these days. For lots of things everybody 'knows' there is actually no evidence, or even evidence to the contrary (see the health benefits of vitamin C supplements or dietary fiber).
I don't know about that... The people you refer to have their first child at a younger age, but do they have more of them in the end?
A lot of high earning techies at my company have 3, 4 even 5 kids. They can afford it, you see. They're making enough money to reduce their work hours or for their spouses to take a few years off work...
You're counting deaths, but they are irrelevant. What's relevant is counting healthy offspring that go on to reproduce. Death can reduce that number, but so can other factors. One person has no children, another has four.
Hey! Shark week is a national treasure
The Netherlands are a notorious corporate tax haven. You are looking at income tax. The 52% is just the highest tax bracket, not a lot of people make enough money to have a significant portion of their income taxed at that level (I get to keep about 70% of my income). But corporations don't pay income tax. Corporate taxes are on the low side (lower than in the US), and multinationals in particular have a loophole they can use to pay even less.
I think the biggest hurdle would be switching the IT infrastructure to windows and then being committed to sticking with that choice for ever.
See Mono
Mono allows you to use visual studio to develop Linux applications. It does not help you run applications written for windows on Linux, because so much of the API has not been ported yet, or doesn't have an equivalent on Linux at all.
Yup.
Java is huge in the kind of stuff that doesn't make the news very often.
More importantly, a lot of these systems are so large that "switching to .NET" isn't really a practical option.
Even if all Java development ceased tommorow.. I suspect Java would still be around for a long, long time. Java could become the next COBOL!
Java is also huge in the kind of stuff that does make the news. It's either the #1 or #2 most used programming language for applications, depending on what you try to measure.
The reason why switching to .NET isn't practical doesn't have anything to do with size. There is nothing preventing anyone from developing a Java-to-CLR compiler (google says http://www.janetdev.org/ but I haven't tried it), and writing any new parts of your application in some other CLR language. I think the biggest hurdle would be switching the IT infrastructure to windows and then being committed to sticking with that choice for ever.
By the way, if you think all COBOL development has ceased, you are wrong.
Where are all these women who are being excluded? At the last place where I worked, every single female candidate for programming positions was hired. Yes, all two of them. One was very good, the other was hmm, maybe average on a good day, but with such a tiny sample size that is pretty meaningless.
My gut feeling has always been that it's simply a job most women aren't interested in. For a job that requires a college degree, coding doesn't pay very well, and has a rather low social status. A woman who is smart enough for a programming job, is also smart enough for a much better job, I reckon.
Logic and rationalism are French ideas. On that ground, I reject them utterly.
If you don't support Ron Paul, you're un-American and should leave the country?
Feather impressions would be scrutinized under microscopic detail. And a known forgery Archeoraptor, wasn't from a fake feather impressions, but two slabs from two different species(top and bottom half), presented as one, and it was suspect because it had no counter-slab of the reverse side.
I read that this particular specimen was bought in the market. They're not even sure exactly where it was found.
I'm sure the imprints are of real feathers, but were they 125 million year old dinosaur down, or contemporary chicken down?
My (certainly amateur) reading of the literature indicates that it's likely that all therapods were feathered, albeit mostly with thin insulating feathers that don't fossilize well. How is this unexpected?
But fossil skin imprints of later therapods (t-rex) indicate that they had scales...
For some reason, apart from the archaeopteryx (which is a far older fossil), the feathered dinosaurs all seem to have lived in that one area in present day China. I'm certainly not an expert, but I'm not convinced any of them are entirely real. Many of these, apparently including this fossil, were not dug up and prepared by paleontologists, but by local artisans. The ones with feather imprints or looking like transitional species fetch a much higher price. How difficult would it be for a local artisan to add some feather or down imprints to a fossil to increase its value?
Why do we make art? It's not for money. It's not for social prestige. We make art as an act of self expression and as a way of passing the time when we're not engaged in activities necessary for our own survival.
Speak for yourself. Self expression and artistic merit are just a means to an end. The end being prestige, money and girls. Sometimes the 'self expression' thing is the best way to achieve that (maybe you're not terribly charismatic or skilled), and sometimes the artistic angle is the way to get there (maybe you like college girls with glasses) but only in so far as they get the job done.
Foreign actors simply don't cost as much as American ones with a similar talent and experience level, and UK ones have the added advantage that they're able to speak English.