Many cities in Italy ban general auto traffic in the core downtown, for example Firenze. They have camera, if you drive in downtown and don't have the proper permits, a VERY expensive ticket arrives in the mail.
Which you can then completely ignore because the Italian government is notoriously bad at record-keeping and they'll never make a serious attempt at collecting on the ticket or putting it on your record. I know people who have gotten dozens of these sorts of tickets and they just laugh and tear them up, even when they get pulled over by an actual officer the past tickets are never mentioned.
Atheism means I don't know that there is a God. I don't claim that I know there is not.
Actually atheism means that you disbelieve there is a god. Agnosticism means that you can find no justification for either belief or disbelief in a god.
Suppose I write a program which says "cogito ergo sum." Perhaps it's even complex enough to believe it exists. Does it?
Now, suppose instead of a program, it's an imaginary friend. Certainly we'd be willing to say that they don't exist, except in the sense that someone, somewhere, is thinking of them...
But if we're willing to say that thoughts exist, then I can say, with some amount of certainty, that the world exists, at least in the sense that I am thinking about it. So either we say that imaginary things do not exist, in which case it's impossible to know I'm not a figment of someone's imagination, or we say that imaginary things do exist in a sense, and we can know that other things exist in the same sense.
Absolutely, they all do exist. However, we can't say much else about them other than that they are observable and appear to have certain properties. We can't know if they are generated by us or if they have an independent existence. We can't say if they do or do not have self-awareness. We can't say anything for sure other than "I sense these things." Anything beyond that is postulating additional facts.
Rather than try to root out the contradictions and eliminate them? That seems like a really lazy epistemology.
That's why I said: "Once you start to assemble a collection of postulates then there is the possibility of contradiction or mismatch between them." "Your energy is better spent on working on eliminating your own personal contradictory postulates and conjectures."
Of course I try to root out contradictions, mine and other people's. I just don't mock people for them, it's not worth the effort. I prefer good, clear logic rather then getting emotions involved.
If you're going for universal skepticism, go all the way -- we don't even know "cogito ergo sum." How do you know you exist? What do you mean when you say you exist?
It's the only certain postulate because if you don't have existence then there's nothing about you to make the statement. If you can think then you must exist, something must be doing the thinking. Saying "I don't exist" is a contradiction, something had to exist to make the statement. You can even remove the "cogito" (I think) from the statement, it's enough to prove existence simply by having the property of being able to perform the action of "saying" anything. If something can perform an action then something must exist to perform that action.
What you can't say is exactly WHAT is performing the action. Is it a single individual in a sea of many? A collection of entities? All of existence? A pattern of nothingness in a sea of particles? Everything beyond "I think therefore I am" is conjecture based on further postulates.
Are all conjectures equal?
Absolutely not! However, taken individually and in a vacuum, all postulates are equal. Once you start to assemble a collection of postulates then there is the possibility of contradiction or mismatch between them. It gets even worse once you start to make conjectures based on postulates, there are numerous logical fallacies that can arise. Without a doubt some conjectures are more self-consistant than others.
Of course theory is wonderful but in practice I'm not stuck on the "cogito ergo sum" step of the consciousness bootstrap. I do have my own personal collection of postulates and conjectures and many of them are contradictory. In spite of that I'm still able to act and exist. Will that be true in the next moment? What does the next moment even mean? Beats me, I'll just have to continue to rely on my existence and my cobbled-together series of beliefs.
My point is that since there is only one solid, base postulate it's kind of silly to make fun of other people's beliefs. Each of us has a plethora of postulates that are ridiculous and can be mocked. To mock others for some of their beliefs is just as good as mocking yourself for some of yours. Your energy is better spent on working on eliminating your own personal contradictory postulates and conjectures. Once you have done that then start casting those stones!;-)
So, I can now see why American Baptists get so miffy about atheists -- it's horrible dealing with people who don't realize how much better you are.
That's funny... that's the same reason I, an atheist, get so miffy about Christians, especially Baptists, especially young-earth Creationists.
What's really funny is how everyone thinks their own personal postulates (beliefs) about the universe are so much better than everyone else's.
Let's face it, we don't REALLY know much of anything about the universe past "cogito ergo sum". Everything else is conjecture. Get over mocking people for their beliefs when you have a slew of your own.
The ironic thing will be this relevant quote, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
"Rare earths" aren't really that rare. There are many potential mining sites worldwide. They're sparse, in that huge amounts of rock have to be processed to get small amounts of metal.
Rare, in this case, is a relative term. You might play poker and rarely get a royal flush (1 in 649,740) but if you play a billion hands you'll get an average of 1539 royal flushes. You never go above the rare chance to get a royal flush but with a big enough sample size you are likely to end up with a lot of them.
The Earth is a HUGE sample size but that doesn't change the fact that the rare earths are, well, rare! Of course almost every element is rare in comparison to the most common element, hydrogen.
How is this better than a web-based news source, even a paywalled one?
Well, supposedly it will be more than the umpteenth regurgitated blog mess that is the current web-based media. You know what I'm talking about, when a "news" article is a blog talking about a blog that references a blog written by a guy who has an unnamed source.
Whether or not this iPad daily "newspaper" is worth it is up to the subscribers to decide. I could easily see it working if the content is thoughtful, heavily researched and backed by facts, engaging, and entertaining. If it fulfills those sort of conditions then there will be people who will pay good money to get it every day. If not then it will fade into obscurity.
Now paywalls have been put up with these sorts of promises before. Some have failed and some have succeeded. I hear the Wall Street Journal Online has been fairly profitable but there are plenty of examples of newspapers that put up a paywall and had it topple on them. Again it's all about the target audience and if you can provide an experience that they can't get on the free-to-browse web.
I said essentially drown. The point was that oxygen using life didn't crowd out anaerobic life, the oxygen produced by clorophyll based life forced it to places with still no oxygen or killed it. If drowning doesn't do it for you as an analogy instead of disrupted enzyme production, then I'm glad everyone was able to see the technically correct explanation.
Breaking things down into simpler ideas that more people can understand is a good thing but you run into the danger of oversimplifying and creating bad analogies that serve to confuse the less technically-minded. Drowning is definitely a bad analogy, saying that too much oxygen poisoned these organism is much more accurate and just as easy to understand. It also allows people to better understand that some of the organisms might be able to tolerate some of the poison better than others.
Your statement has been commonly accepted scientific lore but the actual forests bursting into flame thing is based on one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness.
It's actually based on the finding of charred remains of plant matter and correlating it with global oxygen levels:
The forests don't just burst into flame but higher levels of oxygen do make it easier for fires to start and spread from events such as lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions. There is a TON more scientific methodology to this hypothesis than "one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness".
Anyways, my main point is that we have to be careful in how we summarize and simplify complicated concepts. There were a number of things in the original post that I replied to that were a little misleading, as you said yourself:
I'm a programmer but just happen to be reading Nick Lane's books on this. If I get something wrong please biologists jump in and correct me.
I am a chemist, not a biologist, but I have a solid grasp on combustion chemistry and the use of oxygen by organisms. It's good that you are sharing what you have read but simplifying these concepts can be tricky at times. I'm just trying to clarify some of the statements so that people aren't mislead by an overzealous summary. Remember what Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I only read a page or two a day (first "Oxygen", and now "Power, Sex, Suicide" - and yes, that's all based on oxygen). But the revelation I had yesterday was that anaerobic bacteria essentially drown in oxygen, just as we would suffocate with too little oxygen
They don't "drown" in oxygen. Oxygen is a highly reactive substance, cut an apple and it browns fairly rapidly, expose iron to air and it will rust, those chemical hand warmers take oxygen from the air in order to produce heat. Some organisms, called obligate anaerobes, can't tolerate an environment with high oxygen content because it poisons them by destroying enzymes and interfering with key biological pathways in those organisms.
When organisms came about that produced large amounts of oxygen (a byproduct of photosynthesis, as well as other reducing processes) they basically polluted the environment by producing so much oxygen. This oxygen "pollution" poisoned most of the organisms of the time until some evolved ways to break down and even use the oxygen. Once this happened there was an explosion of oxygen-using organisms. It turns out that since oxygen is so reactive it makes a great agent to "burn" (oxidize) other materials and produce energy.
However, there are many anaerobes that can survive in an oxygen environment - some can even use a little of the oxygen when it's available. There's no hard and fast cutoff of how much oxygen is too much or too little. As levels rise there will be more wildfires and the less oxygen-tolerant organisms will struggle, as levels fall the more oxygen-reliant organisms will have problems. A partial pressure for oxygen of 0.15 kPa (15% at STP - standard temperature & pressure) will certainly cause a lot of problems for many oxygen-reliant organisms.
What have they done in regards to credit card transactions? I just pay with a credit card without logging in; works fine for me
Well, years ago they mucked up my credit when I tried to register with a credit card. I never even got to buy anything through PayPal but somehow stuff got charged to my card. It was a long, drawn-out process to get everything sorted out and ever since then I haven't bothered to do anything with PayPal. I really don't miss using the service, there are so few places that actually require it.
Maybe PayPal has cleaned up its act since then but once bitten, twice shy...
Ok I see what you're saying now. I thought you just meant the normal registered user thing, not a paid subscriber.
I probably would buy a subscription but I see they use PayPal and yeah, I don't buy anything through PayPal. I had some serious problems with them in the past and now I avoid them like the plague. I especially don't trust doing credit card transactions through them.
You know, stuff like this CAN be used in a way that consumers might like. Maybe you you'll be able to sign up with a plan that gives you free internet but you're charged a usage fee on certain popular sites. That'd be great for someone who doesn't use those sites enough to justify paying a monthly fee.
I see this going one of several ways:
provides customers more choice, everyone wins including the provider (more customers)
one provider tries this in an "evil" way, loses customers and backpedals
a bunch of providers try this in an "evil" way, they don't lose customers because there's no where else to go, customers scream to their lawmakers and the government steps in
Overall I think it will all go the way of the first option. There may be some wailing and gnashing of teeth before that but eventually the companies will only win if they keep the customers happy.
This has an easy fix. Create an account, activate it, log in, and subscribe to Slashdot, and it won't redirect you back to an unencrypted connection anymore.
Nope, I'm logged in and it still redirects back to an unencrypted connection.
Safari is a supported browser on Snow Leopard *after* you open Terminal and run a command line to set a flag in the (normally not seen) configuration file. Totally obvious - NOT.
WebGL is not part of the standard Safari on Snow Leopard. It's still in beta and you have to grab the nightly builds, THEN set the default com.apple.Safari WebKitWebGLEnabled to YES.
You're on the cutting edge man, don't expect it to be automatic just yet. If you take a look at the WebGL spec that I linked you'll see that it says "Working Draft", not a released spec. WebGL is not yet ready for the masses who don't know how to set a hidden default.
I never said speech synthesis wasn't around. Read my post and stop mis characterizing me.
Ahem, you said this:
Not until the 32 bit era (68000 Amiga, 80486 +SoundBlaster) did they have enough power to convert text to speech.
I posted an example showing that, indeed, there was hardware around that could do text to speech far before the "32 bit era". It didn't need a vocabulary, it sounded out the words since written English is largely a phonetic language. Yes, some pronunciations were a bit off but it was still effective.
Text to speech wasn't common at the time and it did require additional hardware/software but if you watch the movie that's EXACTLY what the protagonist was all about! In fact he doesn't get the computer to talk until he turns on a peripheral, they SHOW him doing it! As for the military also having text to speech, that's not so far-fetched and even if it is a bit odd there's this thing called creative license. It'd be a hell of a boring movie to have to read everything the computer said and once they had the computer speaking at the kids home you pretty much have to have it speak in other places too.
In other words, there's at least a modicum of plausibility there and it's a movie. Get over it!
the only part that made me cringe was the talking computer. Not until the 32 bit era (68000 Amiga, 80486 +SoundBlaster) did they have enough power to convert text to speech.
I had software speech synthesis on my Apple IIe in the early 80s. It wasn't very good but it sounded pretty close to what was in the movie.
Votrax has produced text-to-speech hardware since the 70s.
My first few years in college were focused on a degree in nuclear physics, I later changed to chemistry and have a bachelors of science in chemistry so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about on this topic.
There's no doubt that some fraction of the hydrocarbon soup that makes up a "fossil" fuel does come from non-living sources. However it is extremely difficult (from an entropy standpoint) to build complex hydrocarbons through non-living (abiogenic) processes so it's extremely likely that the vast majority of "fossil" fuels are produced from formerly-living sources.
There is no such thing as a "renewable" energy source. Every energy source is the result of something being consumed. For most "renewable" sources this means the sun is consuming hydrogen to produce energy that is driving the source. The sun evaporates water, drives the winds, allows plant growth, among other effects. We can tap the results of this energy but in doing so we upset other things. Water power and wind power disrupt natural flow patterns, plant growth ends up trapping heat due to decreased surface albedo, and so on. Yes, this will continue for some time but it's not infinite either. Even more troubling is that we ignore the side effects of tapping these sources because they seem to be free of consequence.
Nuclear power is not an infinite resource either. Fission is certainly more limited than fusion but there is no doubt that there is enough fissile material to last at least a couple of hundred years if a modicum of care is used. Between breeding new fuel and the thorium cycle we should have no problem transitioning from fossil fuels to fusion fuels and having it sustain us until we achieve better technology such as fusion power sources. Once we have mastered fusion we will be using the most abundant element in the universe to power us: hydrogen.
In any event there is no point in summarily dismissing fissile fuels simply because they have a near-term limited supply. Yes, in the grand scheme of things our uranium and thorium stores will not last anywhere as long as the sun burns but they really don't have to! They just have to last until our next alternative, fusion, which is already past its breakthrough point and is on the edge of being able to be scaled to industrial levels.
Even though NeXTSTEP was forked earlier from the BSD codebase than the other BSD flavors there has still been considerable sharing between it, Mac OS X, and the other BSD flavors. OpenBSD is one exception to this since it tends to be a more closed ecosystem than the other BSD variants.
So this might mean Mac OS X is not affected? I'm not knowledgeable enough on *BSD to know.
I don't believe that Mac OS X is affected since OpenBSD only used the IPv6 part of the Kame Project. Apparently OpenBSD developed their own version of IPSec while the other BSD variants used the IPSec implementation from the Kame Project.
Since Mac OS X's IPSec is derived from the one in FreeBSD and NetBSD it's not directly linked to the IPSec in OpenBSD. This doesn't mean that it hasn't been compromised, all code is suspect - even implementations in Linux and Windows - simply because it seems like people have been actively attempting to insert exploits into this type of code.
The sad truth is that most people don't actually understand [anything] in the United States
Fixed that for you. I'm sure somebody will be along with the next iteration soon
I wouldn't be the person to cast that stone if I were you. I visited your blog and saw plenty of evidence of ignorance there. For example, there's this gem:
Nuclear power is fossil fuel based. Do you really think uranium comes from anywhere different than coal? It's a shiny rock we find in the ground, that eventually replenishes from meteors or volcanic activity drawing it out of the center of the earth; tons and tons of this shit isn't popping up all over the planet all the time, it takes something major to make more. To make matters worse, we can only derive 5% of the energy potential from nuclear fuel without breeding it into weapons grade nuclear material (and then summarily using said weapons grade nuclear material for the non-weapons purpose of generating 20 times the electricity we normally could), which of course violates a treaty or two.
There are so many things wrong with what you have written on that blog but I'll just address a few things from this quote.
Fossil fuels come from...fossils! They are produced from carbon, hydrogen, and other trace elements that came from decaying organic matter.
Nuclear power, or more precisely nuclear fission, is performed through the use of much heavier elements, generally isotopes with a higher atomic mass than iron. The most common materials are uranium, plutonium, and thorium - none of which are present in great quantities in organic material.
There are vast reserves of fissile materials, far greater than the reserves of fossil fuels. For example here is a report on uranium. Note that with fast breeder reactors there is enough uranium for approximately 2,500 years of energy production. The situation is even better with thorium which is three to four times as abundant than uranium.
The thorium cycle is very proliferation-resistant due to the fact that the products of the reaction are very undesirable for making weapons and are difficult to separate out. Thus the boogieman of nuclear proliferation can be dealt with by using technologies which do not promote using reactors and fuels which are readily used in weapons.
I could go on but I think I've made my point. Ignorance abounds in many places and you shouldn't have the hubris to paint an entire nation with a broad brush when you exhibit a heady measure of it yourself.
Unless and until a State Governor officially requests federal assistance, the President literally has no authority to send federal troops or resources. Given the number of times this came up during GWB's Presidency, I am shocked that more people don't understand this.
The sad truth is that most people don't actually understand how the system of government in the United States works. Most people seem to assume that the President of the United States is some kind of king or supreme dictator who can move mountains at will and reports to no one. The reality is that, while the President does have some serious powers he is also severely held in check by the other two branches of the government, the constitution, the states themselves, and international treaties, relations, and laws.
I fear that we all need to go back to school and be taught exactly how this representative republic works before we should be allowed to participate in the political process in any manner.
Wow. You jumped up and demonstrated exactly the corporate-puppet faculties he was pointing out.
And how, exactly, did I do that? All I said was to do your own investigation and check Moore's facts. There was nothing corporate in what I said. I'm not pointing at this company's website or spoon-feeding anyone my own viewpoints on the topics that Moore has made movies about.
It only takes a bit of research to realize that, in many cases, the version of reality presented in Michael Moore's documentaries greatly differs from what many other people have observed - including many nonpartisan, non-corporate sources.
My post applies equally to any source of information. Be critical of it all, whether it's a documentary producer, corporate news source, or a political pundit
from the outside, we see moore a hero. maybe its possible that the endless propaganda perpetrated by corporate owned mass media have twisted you american people's views about moore
The problem is that most of Moore's "facts" which he presents in his movies turn out to be no more than elaborate fabrications. He routinely takes quotes out of context, overlays a speech over video from another event, re-arranges video and audio, creates set-up interviews where he asks the guy one question and then re-shoots himself asking another question so the answer is presented in the manner which Moore wants, and many more methods of turning real events into fictional ones.
There are plenty of websites out there that take Moore's movies and show, "fact" by "fact", just how badly Moore manipulates reality. Now this doesn't mean that Moore's topics aren't worth investigating, it just means that you can't take anything he says as the truth. Do your own investigation into the truth and you'll be far better off than relying on Moore to do the job for you.
Yep, it's almost like if a group of people came in and took all the seats in the local diner and refused to leave, just because said diner refused to serve them.
You're absolutely right! In both cases the people can and should be arrested, convicted of trespass or similar crimes, be fined or jailed, and probably owe compensation to the owner for lost business. What a great analogy!
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Many cities in Italy ban general auto traffic in the core downtown, for example Firenze. They have camera, if you drive in downtown and don't have the proper permits, a VERY expensive ticket arrives in the mail.
Which you can then completely ignore because the Italian government is notoriously bad at record-keeping and they'll never make a serious attempt at collecting on the ticket or putting it on your record. I know people who have gotten dozens of these sorts of tickets and they just laugh and tear them up, even when they get pulled over by an actual officer the past tickets are never mentioned.
Atheism means I don't know that there is a God. I don't claim that I know there is not.
Actually atheism means that you disbelieve there is a god. Agnosticism means that you can find no justification for either belief or disbelief in a god.
Suppose I write a program which says "cogito ergo sum." Perhaps it's even complex enough to believe it exists. Does it?
Now, suppose instead of a program, it's an imaginary friend. Certainly we'd be willing to say that they don't exist, except in the sense that someone, somewhere, is thinking of them...
But if we're willing to say that thoughts exist, then I can say, with some amount of certainty, that the world exists, at least in the sense that I am thinking about it. So either we say that imaginary things do not exist, in which case it's impossible to know I'm not a figment of someone's imagination, or we say that imaginary things do exist in a sense, and we can know that other things exist in the same sense.
Absolutely, they all do exist. However, we can't say much else about them other than that they are observable and appear to have certain properties. We can't know if they are generated by us or if they have an independent existence. We can't say if they do or do not have self-awareness. We can't say anything for sure other than "I sense these things." Anything beyond that is postulating additional facts.
Rather than try to root out the contradictions and eliminate them? That seems like a really lazy epistemology.
That's why I said:
"Once you start to assemble a collection of postulates then there is the possibility of contradiction or mismatch between them."
"Your energy is better spent on working on eliminating your own personal contradictory postulates and conjectures."
Of course I try to root out contradictions, mine and other people's. I just don't mock people for them, it's not worth the effort. I prefer good, clear logic rather then getting emotions involved.
If you're going for universal skepticism, go all the way -- we don't even know "cogito ergo sum." How do you know you exist? What do you mean when you say you exist?
It's the only certain postulate because if you don't have existence then there's nothing about you to make the statement. If you can think then you must exist, something must be doing the thinking. Saying "I don't exist" is a contradiction, something had to exist to make the statement. You can even remove the "cogito" (I think) from the statement, it's enough to prove existence simply by having the property of being able to perform the action of "saying" anything. If something can perform an action then something must exist to perform that action.
What you can't say is exactly WHAT is performing the action. Is it a single individual in a sea of many? A collection of entities? All of existence? A pattern of nothingness in a sea of particles? Everything beyond "I think therefore I am" is conjecture based on further postulates.
Are all conjectures equal?
Absolutely not! However, taken individually and in a vacuum, all postulates are equal. Once you start to assemble a collection of postulates then there is the possibility of contradiction or mismatch between them. It gets even worse once you start to make conjectures based on postulates, there are numerous logical fallacies that can arise. Without a doubt some conjectures are more self-consistant than others.
Of course theory is wonderful but in practice I'm not stuck on the "cogito ergo sum" step of the consciousness bootstrap. I do have my own personal collection of postulates and conjectures and many of them are contradictory. In spite of that I'm still able to act and exist. Will that be true in the next moment? What does the next moment even mean? Beats me, I'll just have to continue to rely on my existence and my cobbled-together series of beliefs.
My point is that since there is only one solid, base postulate it's kind of silly to make fun of other people's beliefs. Each of us has a plethora of postulates that are ridiculous and can be mocked. To mock others for some of their beliefs is just as good as mocking yourself for some of yours. Your energy is better spent on working on eliminating your own personal contradictory postulates and conjectures. Once you have done that then start casting those stones! ;-)
So, I can now see why American Baptists get so miffy about atheists -- it's horrible dealing with people who don't realize how much better you are.
That's funny... that's the same reason I, an atheist, get so miffy about Christians, especially Baptists, especially young-earth Creationists.
What's really funny is how everyone thinks their own personal postulates (beliefs) about the universe are so much better than everyone else's.
Let's face it, we don't REALLY know much of anything about the universe past "cogito ergo sum". Everything else is conjecture. Get over mocking people for their beliefs when you have a slew of your own.
The ironic thing will be this relevant quote, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
"Rare earths" aren't really that rare. There are many potential mining sites worldwide. They're sparse, in that huge amounts of rock have to be processed to get small amounts of metal.
Rare, in this case, is a relative term. You might play poker and rarely get a royal flush (1 in 649,740) but if you play a billion hands you'll get an average of 1539 royal flushes. You never go above the rare chance to get a royal flush but with a big enough sample size you are likely to end up with a lot of them.
The Earth is a HUGE sample size but that doesn't change the fact that the rare earths are, well, rare! Of course almost every element is rare in comparison to the most common element, hydrogen.
So you think News Corp is suddenly going to become a bastion of high quality journalism?
Did I say that?
How is this better than a web-based news source, even a paywalled one?
Well, supposedly it will be more than the umpteenth regurgitated blog mess that is the current web-based media. You know what I'm talking about, when a "news" article is a blog talking about a blog that references a blog written by a guy who has an unnamed source.
Whether or not this iPad daily "newspaper" is worth it is up to the subscribers to decide. I could easily see it working if the content is thoughtful, heavily researched and backed by facts, engaging, and entertaining. If it fulfills those sort of conditions then there will be people who will pay good money to get it every day. If not then it will fade into obscurity.
Now paywalls have been put up with these sorts of promises before. Some have failed and some have succeeded. I hear the Wall Street Journal Online has been fairly profitable but there are plenty of examples of newspapers that put up a paywall and had it topple on them. Again it's all about the target audience and if you can provide an experience that they can't get on the free-to-browse web.
I said essentially drown. The point was that oxygen using life didn't crowd out anaerobic life, the oxygen produced by clorophyll based life forced it to places with still no oxygen or killed it. If drowning doesn't do it for you as an analogy instead of disrupted enzyme production, then I'm glad everyone was able to see the technically correct explanation.
Breaking things down into simpler ideas that more people can understand is a good thing but you run into the danger of oversimplifying and creating bad analogies that serve to confuse the less technically-minded. Drowning is definitely a bad analogy, saying that too much oxygen poisoned these organism is much more accurate and just as easy to understand. It also allows people to better understand that some of the organisms might be able to tolerate some of the poison better than others.
Your statement has been commonly accepted scientific lore but the actual forests bursting into flame thing is based on one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness.
It's actually based on the finding of charred remains of plant matter and correlating it with global oxygen levels:
The diversification of Paleozoic fire systems and fluctuations in atmospheric oxygen concentration
The forests don't just burst into flame but higher levels of oxygen do make it easier for fires to start and spread from events such as lightning strikes and volcanic eruptions. There is a TON more scientific methodology to this hypothesis than "one experiment with pieces of paper of various wetness".
Anyways, my main point is that we have to be careful in how we summarize and simplify complicated concepts. There were a number of things in the original post that I replied to that were a little misleading, as you said yourself:
I'm a programmer but just happen to be reading Nick Lane's books on this. If I get something wrong please biologists jump in and correct me.
I am a chemist, not a biologist, but I have a solid grasp on combustion chemistry and the use of oxygen by organisms. It's good that you are sharing what you have read but simplifying these concepts can be tricky at times. I'm just trying to clarify some of the statements so that people aren't mislead by an overzealous summary. Remember what Einstein said, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I only read a page or two a day (first "Oxygen", and now "Power, Sex, Suicide" - and yes, that's all based on oxygen). But the revelation I had yesterday was that anaerobic bacteria essentially drown in oxygen, just as we would suffocate with too little oxygen
They don't "drown" in oxygen. Oxygen is a highly reactive substance, cut an apple and it browns fairly rapidly, expose iron to air and it will rust, those chemical hand warmers take oxygen from the air in order to produce heat. Some organisms, called obligate anaerobes, can't tolerate an environment with high oxygen content because it poisons them by destroying enzymes and interfering with key biological pathways in those organisms.
When organisms came about that produced large amounts of oxygen (a byproduct of photosynthesis, as well as other reducing processes) they basically polluted the environment by producing so much oxygen. This oxygen "pollution" poisoned most of the organisms of the time until some evolved ways to break down and even use the oxygen. Once this happened there was an explosion of oxygen-using organisms. It turns out that since oxygen is so reactive it makes a great agent to "burn" (oxidize) other materials and produce energy.
However, there are many anaerobes that can survive in an oxygen environment - some can even use a little of the oxygen when it's available. There's no hard and fast cutoff of how much oxygen is too much or too little. As levels rise there will be more wildfires and the less oxygen-tolerant organisms will struggle, as levels fall the more oxygen-reliant organisms will have problems. A partial pressure for oxygen of 0.15 kPa (15% at STP - standard temperature & pressure) will certainly cause a lot of problems for many oxygen-reliant organisms.
What have they done in regards to credit card transactions? I just pay with a credit card without logging in; works fine for me
Well, years ago they mucked up my credit when I tried to register with a credit card. I never even got to buy anything through PayPal but somehow stuff got charged to my card. It was a long, drawn-out process to get everything sorted out and ever since then I haven't bothered to do anything with PayPal. I really don't miss using the service, there are so few places that actually require it.
Maybe PayPal has cleaned up its act since then but once bitten, twice shy...
Ok I see what you're saying now. I thought you just meant the normal registered user thing, not a paid subscriber.
I probably would buy a subscription but I see they use PayPal and yeah, I don't buy anything through PayPal. I had some serious problems with them in the past and now I avoid them like the plague. I especially don't trust doing credit card transactions through them.
Queue the conspiracy theorists.
You know, stuff like this CAN be used in a way that consumers might like. Maybe you you'll be able to sign up with a plan that gives you free internet but you're charged a usage fee on certain popular sites. That'd be great for someone who doesn't use those sites enough to justify paying a monthly fee.
I see this going one of several ways:
Overall I think it will all go the way of the first option. There may be some wailing and gnashing of teeth before that but eventually the companies will only win if they keep the customers happy.
This has an easy fix. Create an account, activate it, log in, and subscribe to Slashdot, and it won't redirect you back to an unencrypted connection anymore.
Nope, I'm logged in and it still redirects back to an unencrypted connection.
Safari is a supported browser on Snow Leopard *after* you open Terminal and run a command line to set a flag in the (normally not seen) configuration file. Totally obvious - NOT.
WebGL is not part of the standard Safari on Snow Leopard. It's still in beta and you have to grab the nightly builds, THEN set the default com.apple.Safari WebKitWebGLEnabled to YES.
You're on the cutting edge man, don't expect it to be automatic just yet. If you take a look at the WebGL spec that I linked you'll see that it says "Working Draft", not a released spec. WebGL is not yet ready for the masses who don't know how to set a hidden default.
I never said speech synthesis wasn't around. Read my post and stop mis characterizing me.
Ahem, you said this:
Not until the 32 bit era (68000 Amiga, 80486 +SoundBlaster) did they have enough power to convert text to speech.
I posted an example showing that, indeed, there was hardware around that could do text to speech far before the "32 bit era". It didn't need a vocabulary, it sounded out the words since written English is largely a phonetic language. Yes, some pronunciations were a bit off but it was still effective.
Text to speech wasn't common at the time and it did require additional hardware/software but if you watch the movie that's EXACTLY what the protagonist was all about! In fact he doesn't get the computer to talk until he turns on a peripheral, they SHOW him doing it! As for the military also having text to speech, that's not so far-fetched and even if it is a bit odd there's this thing called creative license. It'd be a hell of a boring movie to have to read everything the computer said and once they had the computer speaking at the kids home you pretty much have to have it speak in other places too.
In other words, there's at least a modicum of plausibility there and it's a movie. Get over it!
the only part that made me cringe was the talking computer. Not until the 32 bit era (68000 Amiga, 80486 +SoundBlaster) did they have enough power to convert text to speech.
I had software speech synthesis on my Apple IIe in the early 80s. It wasn't very good but it sounded pretty close to what was in the movie.
Votrax has produced text-to-speech hardware since the 70s.
My first few years in college were focused on a degree in nuclear physics, I later changed to chemistry and have a bachelors of science in chemistry so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about on this topic.
There's no doubt that some fraction of the hydrocarbon soup that makes up a "fossil" fuel does come from non-living sources. However it is extremely difficult (from an entropy standpoint) to build complex hydrocarbons through non-living (abiogenic) processes so it's extremely likely that the vast majority of "fossil" fuels are produced from formerly-living sources.
There is no such thing as a "renewable" energy source. Every energy source is the result of something being consumed. For most "renewable" sources this means the sun is consuming hydrogen to produce energy that is driving the source. The sun evaporates water, drives the winds, allows plant growth, among other effects. We can tap the results of this energy but in doing so we upset other things. Water power and wind power disrupt natural flow patterns, plant growth ends up trapping heat due to decreased surface albedo, and so on. Yes, this will continue for some time but it's not infinite either. Even more troubling is that we ignore the side effects of tapping these sources because they seem to be free of consequence.
Nuclear power is not an infinite resource either. Fission is certainly more limited than fusion but there is no doubt that there is enough fissile material to last at least a couple of hundred years if a modicum of care is used. Between breeding new fuel and the thorium cycle we should have no problem transitioning from fossil fuels to fusion fuels and having it sustain us until we achieve better technology such as fusion power sources. Once we have mastered fusion we will be using the most abundant element in the universe to power us: hydrogen.
In any event there is no point in summarily dismissing fissile fuels simply because they have a near-term limited supply. Yes, in the grand scheme of things our uranium and thorium stores will not last anywhere as long as the sun burns but they really don't have to! They just have to last until our next alternative, fusion, which is already past its breakthrough point and is on the edge of being able to be scaled to industrial levels.
From the ipsec(4) manpage for Mac OS X 10.6, history section:
The implementation described herein appeared in WIDE/KAME IPv6/IPsec stack.
The KAME stack is the same stack used in NetBSD and FreeBSD.
Even though NeXTSTEP was forked earlier from the BSD codebase than the other BSD flavors there has still been considerable sharing between it, Mac OS X, and the other BSD flavors. OpenBSD is one exception to this since it tends to be a more closed ecosystem than the other BSD variants.
So this might mean Mac OS X is not affected? I'm not knowledgeable enough on *BSD to know.
I don't believe that Mac OS X is affected since OpenBSD only used the IPv6 part of the Kame Project. Apparently OpenBSD developed their own version of IPSec while the other BSD variants used the IPSec implementation from the Kame Project.
Since Mac OS X's IPSec is derived from the one in FreeBSD and NetBSD it's not directly linked to the IPSec in OpenBSD. This doesn't mean that it hasn't been compromised, all code is suspect - even implementations in Linux and Windows - simply because it seems like people have been actively attempting to insert exploits into this type of code.
The sad truth is that most people don't actually understand [anything] in the United States
Fixed that for you. I'm sure somebody will be along with the next iteration soon
I wouldn't be the person to cast that stone if I were you. I visited your blog and saw plenty of evidence of ignorance there. For example, there's this gem:
Nuclear power is fossil fuel based. Do you really think uranium comes from anywhere different than coal? It's a shiny rock we find in the ground, that eventually replenishes from meteors or volcanic activity drawing it out of the center of the earth; tons and tons of this shit isn't popping up all over the planet all the time, it takes something major to make more. To make matters worse, we can only derive 5% of the energy potential from nuclear fuel without breeding it into weapons grade nuclear material (and then summarily using said weapons grade nuclear material for the non-weapons purpose of generating 20 times the electricity we normally could), which of course violates a treaty or two.
There are so many things wrong with what you have written on that blog but I'll just address a few things from this quote.
I could go on but I think I've made my point. Ignorance abounds in many places and you shouldn't have the hubris to paint an entire nation with a broad brush when you exhibit a heady measure of it yourself.
Unless and until a State Governor officially requests federal assistance, the President literally has no authority to send federal troops or resources. Given the number of times this came up during GWB's Presidency, I am shocked that more people don't understand this.
The sad truth is that most people don't actually understand how the system of government in the United States works. Most people seem to assume that the President of the United States is some kind of king or supreme dictator who can move mountains at will and reports to no one. The reality is that, while the President does have some serious powers he is also severely held in check by the other two branches of the government, the constitution, the states themselves, and international treaties, relations, and laws.
I fear that we all need to go back to school and be taught exactly how this representative republic works before we should be allowed to participate in the political process in any manner.
Wow. You jumped up and demonstrated exactly the corporate-puppet faculties he was pointing out.
And how, exactly, did I do that? All I said was to do your own investigation and check Moore's facts. There was nothing corporate in what I said. I'm not pointing at this company's website or spoon-feeding anyone my own viewpoints on the topics that Moore has made movies about.
It only takes a bit of research to realize that, in many cases, the version of reality presented in Michael Moore's documentaries greatly differs from what many other people have observed - including many nonpartisan, non-corporate sources.
My post applies equally to any source of information. Be critical of it all, whether it's a documentary producer, corporate news source, or a political pundit
from the outside, we see moore a hero. maybe its possible that the endless propaganda perpetrated by corporate owned mass media have twisted you american people's views about moore
The problem is that most of Moore's "facts" which he presents in his movies turn out to be no more than elaborate fabrications. He routinely takes quotes out of context, overlays a speech over video from another event, re-arranges video and audio, creates set-up interviews where he asks the guy one question and then re-shoots himself asking another question so the answer is presented in the manner which Moore wants, and many more methods of turning real events into fictional ones.
There are plenty of websites out there that take Moore's movies and show, "fact" by "fact", just how badly Moore manipulates reality. Now this doesn't mean that Moore's topics aren't worth investigating, it just means that you can't take anything he says as the truth. Do your own investigation into the truth and you'll be far better off than relying on Moore to do the job for you.
Yep, it's almost like if a group of people came in and took all the seats in the local diner and refused to leave, just because said diner refused to serve them.
You're absolutely right! In both cases the people can and should be arrested, convicted of trespass or similar crimes, be fined or jailed, and probably owe compensation to the owner for lost business. What a great analogy!