I can't read the article without registering but I wonder if homosexual behavior could be causing horizontal gene transfer in humans, possibly using viruses as a transport mechanism.
If viruses are your transport mechanism, I'm not sure you need homosexual behaviour. You may, yes, but there are plenty of other mechanisms for viruses to spread.
You don't need it from your end of the network, anyway, do you? So why not just either remove or renumber runlevel 1 in inittab? (Never tried this, and it might be unconventional enough that it blows other things up in strange ways. But it's easy to test.)
You can also tell init to start up a shell (i.e., boot with "init=/bin/bash"). I'm sure there are distributions out there that have replaced the stock init, etc., but odds are good this would work on his machine.
I've heard it said before that the only reason so many scientists get those dates is that they base them on assumptions. Assuming the earth is so many billion years old will get you a date that confirms your theories. Like, if you assume that a variable in an equation is a certain number, and depending on the number you assume you'll get a totally different answer than if you assumed a much larger or smaller number. Could someone confirm or deny (with evidence if possible) whether or not this is true for me? I'm very curious about this.
Unless of course the Abiogenic petroleum origin theory is correct, in which case...
DRILL BABY DRILL!!
Assume for a moment that oil is generated abiogenically. Ignore any problems we might have getting it out of the ground as it's produced. What is the *rate* of abiotic oil production? Let's say it's 100 million barrels a year. That's at about the same magnitude as our current consumption.
But what if it's only 10 million barrels a year? Or a million barrels a year? Or significantly less? Over a few decades (or more likely millions of years) it'll add up, of course, but that's not going to do us a whole lot of good in the meantime.
So it's more like WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT before we can DRILL BABY DRILL (and I left off a lot of WAITs).
True, if you couldn't use that 36,000 acres for anything else. Wind sites can still be farmed, grazed, etc.
To second that, Toronto has a windmill downtown at Exhibition Place. That's a pretty heavily used area.
I'm sure the Europeans can give more examples. Taking the bus or the train through Germany in recent years I've seen a large number of windmills on what looked like actively used farmland.
As John Wanamaker said: "I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted... I just don't know which half."
You do know which half on the interspaz.
You still don't--although you know more than you did. Yes, you know who clicked on the ad, but (like print or television ads) you don't know who saw the ad, was interested but didn't have any immediate need to click on it.
He's -sure- of his hypothesis. You think scientists don't become convinced of our own hypotheses before we have actual evidence? We do. I've been quite convinced of my own hypotheses and even occasionally ignored evidence that suggests I'm wrong, much to my later regret. I'm sure every scientist, and probably everyone else as well, has committed similar sins at some point.
I'm pretty sure he's right (i.e., that "modern" humans and Neanderthal had sex). I have my doubts about whether or not he's going to find any substantive evidence to support it, though.
There are people that speak something that descends from the mayan language, correct. That doesn't help us much in deciphering the written version of the language in hieroglyphics.
Sure it does. Between that and the large number of inscriptions available, we have a reasonably good understanding of classical Mayan language. I'd recommend reading something like Michael Coe's Breaking the Mayan Code and ignoring the 2012 bullshit.
Your post is incredibly relevant considering that the Mayan calendar simply starts over at that time rather than predicting the end. The Apocalyptic prediction from the calendar was simply speculation that arose from not knowing the language. There's not exactly a Mayan Rosetta Stone so even all that we know about the language is still premature.
Second, yeah, the apocalypse garbage is exactly that. I don't think we can blame lack of knowledge of the language--it's just stupid speculation. If the classical Mayans were still around, they'd probably have a big festival.
Let's abuse the analogy: Budweiser is cheaper and more consistent than most microbrews.
Entirely off topic, but Budweiser actually has a lot of talented people working for them. It actually takes more skill to brew a beer without flavor than it does to brew a beer with flavor. The flavor will hide flaws that are much easier to notice in beers like Budweiser.
For instance, the brewmaster at award-winning micro New Glarus Brewing used to to work for Anhueser-Busch. The New Glarus beers aren't as consistent as Budweiser, of course. Then again, they have flavor.
To be fair, quite a lot of us Brits forget that there are many quite different native languages, let alone accents, on these fair and drizzly isles. English is arguaby the language of some fairly recent immigrants who were invited in to do a job and then didn't want to go home again afterwards.
From another perspective, all the "native" languages are just the languages of somewhat less recent immigrants.
All the native languages are in the Celtic family, which in turn is part of the larger Indo-European family. The Beaker culture people who built Stonehenge may have spoken a Celtic language, or Celtic languages may have come in later during the Iron age. Either way, before the Celtic languages Brits almost certainly spoke something completely different.
I wonder if any influence or link can be traced between it and the Phoenician culture...
There's no link. A LOT happened in the 5-6000 years between this and the time Phoenician culture arose (2000-1500 BC). I'm sure there was influence, but nothing you could trace directly. Nearly every culture in the region could claim the same influence, and there were a lot of them.
Who cares who reported this? The point is that the Democrats need to be kicked out of government once and for all, and the NSF should be shut down, just like ACORN.
Exactly. The Dems should be kicked out of office for things which happened in the executive branch before they took power!
I've really enjoyed some of Moorcock's books, but just could not get through many of the others. For instance, I liked "The Warhound and the World's Pain," but I just could not get through the sequel.
People still have working intercoms in homes? I thought that those went out in the 70's to early 80's.
Yes, but sometimes they're still useful. I'm in a three-floor townhouse and I'm thinking of putting one at the door. It's a pain in the ass to run down two flights of stairs to get the door.
Ur, no. Heroin is essentially a faster-acting version of morphine, and can be used medically as a painkiller. Obviously, it's pretty easily abused, which is why it's not commonly used medically these days outside of the UK (according to the Wikipedia article, anyway.
I think we're agreed, though, that anybody using heroin shouldn't be driving.
I've never understood this complaint. You have either 8 bit (256 colour) graphics for the early web, or 24 bit (full colour) for full print-ready work, but 16 bit? Why bother with 16 bit support? Its only usefulness was for monitors/graphics cards in the early 1990s that didn't support 24 bit colour due to a lack of RAM, and this was in the days when a four MEGABYTE graphics card was large. Nowadays we have 512MB cards and higher as standard; the requirement for such low bit depths is long gone.
Looking for 16 bit colour support is like checking a modern car for a crank handle, it's utterly pointless and anyone complaining that Gimp doesn't have it is simply looking for a reason to support Adobe. Brainwashing etc, call it what you will.
I gather you're not a photographer. I'm not aware of a camera on the market that supports 24 bit raw files, including expensive medium format digital camera backs like Phase One. Raw files taken by most cameras are in fact 12 or 14 bits. Converting the file prematurely to 24 bits would increase the file size and the memory used by the image program without any real benefit.
Good grief, computers were invented during the 2nd world war in the UK and used to decode the German mechanically generated ciphers and it sure wasn't IBM. Where the hell did you get your tall story?
Actually, the book alleges that IBM sold punch card machines to the Nazis. Punch card machines were in use as far back as the nineteenth century. I haven't done more than thumb through it, but it seems to be well-researched and credible.
I'm assuming the OP isn't Stephen King. Otherwise, it's a very bad time to be a writer of either fiction or nonfiction; it's hard to get published, you don't make much, and you're competing against this internets thingy where people give away what you're trying to sell.
I published my novel with Lulu, as well as distributing it online for free, and I'm very happy with the result; in the fullness of time people have willingly sent me tips and bought enough copies to give me about the same amount of money I could have expected on an advance from an unknown author's first paperback, and I didn't write it to pay the rent in any case.
Uh, when was it a good time? There have always been a few people who make a fortune, but the vast majority of writers out there have always needed a day job or someone else to pay the bills.
Supporting this, my former employer did managed services. We had some customers who used to be customers of IBM. They loved us, at least in comparison to IBM, since they could call us up and either get things done right away (routine changes) or get them scheduled for the next maintenance window. IBM took forever...
So cheer up, beancounters, because you're part of a glorious 3000+ year tradition!
More like a glorious 5000+ year tradition. By 1000 BC, the folks in Mesopotamia had been using cuneiform for their accounting for at least two thousand years, and the folks in Mycenean Greece had already stopped using Linear A.
I've found this to be true of many aspects of IT, not just concerning mainframes.
This is pretty much universally true of all areas. Before I got into IT, I worked at a division of a company that did pesticide studies for companies (among other things) to help them get pesticides registered with the EPA. This meant that someone would grow the crops, apply the pesticides to the crops, and sample the crops and the soil at various point to see whether or not the pesticide and various by-products wound up in the finished product or the soil. Typically we'd have a large backlog of samples to analyze, which we kept frozen in a couple of trucks out back. My boss kept hounding management to build a really big freezer building so we could house the samples more safely and more cheaply. Nope, he was told it was too expensive. Nor would management shell out for an automatic temperature monitoring system, which also cost too much.
Well, one Friday afternoon somebody accidentally flipped the switch that put one of the freezer trucks--the one with the most samples--to defrost. Security was supposed to check the temperature at least once a day over the weekend, but they were just filling in the log entries without actually doing it. By the time somebody discovered it on Monday morning, the sides of the truck were literally bulging outwards. The stench was unbearable, and all the samples were ruined.
Naturally, anybody who had samples in that freezer was pissed. In most cases, the study had to be redone, which meant a delay of a year (since the pesticide had to be reapplied in the field). The insurance money went to redoing the field portion of the study for those customers that trusted us to do it again, but of course we lost a majority of the customers we had. I'm sure the lawyers had a field day, too. The net result of it was my division hung on for a few years, surviving largely on some of the other areas in which we did work. A few years later they sold off the burnt shell to another company. I was long gone before then.
So yeah, that's kind of an extreme example, but if you dig around companies in almost any field you'll find examples of how the bean counters can hurt the bottom line.
A Vax is a minicomputer. The minicomputers really are dying. None of them are being made now, unless you count IBMs successor to the AS/400 (the iSeries?).
Well, "iSeries" was a couple of names ago. After iSeries, they called it System i, and now Power Systems. They're merging the hardware with the RS/6000/pSeries/System p line. Depending on the degree to which "minicomputer" is equivalent to "mid-range computer," they're still alive and kicking, albeit with arthritis and bad knees.
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I can't read the article without registering but I wonder if homosexual behavior could be causing horizontal gene transfer in humans, possibly using viruses as a transport mechanism.
If viruses are your transport mechanism, I'm not sure you need homosexual behaviour. You may, yes, but there are plenty of other mechanisms for viruses to spread.
You don't need it from your end of the network, anyway, do you? So why not just either remove or renumber runlevel 1 in inittab? (Never tried this, and it might be unconventional enough that it blows other things up in strange ways. But it's easy to test.)
You can also tell init to start up a shell (i.e., boot with "init=/bin/bash"). I'm sure there are distributions out there that have replaced the stock init, etc., but odds are good this would work on his machine.
I've heard it said before that the only reason so many scientists get those dates is that they base them on assumptions. Assuming the earth is so many billion years old will get you a date that confirms your theories. Like, if you assume that a variable in an equation is a certain number, and depending on the number you assume you'll get a totally different answer than if you assumed a much larger or smaller number. Could someone confirm or deny (with evidence if possible) whether or not this is true for me? I'm very curious about this.
Read something like The Age of the Earth.
Unless of course the Abiogenic petroleum origin theory is correct, in which case... DRILL BABY DRILL!!
Assume for a moment that oil is generated abiogenically. Ignore any problems we might have getting it out of the ground as it's produced. What is the *rate* of abiotic oil production? Let's say it's 100 million barrels a year. That's at about the same magnitude as our current consumption.
But what if it's only 10 million barrels a year? Or a million barrels a year? Or significantly less? Over a few decades (or more likely millions of years) it'll add up, of course, but that's not going to do us a whole lot of good in the meantime.
So it's more like WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT before we can DRILL BABY DRILL (and I left off a lot of WAITs).
True, if you couldn't use that 36,000 acres for anything else. Wind sites can still be farmed, grazed, etc.
To second that, Toronto has a windmill downtown at Exhibition Place. That's a pretty heavily used area.
I'm sure the Europeans can give more examples. Taking the bus or the train through Germany in recent years I've seen a large number of windmills on what looked like actively used farmland.
As John Wanamaker said: "I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted ... I just don't know which half."
You do know which half on the interspaz.
You still don't--although you know more than you did. Yes, you know who clicked on the ad, but (like print or television ads) you don't know who saw the ad, was interested but didn't have any immediate need to click on it.
He's -sure- of his hypothesis. You think scientists don't become convinced of our own hypotheses before we have actual evidence? We do. I've been quite convinced of my own hypotheses and even occasionally ignored evidence that suggests I'm wrong, much to my later regret. I'm sure every scientist, and probably everyone else as well, has committed similar sins at some point.
I'm pretty sure he's right (i.e., that "modern" humans and Neanderthal had sex). I have my doubts about whether or not he's going to find any substantive evidence to support it, though.
There are people that speak something that descends from the mayan language, correct. That doesn't help us much in deciphering the written version of the language in hieroglyphics.
Sure it does. Between that and the large number of inscriptions available, we have a reasonably good understanding of classical Mayan language. I'd recommend reading something like Michael Coe's Breaking the Mayan Code and ignoring the 2012 bullshit.
Your post is incredibly relevant considering that the Mayan calendar simply starts over at that time rather than predicting the end. The Apocalyptic prediction from the calendar was simply speculation that arose from not knowing the language. There's not exactly a Mayan Rosetta Stone so even all that we know about the language is still premature.
First, there is a Rosetta stone of sorts. Diego de Landa had some of the Mayans write down some of the glyphs in the Spanish alphabet about the time he had most of the books burned.
Second, yeah, the apocalypse garbage is exactly that. I don't think we can blame lack of knowledge of the language--it's just stupid speculation. If the classical Mayans were still around, they'd probably have a big festival.
Let's abuse the analogy: Budweiser is cheaper and more consistent than most microbrews.
Entirely off topic, but Budweiser actually has a lot of talented people working for them. It actually takes more skill to brew a beer without flavor than it does to brew a beer with flavor. The flavor will hide flaws that are much easier to notice in beers like Budweiser.
For instance, the brewmaster at award-winning micro New Glarus Brewing used to to work for Anhueser-Busch. The New Glarus beers aren't as consistent as Budweiser, of course. Then again, they have flavor.
To be fair, quite a lot of us Brits forget that there are many quite different native languages, let alone accents, on these fair and drizzly isles. English is arguaby the language of some fairly recent immigrants who were invited in to do a job and then didn't want to go home again afterwards.
From another perspective, all the "native" languages are just the languages of somewhat less recent immigrants.
All the native languages are in the Celtic family, which in turn is part of the larger Indo-European family. The Beaker culture people who built Stonehenge may have spoken a Celtic language, or Celtic languages may have come in later during the Iron age. Either way, before the Celtic languages Brits almost certainly spoke something completely different.
Pity they didn't write things down, though.
I wonder if any influence or link can be traced between it and the Phoenician culture...
There's no link. A LOT happened in the 5-6000 years between this and the time Phoenician culture arose (2000-1500 BC). I'm sure there was influence, but nothing you could trace directly. Nearly every culture in the region could claim the same influence, and there were a lot of them.
Who cares who reported this? The point is that the Democrats need to be kicked out of government once and for all, and the NSF should be shut down, just like ACORN.
Exactly. The Dems should be kicked out of office for things which happened in the executive branch before they took power!
I've really enjoyed some of Moorcock's books, but just could not get through many of the others. For instance, I liked "The Warhound and the World's Pain," but I just could not get through the sequel.
3) Make said songs available for ipod download.
Nice plan until Apple decides which songs can be downloaded onto their hardware. Try again.
At which point ipod sales start dropping.
People still have working intercoms in homes? I thought that those went out in the 70's to early 80's.
Yes, but sometimes they're still useful. I'm in a three-floor townhouse and I'm thinking of putting one at the door. It's a pain in the ass to run down two flights of stairs to get the door.
Heroin is always bad when taken into the body.
Ur, no. Heroin is essentially a faster-acting version of morphine, and can be used medically as a painkiller. Obviously, it's pretty easily abused, which is why it's not commonly used medically these days outside of the UK (according to the Wikipedia article, anyway.
I think we're agreed, though, that anybody using heroin shouldn't be driving.
I've never understood this complaint. You have either 8 bit (256 colour) graphics for the early web, or 24 bit (full colour) for full print-ready work, but 16 bit? Why bother with 16 bit support? Its only usefulness was for monitors/graphics cards in the early 1990s that didn't support 24 bit colour due to a lack of RAM, and this was in the days when a four MEGABYTE graphics card was large. Nowadays we have 512MB cards and higher as standard; the requirement for such low bit depths is long gone.
Looking for 16 bit colour support is like checking a modern car for a crank handle, it's utterly pointless and anyone complaining that Gimp doesn't have it is simply looking for a reason to support Adobe. Brainwashing etc, call it what you will.
I gather you're not a photographer. I'm not aware of a camera on the market that supports 24 bit raw files, including expensive medium format digital camera backs like Phase One. Raw files taken by most cameras are in fact 12 or 14 bits. Converting the file prematurely to 24 bits would increase the file size and the memory used by the image program without any real benefit.
Good grief, computers were invented during the 2nd world war in the UK and used to decode the German mechanically generated ciphers and it sure wasn't IBM. Where the hell did you get your tall story?
Actually, the book alleges that IBM sold punch card machines to the Nazis. Punch card machines were in use as far back as the nineteenth century. I haven't done more than thumb through it, but it seems to be well-researched and credible.
I'm assuming the OP isn't Stephen King. Otherwise, it's a very bad time to be a writer of either fiction or nonfiction; it's hard to get published, you don't make much, and you're competing against this internets thingy where people give away what you're trying to sell.
I published my novel with Lulu, as well as distributing it online for free, and I'm very happy with the result; in the fullness of time people have willingly sent me tips and bought enough copies to give me about the same amount of money I could have expected on an advance from an unknown author's first paperback, and I didn't write it to pay the rent in any case.
Uh, when was it a good time? There have always been a few people who make a fortune, but the vast majority of writers out there have always needed a day job or someone else to pay the bills.
Supporting this, my former employer did managed services. We had some customers who used to be customers of IBM. They loved us, at least in comparison to IBM, since they could call us up and either get things done right away (routine changes) or get them scheduled for the next maintenance window. IBM took forever...
So cheer up, beancounters, because you're part of a glorious 3000+ year tradition!
More like a glorious 5000+ year tradition. By 1000 BC, the folks in Mesopotamia had been using cuneiform for their accounting for at least two thousand years, and the folks in Mycenean Greece had already stopped using Linear A.
I've found this to be true of many aspects of IT, not just concerning mainframes.
This is pretty much universally true of all areas. Before I got into IT, I worked at a division of a company that did pesticide studies for companies (among other things) to help them get pesticides registered with the EPA. This meant that someone would grow the crops, apply the pesticides to the crops, and sample the crops and the soil at various point to see whether or not the pesticide and various by-products wound up in the finished product or the soil. Typically we'd have a large backlog of samples to analyze, which we kept frozen in a couple of trucks out back. My boss kept hounding management to build a really big freezer building so we could house the samples more safely and more cheaply. Nope, he was told it was too expensive. Nor would management shell out for an automatic temperature monitoring system, which also cost too much.
Well, one Friday afternoon somebody accidentally flipped the switch that put one of the freezer trucks--the one with the most samples--to defrost. Security was supposed to check the temperature at least once a day over the weekend, but they were just filling in the log entries without actually doing it. By the time somebody discovered it on Monday morning, the sides of the truck were literally bulging outwards. The stench was unbearable, and all the samples were ruined.
Naturally, anybody who had samples in that freezer was pissed. In most cases, the study had to be redone, which meant a delay of a year (since the pesticide had to be reapplied in the field). The insurance money went to redoing the field portion of the study for those customers that trusted us to do it again, but of course we lost a majority of the customers we had. I'm sure the lawyers had a field day, too. The net result of it was my division hung on for a few years, surviving largely on some of the other areas in which we did work. A few years later they sold off the burnt shell to another company. I was long gone before then.
So yeah, that's kind of an extreme example, but if you dig around companies in almost any field you'll find examples of how the bean counters can hurt the bottom line.
A Vax is a minicomputer. The minicomputers really are dying. None of them are being made now, unless you count IBMs successor to the AS/400 (the iSeries?).
Well, "iSeries" was a couple of names ago. After iSeries, they called it System i, and now Power Systems. They're merging the hardware with the RS/6000/pSeries/System p line. Depending on the degree to which "minicomputer" is equivalent to "mid-range computer," they're still alive and kicking, albeit with arthritis and bad knees.
However as there is no hdd, and less than 1MB of ram your drive will likey be worn out from swapping the floppies around before you manage to open IE.
You're worried about the computer? The poor bastard swapping the floppies will have snapped long before the computer wears out.