We're not evolving in any meaningful sense of the word. Resistance to disease or narcotic addiction is only "evolution" if you massage the word a lot.
Change in allele frequency over time? Fits perfectly. Resistance to disease is a big part of evolution you know. Consider the role of smallpox when humans of European descent were competing for resources with humans of American descent. And in a population where narcotic addiction is a significant killer, resistance thereto will be favoured by natural selection.
As humans, we do not deal with environmental pressures.
So all humans are equally successful at propagating their genes, regardless of their particular personal traits and environment? Or do some traits prosper better in some environments, and not in others? If so, then we're dealing with environmental pressures.
In a flock of one thousand gulls, one who is just a bit faster or has better eyesight or whatever is going to have a notable advantage at staying alive, and will be adept at outcompeting his peers. In a flock of one hundred thousand, his genetic advantages are barely a drop in a bucket, and for every gull chick produced from his loins, fifty thousand other "lesser" gulls are born. We're a population of nearly seven billion and aren't really constrained by geographic considerations anymore either. Tomorrow's superchild's signal will get completely drowned out by the noise of the slavering, drooling masses around him.
It was originally thought this was a problem with the theory. Since then, we've discovered something called 'genetics'. This tells us that traits are not infinitely divisible; in the end, you either have a gene or you don't, you can't have half a gene. That means a new beneficial trait cannot be swamped by the size of the gene pool. If the mutant gull's variation is truly beneficial, then it will have more young than the rest, and they will carry the gene. They in turn will also have more children than the rest, and pass the gene on again. Interbreeding with the rest of the population spreads the gene all the faster. Eventually it will become almost universal - work it out, beginning with a population of 2 mutants growing at 6% per generation and a population of 200,000 normals growing at 5% per generation, they become even in 1,215 generations. A larger population means it will take a little longer to get there, but also means there are more chances for the mutation to arise in the first place. If the supermen have more children than the proles, then their genes will spread throughout the population as a whole; if they do not, then they go extinct. That's evolution.
If you take something without paying for it, your stealing, and breaking God's law.
I'd be interested to see any ancient religious text that endorses the concept of copyright. Remember that these came out of mostly illiterate cultures in which songs and stories were memorised by bards and minstrels and suchlike and performed publicly by them without any effort to send money to the author or his heirs. The nearest I can think of is the story that Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give it to Man, even though the gods still had their fire and Prometheus had really copied the gods' fire; that could be read as equating copying without permission of the originator with stealing. But it's a hell of a stretch.
YOUR "NITPICK" also goes for *NIX variants (& editing their config files in say, etc , usr/home, OR other folders/directories - subfolders/subdirectories) like Linux, Solaris, BSD variants like MacOS X & FreeBSD etc. et al... period.
Yes. I thought that was obvious; certainly it was the entire point of my post. Perhaps I overestimated my audience... The idea was that every time anybody posts any kind of howto for modifying a Linux system which involves the issuing of terminal commands or editing values in/etc/somethingorother, some troll posts something along those lines explaining that such command-line shenanigans mean that Linux is not ready for the desktop, that it is necessary to design a system such that 'Grandma', whoever she may be, can set it up with a single click and needs never concern herself with such esoterica, and implies that some other system such as Windows meets these criteria. Hence I thought it amusing to echo those familiar posts now that it seems it is necessary to do the very same in Windows that we commonly do in Unix-like systems.
It seems I aimed too high. Irony's maybe a bit much for some people, I can see that, OK. Not to worry, I can dumb it down if you like. Knock Knock jokes, maybe?
There's always AbiWord or OpenOffice.org. Determining to use only free software is admirable; refusing to use de-facto standard non-free document formats when they are very well understood by mature free applications, well, that's just masochism. Publish your own materials in free formats by all means, but if free software is capable of deciphering non-free formats sent to you by others then one shouldn't make too much of a fuss over the principle. Strict in what you send, tolerant in what you receive, that's the ticket.
The average end-user doesn't want to have to open registry editors and manually modify esoteric values in obscure text configuration files. No matter how much hobbyists and enthusiasts wish otherwise, until there's an idiot-proof GUI that makes all of this happen in a single click, Windows will never be ready for the mainstream desktop.
Yes, they are. And yes, this is unbelievably stupid.
Guys? A clue for you. You've got me paying for music again. The Napster generation, the whole Gen-Y pirate crowd, people who habitually download entire band discographies from The Pirate Bay - these people are falling over themselves to pay you well in excess of the iTunes price per track, because you've made it interactive, you've made it cool. You've worked out how to sell music in the 21st century, and now you're about to break it. Unbelievable.
That was a dumb movie. How long would it take the Chicoms to defeat the UK? 5 whole seconds?
The premise is stupid, but not for that reason. The Chinese Army can't attack the UK - there's an awful lot of Russia in the way for a start, and at the time that film came out I'm not sure there was any British soldier within a thousand miles of China (Hong Kong I think had already been returned). I don't think either air force would have the range to reach the adversary. The Chinese Navy would end up playing the game of spot-the-submarine, and they'd probably do about as well as did the captain of the General Belgrano, and then bugger off back to port; not that this would much advantage the Royal Navy, who probably wouldn't want to park carriers off the Chinese coast because they know perfectly well about Exocets and the Chinese likely have plenty of home-grown or Soviet-derived equivalents.
The only way that the UK and China could do each other serious military damage would be by ICBM. And it would take an awful lot more than a Bond villain's crappy plot for them to go that far.
I'm pretty sure it's actually been done; I'd have to pore through Crypto-Gram back issues to find the reference though. The key here is that there are characteristic delays between clicks that depend on the distance between keys, there are subtle differences in pitch, things like that. The spacebar sounds very different, and so does Backspace. Gather a large enough record of clicks from the same typist and it just becomes a matter of statistics, and you can often extract quite a bit of the text.
Of course if you have such a cunningly placed listening device you're probably better off just monitoring conversations between the typist and his co-workers, but I think this one was done as a Cool Hack rather than as a practical feat of espionage.
Its a crippled kernel that only recognizes 1 GB of RAM.
It's a netbook. It only has 1GiB of RAM.
And if you're the kind of person who opens up and upgrades portables, you're perfectly capable of changing the kernel. In fact I bet the first thing you did on delivery of the computer was wipe it and install your favourite distro, wasn't it? So I don't really see that this is a major problem.
I understand it works out of the box for the original Eee, but for the 901 - and presumably the closely related 1000 - neither wired nor wireless networking work. You'll need to install a custom kernel to get those going. Otherwise, everything's fine here.
The 99p - £1.99 - £2.99 was a fast expansion of price - 300% inflation within 10 years. But since then, we've seen nearly 1000% inflation in 20 years (£2.99 in 1989 -> £20-30 in 2009), just for budget titles. That's exponential growth. Real inflation in developed countries hangs way under the 5% a year mark, so even with the best maths in the world (you can't really necessarily just "add up" the year-on-year inflation for the last ten years), it's not anywhere near 300% and certainly not 1000% inflation over 10 or 20 years.
At 5% inflation per annum, the price of a budget game today should be £7.96 if it was £3 twenty years ago. But comparing to the Wii is unfair; no Wii game is more than two years old, whereas in 1989 the Spectrum had a library going back almost a decade, and the older games made up the 'budget' category. So take a look instead at older PS2 or PC games. How much can you get those for? Pretty much every games store has a rack of budget PC games going for about a fiver.
Did anyone do anything about it though? If not, you could at least get away with semi-independant nation status, where you were independant unless you provoked a nearby real nation to do something.
Sealand has never quite provoked Britain badly enough to be invaded. The military cost of annexing Sealand would be trivial; the problem would be the legal situation. It could be argued that Britain has implicitly recognised Sealand in the past; for a start, there was a court decision in 1968 that Sealand was outside British jurisdiction, which was cited ten years later by the British government as a reason to do nothing about a German being held prisoner in Sealand after a failed coup d'etat.
It would take months to sort out, and be the most spectacular media circus in the meantime. Awfully embarrassing. And then there's the PR end of things. You'd need sound propaganda to paint the Sealanders as, oh, a bunch of crazed armed thugs on an old sea fort with a habit of taking pot shots at passing ships - otherwise you'd look the most awful bully, sending the SBS or someone to take over the smallest country in the world.
If shooting at the Royal Navy didn't do it, I doubt running a pirate BitTorrent tracker service out of Sealand would be sufficient provocation for a British invasion to go ahead. After all, the place was founded by a pirate radio operator in the first place, it would only be in keeping with proud Sealand tradition. I suspect British policy is simply to quietly ignore the entire thing and wait for Prince Roy to die, or at least grow old enough to want to live somewhere slightly more comfortable - and then demolish the place once it's abandoned.
Staffordshire, in England. Stiff upper lip, and all that. Known for it's particularly fierce Sergeants, much like Nepal is known for its Gurkhas, and for its Bull Terriers.
Most of these would be just outside US internation waters, pirates would have to be based inside the US to hit them in short range craft more commonly used.
The Somali pirates have been getting bolder lately. Nowadays they set out in large ships with long range, and deploy short-range fast craft from that mothership to launch the actual attack. The Sirius Star was halfway to Madagascar when it was taken.
Still, the reason pirates flourish in Somalia is that it is an anarchy close to a major shipping route. Although there are plenty of nations in the region with weak governments, I don't think there's any outright anarchic state in the Caribbean that might form a pirate haven. And, as you say, it would be a bold pirate who operated in the back yard of the US Navy. The Gulf of Aden isn't any great power's particular patch, and hasn't been since the fall of the Empire; the same cannot be said for the Caribbean. So far the Somali pirates haven't upset any major power badly enough for a serious effort to be made to eradicate them; even so, it's clear that the Indians in particular are near the limit of their patience, and many other nations have been sending warships to the region.
Quite. If you're using modern lamps, 30W is ludicrously bright. If you're using old-fashioned incandescents, 30W is pathetically dim. Does such a thing as a 30W bulb actually exist in the world?
Thirty watt-hours is the amount of energy used to light a 30-watt bulb for one hour.
A 30W bulb? Wow. The room I'm in now is lit by a single 18W lamp and that's more than adequate. I realise that American homes tend to be more spacious, but seriously - 30W? How large are your rooms?
And because it is a criminal trial, prosecution can not come back with another case based on the same facts... so dropping the charges now has permanent impact.
Are they the same facts, though? Suppose I'm trying to convict a burglar, I turn up in court with evidence of his burglaries, and that evidence is ruled inadequate and he is acquitted; I cannot now convict him of those burglaries, double jeopardy and all. But he's a burglar, and afterwards he carries on in that line of work. I can gather evidence on his new burglaries, and make sure it's sound this time around.
Similarly, since TPB are certainly not going to stop linking to torrents, if they are acquitted here due to technical flaws in the prosecution's evidence, then they can't be charged again over those particular torrents - but new ones are published every day, and the prosecution could try again with a different set of specific torrents, and with more complete evidence.
Mind you the chances that we will be in the near vicinity of a civilization that communicates by radio waves that we can pick up is possibly quite slim- we've only been doing it for less than a hundred years.
And how much longer are we going to be doing it, with everything converging onto the Internet? If the earth lights up as a radio source in the early 20th century, but has gone dark again by the dawn of the 22nd because almost everything is now connected to fibre, what hope is there for SETI?
Bands such as the Beatles would never happen today because the record companies only want to pay a solo artist, such as Britney Spears.
* flips through the NME *
Four white guys with guitars and drums... four more white guys with guitars and drums... another Caucasian quartet based around percussion and strings... hey, wow, I haven't heard of these guys before, they're an indie band consisting of four white guys with guitars and drums!
How else, the Communists argued, would progress be possible if you couldn't better yourself in life and pass on those traits to your children? If everyone just started over a blank slate at birth, wouldn't it be just a big wash where nobody ever improved?
That sounds like a very bourgeois attitude. If the rich man passes on his riches to his son, then the rich man's son has an unearned advantage over the poor man's son. That's how it is done in the imperialist nations. Under Communism, comrades, we must abolish the inequitable capitalist ideologies of inherited wealth, and give all free workers an equal chance to achieve their Socialist goals!
He said a comet impact of a similar scale to the one that wiped out over 2,000 square kilometres of forest at Tunguska in Siberia was a "one-in-10-million-year event"
That strikes me as dubious. Way too long. Tunguska was a relatively small impact, comparable to a decent-sized H-bomb; the figures I've heard bandied around for how frequently those can be expected are typically two or three centuries between events.
while a continent destroying impact was a one-in-60-million-year event.
That makes more sense. The last of these would have been 65 million years ago in the Yucatan.
Just what are the "other" impact hazards? I'm very curious about this.
Asteroids.
Asteroids orbit nearer the Sun, and many of them have paths that cross Earth's orbit quite frequently. They're a menace all right, but a menace that can be mapped and measured. Comets on the other hand have long, highly elliptical orbits that carry them far from the Sun. Though any given comet won't pass near the Earth anywhere near so often, they exist in colossal numbers, and for all we know one could come barrelling out of the dark to kill us all next month. We could in principle track every rock of dangerous size in the inner solar system. We haven't a prayer of tracking all the comets.
Slashdot Mirror
Change in allele frequency over time? Fits perfectly. Resistance to disease is a big part of evolution you know. Consider the role of smallpox when humans of European descent were competing for resources with humans of American descent. And in a population where narcotic addiction is a significant killer, resistance thereto will be favoured by natural selection.
As humans, we do not deal with environmental pressures.
So all humans are equally successful at propagating their genes, regardless of their particular personal traits and environment? Or do some traits prosper better in some environments, and not in others? If so, then we're dealing with environmental pressures.
In a flock of one thousand gulls, one who is just a bit faster or has better eyesight or whatever is going to have a notable advantage at staying alive, and will be adept at outcompeting his peers. In a flock of one hundred thousand, his genetic advantages are barely a drop in a bucket, and for every gull chick produced from his loins, fifty thousand other "lesser" gulls are born. We're a population of nearly seven billion and aren't really constrained by geographic considerations anymore either. Tomorrow's superchild's signal will get completely drowned out by the noise of the slavering, drooling masses around him.
It was originally thought this was a problem with the theory. Since then, we've discovered something called 'genetics'. This tells us that traits are not infinitely divisible; in the end, you either have a gene or you don't, you can't have half a gene. That means a new beneficial trait cannot be swamped by the size of the gene pool. If the mutant gull's variation is truly beneficial, then it will have more young than the rest, and they will carry the gene. They in turn will also have more children than the rest, and pass the gene on again. Interbreeding with the rest of the population spreads the gene all the faster. Eventually it will become almost universal - work it out, beginning with a population of 2 mutants growing at 6% per generation and a population of 200,000 normals growing at 5% per generation, they become even in 1,215 generations. A larger population means it will take a little longer to get there, but also means there are more chances for the mutation to arise in the first place. If the supermen have more children than the proles, then their genes will spread throughout the population as a whole; if they do not, then they go extinct. That's evolution.
I think the current euphemism is 'enhanced interrogation'.
I'd be interested to see any ancient religious text that endorses the concept of copyright. Remember that these came out of mostly illiterate cultures in which songs and stories were memorised by bards and minstrels and suchlike and performed publicly by them without any effort to send money to the author or his heirs. The nearest I can think of is the story that Prometheus stole fire from the gods to give it to Man, even though the gods still had their fire and Prometheus had really copied the gods' fire; that could be read as equating copying without permission of the originator with stealing. But it's a hell of a stretch.
Impressive list. So what have you been up to in the last ten years?
Yes. I thought that was obvious; certainly it was the entire point of my post. Perhaps I overestimated my audience... The idea was that every time anybody posts any kind of howto for modifying a Linux system which involves the issuing of terminal commands or editing values in /etc/somethingorother, some troll posts something along those lines explaining that such command-line shenanigans mean that Linux is not ready for the desktop, that it is necessary to design a system such that 'Grandma', whoever she may be, can set it up with a single click and needs never concern herself with such esoterica, and implies that some other system such as Windows meets these criteria. Hence I thought it amusing to echo those familiar posts now that it seems it is necessary to do the very same in Windows that we commonly do in Unix-like systems.
It seems I aimed too high. Irony's maybe a bit much for some people, I can see that, OK. Not to worry, I can dumb it down if you like. Knock Knock jokes, maybe?
There's always AbiWord or OpenOffice.org. Determining to use only free software is admirable; refusing to use de-facto standard non-free document formats when they are very well understood by mature free applications, well, that's just masochism. Publish your own materials in free formats by all means, but if free software is capable of deciphering non-free formats sent to you by others then one shouldn't make too much of a fuss over the principle. Strict in what you send, tolerant in what you receive, that's the ticket.
The average end-user doesn't want to have to open registry editors and manually modify esoteric values in obscure text configuration files. No matter how much hobbyists and enthusiasts wish otherwise, until there's an idiot-proof GUI that makes all of this happen in a single click, Windows will never be ready for the mainstream desktop.
Yes, they are. And yes, this is unbelievably stupid.
Guys? A clue for you. You've got me paying for music again. The Napster generation, the whole Gen-Y pirate crowd, people who habitually download entire band discographies from The Pirate Bay - these people are falling over themselves to pay you well in excess of the iTunes price per track, because you've made it interactive, you've made it cool. You've worked out how to sell music in the 21st century, and now you're about to break it. Unbelievable.
The premise is stupid, but not for that reason. The Chinese Army can't attack the UK - there's an awful lot of Russia in the way for a start, and at the time that film came out I'm not sure there was any British soldier within a thousand miles of China (Hong Kong I think had already been returned). I don't think either air force would have the range to reach the adversary. The Chinese Navy would end up playing the game of spot-the-submarine, and they'd probably do about as well as did the captain of the General Belgrano, and then bugger off back to port; not that this would much advantage the Royal Navy, who probably wouldn't want to park carriers off the Chinese coast because they know perfectly well about Exocets and the Chinese likely have plenty of home-grown or Soviet-derived equivalents.
The only way that the UK and China could do each other serious military damage would be by ICBM. And it would take an awful lot more than a Bond villain's crappy plot for them to go that far.
I'm pretty sure it's actually been done; I'd have to pore through Crypto-Gram back issues to find the reference though. The key here is that there are characteristic delays between clicks that depend on the distance between keys, there are subtle differences in pitch, things like that. The spacebar sounds very different, and so does Backspace. Gather a large enough record of clicks from the same typist and it just becomes a matter of statistics, and you can often extract quite a bit of the text.
Of course if you have such a cunningly placed listening device you're probably better off just monitoring conversations between the typist and his co-workers, but I think this one was done as a Cool Hack rather than as a practical feat of espionage.
It's a netbook. It only has 1GiB of RAM.
And if you're the kind of person who opens up and upgrades portables, you're perfectly capable of changing the kernel. In fact I bet the first thing you did on delivery of the computer was wipe it and install your favourite distro, wasn't it? So I don't really see that this is a major problem.
I understand it works out of the box for the original Eee, but for the 901 - and presumably the closely related 1000 - neither wired nor wireless networking work. You'll need to install a custom kernel to get those going. Otherwise, everything's fine here.
At 5% inflation per annum, the price of a budget game today should be £7.96 if it was £3 twenty years ago. But comparing to the Wii is unfair; no Wii game is more than two years old, whereas in 1989 the Spectrum had a library going back almost a decade, and the older games made up the 'budget' category. So take a look instead at older PS2 or PC games. How much can you get those for? Pretty much every games store has a rack of budget PC games going for about a fiver.
Sealand has never quite provoked Britain badly enough to be invaded. The military cost of annexing Sealand would be trivial; the problem would be the legal situation. It could be argued that Britain has implicitly recognised Sealand in the past; for a start, there was a court decision in 1968 that Sealand was outside British jurisdiction, which was cited ten years later by the British government as a reason to do nothing about a German being held prisoner in Sealand after a failed coup d'etat.
It would take months to sort out, and be the most spectacular media circus in the meantime. Awfully embarrassing. And then there's the PR end of things. You'd need sound propaganda to paint the Sealanders as, oh, a bunch of crazed armed thugs on an old sea fort with a habit of taking pot shots at passing ships - otherwise you'd look the most awful bully, sending the SBS or someone to take over the smallest country in the world.
If shooting at the Royal Navy didn't do it, I doubt running a pirate BitTorrent tracker service out of Sealand would be sufficient provocation for a British invasion to go ahead. After all, the place was founded by a pirate radio operator in the first place, it would only be in keeping with proud Sealand tradition. I suspect British policy is simply to quietly ignore the entire thing and wait for Prince Roy to die, or at least grow old enough to want to live somewhere slightly more comfortable - and then demolish the place once it's abandoned.
What's a Nepalese Bull Terrier like?
The Somali pirates have been getting bolder lately. Nowadays they set out in large ships with long range, and deploy short-range fast craft from that mothership to launch the actual attack. The Sirius Star was halfway to Madagascar when it was taken.
Still, the reason pirates flourish in Somalia is that it is an anarchy close to a major shipping route. Although there are plenty of nations in the region with weak governments, I don't think there's any outright anarchic state in the Caribbean that might form a pirate haven. And, as you say, it would be a bold pirate who operated in the back yard of the US Navy. The Gulf of Aden isn't any great power's particular patch, and hasn't been since the fall of the Empire; the same cannot be said for the Caribbean. So far the Somali pirates haven't upset any major power badly enough for a serious effort to be made to eradicate them; even so, it's clear that the Indians in particular are near the limit of their patience, and many other nations have been sending warships to the region.
Quite. If you're using modern lamps, 30W is ludicrously bright. If you're using old-fashioned incandescents, 30W is pathetically dim. Does such a thing as a 30W bulb actually exist in the world?
A 30W bulb? Wow. The room I'm in now is lit by a single 18W lamp and that's more than adequate. I realise that American homes tend to be more spacious, but seriously - 30W? How large are your rooms?
Are they the same facts, though? Suppose I'm trying to convict a burglar, I turn up in court with evidence of his burglaries, and that evidence is ruled inadequate and he is acquitted; I cannot now convict him of those burglaries, double jeopardy and all. But he's a burglar, and afterwards he carries on in that line of work. I can gather evidence on his new burglaries, and make sure it's sound this time around.
Similarly, since TPB are certainly not going to stop linking to torrents, if they are acquitted here due to technical flaws in the prosecution's evidence, then they can't be charged again over those particular torrents - but new ones are published every day, and the prosecution could try again with a different set of specific torrents, and with more complete evidence.
And how much longer are we going to be doing it, with everything converging onto the Internet? If the earth lights up as a radio source in the early 20th century, but has gone dark again by the dawn of the 22nd because almost everything is now connected to fibre, what hope is there for SETI?
* flips through the NME *
Four white guys with guitars and drums... four more white guys with guitars and drums... another Caucasian quartet based around percussion and strings... hey, wow, I haven't heard of these guys before, they're an indie band consisting of four white guys with guitars and drums!
That sounds like a very bourgeois attitude. If the rich man passes on his riches to his son, then the rich man's son has an unearned advantage over the poor man's son. That's how it is done in the imperialist nations. Under Communism, comrades, we must abolish the inequitable capitalist ideologies of inherited wealth, and give all free workers an equal chance to achieve their Socialist goals!
Can't be. There's only one promotion left for Jack Ryan, and Darth Ratzinger got in first.
That strikes me as dubious. Way too long. Tunguska was a relatively small impact, comparable to a decent-sized H-bomb; the figures I've heard bandied around for how frequently those can be expected are typically two or three centuries between events.
while a continent destroying impact was a one-in-60-million-year event.
That makes more sense. The last of these would have been 65 million years ago in the Yucatan.
Asteroids.
Asteroids orbit nearer the Sun, and many of them have paths that cross Earth's orbit quite frequently. They're a menace all right, but a menace that can be mapped and measured. Comets on the other hand have long, highly elliptical orbits that carry them far from the Sun. Though any given comet won't pass near the Earth anywhere near so often, they exist in colossal numbers, and for all we know one could come barrelling out of the dark to kill us all next month. We could in principle track every rock of dangerous size in the inner solar system. We haven't a prayer of tracking all the comets.