You don't believe, despite their own claims to be doing so, that Iran is developing nuclear weapons,
False - Iran claims not to be developing nuclear weapons. It claims that it wants to carry a uranium enrichment program as part of its nuclear reactor delopment program. Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant. Either you are ignorant or lying, since you label youself as neocon, is is difficult to tell which is the case given the Bush regime's use of both these vices.
Given the US invasion of Iraq and that Iran has large oil reserves, I would not blame them if they wanted to develop nuclear weapons to defend themselves from a future US invasion. I wouldn't blame any oil producing country from wanting to do that.
Hang on a second I am Canadian! We are the second largest supplier of oil to the US. We have massive oil reserves. I guess we better abrogate our adherence to the non-proliferation treaty and start developing nuclear weapons aimed at Washington now. It could be the only way to stop the army of the evil empire invading from us.
Gilbert Levins labelled release (LR) results from the Viking expedition, indicating the presence of microbial life on Mars makes more and more sense. The arguements against it from the chemistry experiment on the expedition don't hold up. The experiment used a mass spectrometer (MS), the set up was designed by Klaus Bieman one of the most distinguished mass spectrometrists in the world. When they got negative results and the biology experiment got positive results, they were not going to accept it and they carried out an organized campaign to discredit the LR results proposing all sorts of experimentally unreproducible hypotheses to show that the LR results were a false positive.
Well I am a chemist and a mass spectrometrist who in my youth used to regard Bieman as an almost godlike figure. Well he was wrong. The MS results were of limited sensitivity. The most likely form microbial life in Martian soil would take is to be dormant spores waiting for the rare periods when liquid water becomes available. These spores could be in a very low level in the Martian soil well below the level that would produce sufficent quantities of organic compounds to be detectible by MS.
The LR experiment is very sensitive. Levin was able to use it to show the presence of microorganisms in Antarctic ice cores, which could not be detected chemically, but which could be confirmed by the standard microbiological procedures of plating out. Lunar rock from the Apollo mission gave no false positives in the LR experiment.
All the recent results from Mars probes showing both evidence for the existance of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past and for evidence of the presence of water now, all serve to support the claim that the original Viking biology results provide a strong indication that microbial life is present on Mars. There is a case to answer. Now is the time for NASA to invest in sending a chiral LR experiment to Mars to further investigate and hopefully come up with some conclusive answers.
Her even later descendents Homo erectus, H. habilis, or neanderthalis wanders out into Asia and becomes H. sapiens, who in turn wanders back to Africa, and of course, the rest of the world.
This is not Roebroeks and Dennell's hypothesis. They propose that the "Out of Africa 1" theory where Homo ergaster/erectus migrates out of africa 1.8 Myear ago is wrong. Instead they propose that an earlier more primitive humanoid migrated out of africa earlier and that Homo erectus evolved in asia and then back migrated to africa.
This hypothesis is consistent with the "Out of Africa 2" theory proposed by Stringer et al which requires a relatively the recent evolution of Homo sapiens in africa and its subsequent spread throughout the world.
Their views are better summarized in the following link:
Microsoft still fits the legal definition of a monopoly for the desktop where it leverages its 95% share of the desktop market to leverage control of the operating systems installed by the major PC manufacturers.
It is not yet a fully a monopoly in the server area. This is particularily so at the the enterprise level where MS's penetration has been kept relatively low.
In the file and print server area, and now directory services area, it is in a very strong position. Here it is trying to leverage its effective desktop client monopoly into a server monopoly. This is the essence of what its dispute with the EU's monopoly commission is about.
MS has taken the open protocols for SMB, Kerberos and LDAP transformed them into the proprietary CIFS and Active Directory then deliberately engineered in incompatabilities. This is aimed at ensuring that only MS Windows servers can talk to Windows clients, in order to leverage its client side monopoly into a server side monopoly. The heroic reverse engineering of the SAMBA organization have to a consiferable extent impeded this. However a fair open playing field should be enforced by forcing MS to openly document its protocols for purposes of computer interoperability. This is what the EU is trying to do and with some claws imposing multimillion dollar daily fines (unlike the US courts that actually helped MS rather than hindered it in this area with their remdies for their finding of MS being an illegal monopoly).
MS rather than acceeding to the EU requirements has been screaming "intellectual property rights" and spreading FUD that the EU is rquiring them to open up their source code rather than open up the documentation of their computer communication protocols which is really the case. This response clearly demonstrates that MS is still intent on extending its monopoly position in to new areas, and thus is still a dangerous corporate criminal.
All the Gnome users I've ever known fall into one of three distinct classifictions:
1. They don't know about KDE as an alternative.
2. They hold up their Gnome use as a macho Linux status symbol (when asked why they don't use KDE, they shrug and say, "Bah....I do all my work from the shell anyway...).
3. They suffer from a deep-seated need to punish themselvs for some reason.
I use it because it just works.... Haven't I heard that somewhere else before;P
In the late eighties I was a grad student in the late eighties doing computational chemistry on Unix boxes. I had to use vi, it was what my supervisor used and I hated it, compared to the nice easy editors like simedit we used on the DOS boxes. When a decade later I sarted with Linux at home i decided to use Emacs instead of vim. I became quite an Emacs zealot. Then I realized I was only able to use Emacs in the GUI version on X when I had to do some recovery work on the console.
Impress is the only real alternative for producing a presentation on GNU/Linux that you can save as a.ppt file then take to some random Windows computer with a projector and then just give a presentation.
Because evolution is a *theory* and by definition unproven. Being "pro theory" is nonsensical in the realm of science.
Theory is a good as it gets in science. There is no more proven level than theory. All theories a subject further test. Even the best theories may be shown to be limiting cases of better theories, as with Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity. Newtonian Mechanics is still "Rocket Science":)
Modern evolutionary theory is not simple Darwinism, but it is the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis a synthesis of Darwin's natural selection with population genetics.
The three best theories in science today are:
Quantum Theory
The Theory of General Relativity
The Theory of Evolution
BTW a useful quote from Father Kevin Coyne, Director of the Vatican's astronomical observatory:
"Intelligent design is not science"
I am an atheist, but there are many christians both Catholic and mainstream Protestants who have sophisticated views that make science and their religious belief consistent. I respect them, together we share the modern world.
But then there are these damn fundies that need a slap in the face... Oh Father Coyne just gave them one:P
It seems to me that these "experienced Linux administrators" paid for by the MS financed study were instructed to cause the system to fail. They were told to install a new version of MySQL that was not compatible with the version of SLES they had installed. Then they were told that they were not allowed to upgrade the SLES version so that they then had to install a new version of glibc on an incompatible kernel (ugh!) which they went along with:P. Experienced yeah!
Looks to me like this situation was deliberately set up.
Windows has always outsold Linux on the server market, at least in terms of revenue on the figures for servers sold with a pre-installed OS from the major hardware manufactures which is what the Gartner figues are based on.
However, Linux was and still is the fastest growing OS on the server market. So this article is not news, it's just a pretty stupid flamebait by the wannabe kiddies at CoolTechZone who are recycling the pro MS spin of the corporate media tech newsites.
What the real news was that for the first time Windows outsold Unix in terms of revenue this quarter. What is new is that for the last two quarters MS has made a turnaround in the server market insomuch the it's rate of growth exceeds that of the rate of growth in this market, prior to that it was lower.
The rate of growth of Linux in the server market is still twice that of Windows, but it will be several years before Linux has a larger share of this market on current trends.
What we are really seeing is the slow fading away of proprietary Unix.
Einstein retracted his fudge while still alive and I have a suspicion those championing dark matter/energy will have to as well:)
Prior to the experimental (observational) discovery of the increasing rate of expansion of the observable universe (part of the multiverse ?) many physicists regarded the cosmological as essential to general relativity. Coleman for one asked the question why is the cosmological constant zero and proposed a hypothesis based on wormholes between universes to explain why it should be zero. Inflationary big bang theories suggest a very high vacuuum energy (dark energy) which manifests itself as a cosmological constant. This vacuum energy arises from quantum theory rather than GR, or at any rate as a result of the uneasy coexistance of QT and GR in inflationary theories.
The result is that the expectation value of the vacuum energy should be much greater than required by the observational data for the increasing rate of expansion of the observable univese. Weinberg has proposed that selection on the basis of the weak anthopic principle from a multiverse composed of universes with the full range of possible values of the cosmological constant 9as a result of quantum uncertainty during the big bang) to explain why the value of the cosmological constant we observe.
IANAP but I am a chemist who suffers from physics envy (as Niles Eldredge put it) who occasionally consults the original papers coming out on arXiv.org to try to undertand what is going on in cosmology.
I had to use vi (that was before vim) when I was a grad student and I hated. When I later discovered Emacs I became an Emacs zealot. The I discovered I could only use it in X with drop down menus - the Emacs shortcuts we so err! well forgetable. So now I am back to vim which I have no problem using in a console and GTK Vim is pretty cool in X.
That's just your assumption. The fact that you don't understand why your assumption is useless is why you're so clueless.
Please explain, using verifiable evidence, how you came to this conclusion about this specific study..
There is an inherent doubt about any study paid for by a commercial organization which has an interest in the outcome. This is especially true when the study is carried out by a consulting company dependant on commercial companies giving it contracts.
If you cannot understand that this means that we cannot trust any study carried out under such conditions then you are either very naive, stupid or a shill.
That's what I thought. However a quick scan of the article suggests that the increase in the rate of expansion can be explained better by a Cosmological constant (which is a constant unlike Hubble's constant which is not) rather than the alternative Quintessence hypothesis where the repulsive force is not constant.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS started the Free Software Movement because he wanted to improve a printer driver for an early laser printer and they wouln't give him the source.
False - Iran claims not to be developing nuclear weapons. It claims that it wants to carry a uranium enrichment program as part of its nuclear reactor delopment program. Whether you believe that or not is irrelevant. Either you are ignorant or lying, since you label youself as neocon, is is difficult to tell which is the case given the Bush regime's use of both these vices.
Given the US invasion of Iraq and that Iran has large oil reserves, I would not blame them if they wanted to develop nuclear weapons to defend themselves from a future US invasion. I wouldn't blame any oil producing country from wanting to do that.
Hang on a second I am Canadian! We are the second largest supplier of oil to the US. We have massive oil reserves. I guess we better abrogate our adherence to the non-proliferation treaty and start developing nuclear weapons aimed at Washington now. It could be the only way to stop the army of the evil empire invading from us.
Well I am a chemist and a mass spectrometrist who in my youth used to regard Bieman as an almost godlike figure. Well he was wrong. The MS results were of limited sensitivity. The most likely form microbial life in Martian soil would take is to be dormant spores waiting for the rare periods when liquid water becomes available. These spores could be in a very low level in the Martian soil well below the level that would produce sufficent quantities of organic compounds to be detectible by MS.
The LR experiment is very sensitive. Levin was able to use it to show the presence of microorganisms in Antarctic ice cores, which could not be detected chemically, but which could be confirmed by the standard microbiological procedures of plating out. Lunar rock from the Apollo mission gave no false positives in the LR experiment.
All the recent results from Mars probes showing both evidence for the existance of liquid water on the surface of Mars in the past and for evidence of the presence of water now, all serve to support the claim that the original Viking biology results provide a strong indication that microbial life is present on Mars. There is a case to answer. Now is the time for NASA to invest in sending a chiral LR experiment to Mars to further investigate and hopefully come up with some conclusive answers.
This is not Roebroeks and Dennell's hypothesis. They propose that the "Out of Africa 1" theory where Homo ergaster/erectus migrates out of africa 1.8 Myear ago is wrong. Instead they propose that an earlier more primitive humanoid migrated out of africa earlier and that Homo erectus evolved in asia and then back migrated to africa.
This hypothesis is consistent with the "Out of Africa 2" theory proposed by Stringer et al which requires a relatively the recent evolution of Homo sapiens in africa and its subsequent spread throughout the world.
Their views are better summarized in the following link:
http://research.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=1&c=144
Than in the National Geographic News article.
...then the CD can't be played. Yes but it can be ripped: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20051101/1514209_ F.shtml
It is not yet a fully a monopoly in the server area. This is particularily so at the the enterprise level where MS's penetration has been kept relatively low.
In the file and print server area, and now directory services area, it is in a very strong position. Here it is trying to leverage its effective desktop client monopoly into a server monopoly. This is the essence of what its dispute with the EU's monopoly commission is about.
MS has taken the open protocols for SMB, Kerberos and LDAP transformed them into the proprietary CIFS and Active Directory then deliberately engineered in incompatabilities. This is aimed at ensuring that only MS Windows servers can talk to Windows clients, in order to leverage its client side monopoly into a server side monopoly. The heroic reverse engineering of the SAMBA organization have to a consiferable extent impeded this. However a fair open playing field should be enforced by forcing MS to openly document its protocols for purposes of computer interoperability. This is what the EU is trying to do and with some claws imposing multimillion dollar daily fines (unlike the US courts that actually helped MS rather than hindered it in this area with their remdies for their finding of MS being an illegal monopoly). MS rather than acceeding to the EU requirements has been screaming "intellectual property rights" and spreading FUD that the EU is rquiring them to open up their source code rather than open up the documentation of their computer communication protocols which is really the case. This response clearly demonstrates that MS is still intent on extending its monopoly position in to new areas, and thus is still a dangerous corporate criminal.
I thought that with AIX 5L (L for Linux compatible) that IBM had provided a GNU userland.
God you are dumb :)
Yes I do that for the CD's I purchase.
Go away oGalaxyo
I use it because it just works.... Haven't I heard that somewhere else before ;P
Yeah your right and I didn't even notice before.
I have know gone back to vim mostly ;)
Real men use three button mice :)
Impress is the only real alternative for producing a presentation on GNU/Linux that you can save as a .ppt file then take to some random Windows computer with a projector and then just give a presentation.
Theory is a good as it gets in science. There is no more proven level than theory. All theories a subject further test. Even the best theories may be shown to be limiting cases of better theories, as with Newtonian mechanics and General Relativity. Newtonian Mechanics is still "Rocket Science" :)
Modern evolutionary theory is not simple Darwinism, but it is the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis a synthesis of Darwin's natural selection with population genetics.
The three best theories in science today are:
Quantum Theory
The Theory of General Relativity
The Theory of Evolution
BTW a useful quote from Father Kevin Coyne, Director of the Vatican's astronomical observatory:
"Intelligent design is not science"
I am an atheist, but there are many christians both Catholic and mainstream Protestants who have sophisticated views that make science and their religious belief consistent. I respect them, together we share the modern world.
But then there are these damn fundies that need a slap in the face ... Oh Father Coyne just gave them one :P
Get it right we punks are all anti-creationist anti-intelligent design. See Greg Graffin's Punk Manifesto:
http://www.badreligion.com/news/essays.php?id=5
BTW Greg the singer of Bad Religion recently completed a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology
Mirecki was beaten up by two rednecks.
"Our employees were playing Windows games so we installed Linux..."
Looks to me like this situation was deliberately set up.
However, Linux was and still is the fastest growing OS on the server market. So this article is not news, it's just a pretty stupid flamebait by the wannabe kiddies at CoolTechZone who are recycling the pro MS spin of the corporate media tech newsites.
What the real news was that for the first time Windows outsold Unix in terms of revenue this quarter. What is new is that for the last two quarters MS has made a turnaround in the server market insomuch the it's rate of growth exceeds that of the rate of growth in this market, prior to that it was lower.
The rate of growth of Linux in the server market is still twice that of Windows, but it will be several years before Linux has a larger share of this market on current trends.
What we are really seeing is the slow fading away of proprietary Unix.
Prior to the experimental (observational) discovery of the increasing rate of expansion of the observable universe (part of the multiverse ?) many physicists regarded the cosmological as essential to general relativity. Coleman for one asked the question why is the cosmological constant zero and proposed a hypothesis based on wormholes between universes to explain why it should be zero. Inflationary big bang theories suggest a very high vacuuum energy (dark energy) which manifests itself as a cosmological constant. This vacuum energy arises from quantum theory rather than GR, or at any rate as a result of the uneasy coexistance of QT and GR in inflationary theories.
The result is that the expectation value of the vacuum energy should be much greater than required by the observational data for the increasing rate of expansion of the observable univese. Weinberg has proposed that selection on the basis of the weak anthopic principle from a multiverse composed of universes with the full range of possible values of the cosmological constant 9as a result of quantum uncertainty during the big bang) to explain why the value of the cosmological constant we observe.
IANAP but I am a chemist who suffers from physics envy (as Niles Eldredge put it) who occasionally consults the original papers coming out on arXiv.org to try to undertand what is going on in cosmology.
Dark energy and the cosmological constant are essentially the same thing.
I had to use vi (that was before vim) when I was a grad student and I hated. When I later discovered Emacs I became an Emacs zealot. The I discovered I could only use it in X with drop down menus - the Emacs shortcuts we so err! well forgetable. So now I am back to vim which I have no problem using in a console and GTK Vim is pretty cool in X.
There is an inherent doubt about any study paid for by a commercial organization which has an interest in the outcome. This is especially true when the study is carried out by a consulting company dependant on commercial companies giving it contracts.
If you cannot understand that this means that we cannot trust any study carried out under such conditions then you are either very naive, stupid or a shill.
That's what I thought. However a quick scan of the article suggests that the increase in the rate of expansion can be explained better by a Cosmological constant (which is a constant unlike Hubble's constant which is not) rather than the alternative Quintessence hypothesis where the repulsive force is not constant.
So yes this story is new and possibly important.