No real evidence has ever been discovered (or much less reproduced) that one kind of animal can bring forth an animal of a different kind: i.e. a fish giving birth to a frog.
Evolution doesn't predict that, but call Ripley if you come across this.
However, perhaps you might consider that frogs DO give birth to fish (i.e. tadpoles). What was God thinking when he made that up? Obviously He was testing our faith by suggesting that frogs evolved from fish.
I realise that recapitulation theory doesn't prove anything conclusively, but it is highly suggestive of an animal's (and our) genetic heritage.
we at least need one more episode to tie up some loose ends, mmmmmkay?
I think you have a better chance looking here to find closure than waiting for a network to revive it.
Blame the producers. They must have know they were on the skids; instead of facing it and wrapping it up they leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth with an unresolved cliffhanger. Personally I've never seen it; it was on my list of things to watch when the DVD was available, but now, knowing that it's cut short, I won't bother at all.
0) Read a book. If you want good SF, you could just start with the Hugo Award winners. At your local bookshop or library. But that will make you dissatisfied with what is presented as SF on network TV....
Yes it is.
If she is taking Apple's "sillhouette ads" and copying them to advertise her "device", it is copyright infringement, pure and simple
No it's not. She's not "copying" them in the digital sense, which would be an infringement, but imitating. You can't copyright a style of advertisement. Considering how ads blatantly steal (or are "inspired by") other ads all the time, this is obviously accepted practice.
The ad is a parody, but the iGasm is an actual product (unless it's a hoax?). Parody is a defence for copyright infringement. This would be about trademark and patents. Since they're actually selling goods which are obviously meant to suggest an iPod style, it probably does infringe.
Spammers are already using CAPTCHA techniques to automate account creations on protected websites
Really? How do you know this? Can you give an example of a porn site that asks for captchas? If not, it's an urban legend.
I've seen this suggested as an attack on captchas, but never heard of any site that put it into practice. Probably it is simpler to pay some third-world computer sweatshop worker to solve hundreds of them per hour for a few dollars a day. But that's equally a conjecture.
Dodgy free porn sites (which is a large percentage) often have nasty exploits to infect your computer -- never browse porn with IE.
The report gave the example of a history department in a northern city which decided not to teach the Holocaust as a topic for GCSE coursework.
ONE history department in ONE school. (Possibly one teacher in one class.) The Daily Mail, and Slashdot, say "Some Schools", and imply it's a widespread trend of political correctness.
The first link is dead, four years old, so I don't know how that worked out. Sounds rather general complaint from the Slashdot summary. I somehow doubt there was a payday. The second is antitrust, evil but not about faulure of the product to work.
I'd say "parasite". No one wants to see the crap he puts on the sites, people come there either because the original site they were looking for has expired or by a typo. Instead of a 404, you get a page full of ads; mostly it's obvious and you close it immediately, but sometimes you have to poke around before you realise that its content is generated automatically. These sites fill up search results too. I can;t imagine the advertisers who pay him for hits actually get any return either. He's getting paid for delivering garbage.
Also, anyone who would like to actually set up a real website finds that most of the obvious word variations they can think of are occupied or parked by these assholes. They have to pay a small fortune to buy a memorable address; these speculators scoop up all the expiring names so no one can reuse them for a useful site, they become zombie sites full of crap links.
The main difference is that most people would enjoy seeing all ads censored and no pages unindexed.
Actually, I think a lot of people wish those robbotically-created pages that pollute the results pages weren't indexed. Crap like all the dozens of clones of Wikipedia with added advertisements; pseudo-search pages that have no actual information, not to mention those full of popups and exploits. Sometimes it takes a dozen tries before I work out a search that actually finds the thing I want, and not a viagra or porn page with the search terms salted through it.
Unlikely. This is his explanation of bosons:
"...theory of particle physics (boson is the name physicists give subatomic particles with particular properties)."
an LoC is no longer based on a physical library but has rather been redefined based on a more basic unit of information, (ie: the byte)...it could mean the LoC is well on it's way to becoming an accepted SI unit
Now we will have a whole other schism over whether the 10 TB is binary (10 x 2^40) or decimal (10 x 10^12), with SI purists demanding the binary be distinguished as 10 tebibytes.
PIRACY IS ILLEGAL. Whether or not it's "helping" the company, IT'S ILLEGAL. STOP PRETENDING THAT YOU'RE DOING THEM A FAVOR.
No matter how loud you shout, there is no contradiction between 1) stating that piracy is illegal (by definition) and 2) stating that piracy has and does sometimes benefit the vendor.
No one is saying that it's moral (well, TFA didn't anyway), so you're arguing with a straw man. Availability of pirated goods allows a monopoly to be built and cemented, as less scrupulous users can still use the market leader without considering price and competing products can never get their foot in the door by offering a cheaper product. There are many examples of MS ignoring widespread piracy of their products for years, but leaping into action the moment a competing legal product was seriously proposed to replace said pirated products. Government programs in India and Thailand to use Linux instead of pirated Windows resulted in massively discounted licenses being offered. MS would have preferred pirates keep supplying the low end of the market, so they don't have to deal with grey market imports of legal cheap versions in developed countries. Their cheap version however are so crippled that no one wants to use them, and are replaced in practice by -- you guessed it -- pirate versions of the "real" software.
This excuses neither the conditions under which they're now working nor the pay, though I wonder if the national average differs from what you're seeing on the mainland around Hong Kong
Yes, the further from the coast, the lower the wages. There's a continuous flow of immigrants to the coastal areas, looking for work. The wages paid to these computer scavengers is very low. You can quibble about if it's just above or below the poverty line, but it's certainly not "huge". It's a job people take from desperation.
do you think people have a better chance of working themselves up and out of a job like smelting the gold from circuit boards?
Some may be able to save some money and get out. But from reports I've read, many have suffered permanent damge to their health by then and go home to live the remainder of their lives in poverty and sickness.
Those who get relatively clean and better paid jobs, as in the garment trade, can save up a nest egg and go back home afer a few years. Others may stay on permanently. Large cities have grown across the border from villages in the last 20 years.
China has always interested me in this regard, because of the 40 years of attempted (and forced) equality.
Ideas of equality have been abandoned. Since Deng Xiaoping said "Let some people get rich first" it's been devil take the hindmost.
Do you think there are more opportunities to change your life there because there are fewer distinctions?
China's growth is based on the enormous cheap labour force, former peasants who will do almost anything to get out of the poverty of subsistence farming. Similar to the "satanic mills" period of the Industrial Revolution in the West. Some robber barons get very rich, factory fodder are worked like donkeys, while at the same time a middle class is growing that may eventually moderate the worst excesses of unrestrained capitalism.
I live in Hong Kong, so I have an idea of salaries in the mainland. That's way below what a factory worker would earn. Not to mention the cancer and other health risks from the lead, burning plastic and other toxic wastes.
The bosses are making a profit, but the gold is the least of it.
According to the submitter "The payoff is huge: computer waste contains 17 times more gold than gold ore..."
What a load of bullshit. If the payoff was "huge", why would companies pay to have it taken away to China? Gold ore is much easier to process in bulk from fairly homogeneous rock than trying to extract it from a pile of metal, plastic and glass components. Gold ore is anything from 0.5 ppm up, so this "17 times" is a meaningless figure. At best, it means a few grammes of gold per tonne of hardware. How many hundreds of manhours would it take to break it down and separate out the tiny scrapings of gold from electrical contacts? Copper is more easily scavenged from wiring and power supplies.
>>In fact, Microsoft BENEFITS from such "piracy".
>Regardless of whether or not that is true, Microsoft certainly does not think so by their actions.
Actually, MS's actions, as opposed to their words, show the opposite. MS will fulminate about software piracy, but in most Third World countries takes little action to prevent it. They know that in the long run, retaining a monopoly on OS and Office software is more valuable. When a country starts to take off economically, as India, its business and home users will naturally prefer to keep using the familiar software. Then MS can apply pressure to enforcement, and the next generation of hardware and software will be OEM-preinstalled MS, as in the USA. I've seen this happen in Hong Kong over the last decade. It used to be standard for PCs to come "fully loaded", with all the software that would fit on the hard disk. Now you get and pay for MS Windows, MS Office, and a little hologram certificate.
See also what happens in countries where alternative (Linux) OSs are seriously proposed, eg in Thailand a few years ago. Immediately MS released special editions of Windows and Office at a much lower price, and engaged in hard lobbying to kill the initiative. The almost 100% piracy rate prior to this had produced no reaction; MS had just been waiting for the economy to make people wealthy enough to be worth strongarming. Piracy does more to build marketshare for MS than any amount of advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
How many fucking years does it take to implement a spellcheck and train the editors to use it?
Numbers are abstract concepts. They can be defined in many ways. These might not be useful, nevertheless they're not invalid.
Evolution doesn't predict that, but call Ripley if you come across this.
However, perhaps you might consider that frogs DO give birth to fish (i.e. tadpoles). What was God thinking when he made that up? Obviously He was testing our faith by suggesting that frogs evolved from fish.
I realise that recapitulation theory doesn't prove anything conclusively, but it is highly suggestive of an animal's (and our) genetic heritage.
1 x 0 = 2 x 0
1 x infinity = 2 x infinity.
1 x 360 degree rotation = 2 x 360 degree rotation...
There are lots of times 1=2.
I think you have a better chance looking here to find closure than waiting for a network to revive it.
Blame the producers. They must have know they were on the skids; instead of facing it and wrapping it up they leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth with an unresolved cliffhanger. Personally I've never seen it; it was on my list of things to watch when the DVD was available, but now, knowing that it's cut short, I won't bother at all.
PS. The Hugos (above) are awarded by a vote of fans. The Nebulas are awarded by writers, they often go to more "literary" works.
0) Read a book. If you want good SF, you could just start with the Hugo Award winners. At your local bookshop or library. But that will make you dissatisfied with what is presented as SF on network TV....
As I said, the object itself may infringe trademarks or patents, but copyright on ads doesn't come into it.
Yes it is. If she is taking Apple's "sillhouette ads" and copying them to advertise her "device", it is copyright infringement, pure and simple
No it's not. She's not "copying" them in the digital sense, which would be an infringement, but imitating. You can't copyright a style of advertisement. Considering how ads blatantly steal (or are "inspired by") other ads all the time, this is obviously accepted practice.
The ad is a parody, but the iGasm is an actual product (unless it's a hoax?). Parody is a defence for copyright infringement. This would be about trademark and patents. Since they're actually selling goods which are obviously meant to suggest an iPod style, it probably does infringe.
Really? How do you know this? Can you give an example of a porn site that asks for captchas? If not, it's an urban legend.
I've seen this suggested as an attack on captchas, but never heard of any site that put it into practice. Probably it is simpler to pay some third-world computer sweatshop worker to solve hundreds of them per hour for a few dollars a day. But that's equally a conjecture.
Dodgy free porn sites (which is a large percentage) often have nasty exploits to infect your computer -- never browse porn with IE.
One for Linus; one for RMS. Who gets the third one?
The system is working? If you say so.
I'd say "parasite". No one wants to see the crap he puts on the sites, people come there either because the original site they were looking for has expired or by a typo. Instead of a 404, you get a page full of ads; mostly it's obvious and you close it immediately, but sometimes you have to poke around before you realise that its content is generated automatically. These sites fill up search results too. I can;t imagine the advertisers who pay him for hits actually get any return either. He's getting paid for delivering garbage.
Also, anyone who would like to actually set up a real website finds that most of the obvious word variations they can think of are occupied or parked by these assholes. They have to pay a small fortune to buy a memorable address; these speculators scoop up all the expiring names so no one can reuse them for a useful site, they become zombie sites full of crap links.
Actually, I think a lot of people wish those robbotically-created pages that pollute the results pages weren't indexed. Crap like all the dozens of clones of Wikipedia with added advertisements; pseudo-search pages that have no actual information, not to mention those full of popups and exploits. Sometimes it takes a dozen tries before I work out a search that actually finds the thing I want, and not a viagra or porn page with the search terms salted through it.
You can still search, and find whatever you want. What they're doing is not seving ads for these products when you search for a related term.
Unlikely. This is his explanation of bosons:
"...theory of particle physics (boson is the name physicists give subatomic particles with particular properties)."
Now we will have a whole other schism over whether the 10 TB is binary (10 x 2^40) or decimal (10 x 10^12), with SI purists demanding the binary be distinguished as 10 tebibytes.
No matter how loud you shout, there is no contradiction between 1) stating that piracy is illegal (by definition) and 2) stating that piracy has and does sometimes benefit the vendor.
No one is saying that it's moral (well, TFA didn't anyway), so you're arguing with a straw man. Availability of pirated goods allows a monopoly to be built and cemented, as less scrupulous users can still use the market leader without considering price and competing products can never get their foot in the door by offering a cheaper product. There are many examples of MS ignoring widespread piracy of their products for years, but leaping into action the moment a competing legal product was seriously proposed to replace said pirated products. Government programs in India and Thailand to use Linux instead of pirated Windows resulted in massively discounted licenses being offered. MS would have preferred pirates keep supplying the low end of the market, so they don't have to deal with grey market imports of legal cheap versions in developed countries. Their cheap version however are so crippled that no one wants to use them, and are replaced in practice by -- you guessed it -- pirate versions of the "real" software.
You mean like: keys, abbeys, monkeys, valleys, jockeys, surveys, turkeys, trolleys ...
Yes, the further from the coast, the lower the wages. There's a continuous flow of immigrants to the coastal areas, looking for work. The wages paid to these computer scavengers is very low. You can quibble about if it's just above or below the poverty line, but it's certainly not "huge". It's a job people take from desperation.
do you think people have a better chance of working themselves up and out of a job like smelting the gold from circuit boards?
Some may be able to save some money and get out. But from reports I've read, many have suffered permanent damge to their health by then and go home to live the remainder of their lives in poverty and sickness.
Those who get relatively clean and better paid jobs, as in the garment trade, can save up a nest egg and go back home afer a few years. Others may stay on permanently. Large cities have grown across the border from villages in the last 20 years.
China has always interested me in this regard, because of the 40 years of attempted (and forced) equality.
Ideas of equality have been abandoned. Since Deng Xiaoping said "Let some people get rich first" it's been devil take the hindmost.
Do you think there are more opportunities to change your life there because there are fewer distinctions?
China's growth is based on the enormous cheap labour force, former peasants who will do almost anything to get out of the poverty of subsistence farming. Similar to the "satanic mills" period of the Industrial Revolution in the West. Some robber barons get very rich, factory fodder are worked like donkeys, while at the same time a middle class is growing that may eventually moderate the worst excesses of unrestrained capitalism.
No it's not. $2/day is nothing.
I live in Hong Kong, so I have an idea of salaries in the mainland. That's way below what a factory worker would earn. Not to mention the cancer and other health risks from the lead, burning plastic and other toxic wastes.
The bosses are making a profit, but the gold is the least of it.
What a load of bullshit. If the payoff was "huge", why would companies pay to have it taken away to China? Gold ore is much easier to process in bulk from fairly homogeneous rock than trying to extract it from a pile of metal, plastic and glass components. Gold ore is anything from 0.5 ppm up, so this "17 times" is a meaningless figure. At best, it means a few grammes of gold per tonne of hardware. How many hundreds of manhours would it take to break it down and separate out the tiny scrapings of gold from electrical contacts? Copper is more easily scavenged from wiring and power supplies.
>Regardless of whether or not that is true, Microsoft certainly does not think so by their actions.
Actually, MS's actions, as opposed to their words, show the opposite. MS will fulminate about software piracy, but in most Third World countries takes little action to prevent it. They know that in the long run, retaining a monopoly on OS and Office software is more valuable. When a country starts to take off economically, as India, its business and home users will naturally prefer to keep using the familiar software. Then MS can apply pressure to enforcement, and the next generation of hardware and software will be OEM-preinstalled MS, as in the USA. I've seen this happen in Hong Kong over the last decade. It used to be standard for PCs to come "fully loaded", with all the software that would fit on the hard disk. Now you get and pay for MS Windows, MS Office, and a little hologram certificate.
See also what happens in countries where alternative (Linux) OSs are seriously proposed, eg in Thailand a few years ago. Immediately MS released special editions of Windows and Office at a much lower price, and engaged in hard lobbying to kill the initiative. The almost 100% piracy rate prior to this had produced no reaction; MS had just been waiting for the economy to make people wealthy enough to be worth strongarming. Piracy does more to build marketshare for MS than any amount of advertising.