Because this is their chance to stick it to those evil evangelical Christian Republicans. Notice you didn't see a thread here encouraging people to ask Democrats: 'You claim to want to raise taxes on the rich to fund government programs, but government receipts are at an all time high. How much more money do you need? And more importantly, how much money do I need to make to be considered "rich"?' and 'Do you think that retreating from Al Qaeda is a good idea? Do you believe that there is Al Qaeda in Iraq today? What do you honestly believe will happen in Iraq if we pull out immediately, and do you care?'
And more to the point, because this site bills itself as a site carrying 'news for nerds' and so attracts an audience with a disproportionate interest in scientific issues. Taxation and terrorism are of merely mundane interest, and may perhaps qualify as 'stuff that matters', but really, who cares? We're dealing here with a central concept of science which is frequently undermined by political ideologies. That strikes close to the heart of many Slashdotters, to whom the progress of science and a rational understanding of the world are very important indeed.
Arguably the theory of evolution as regards macro evolution is NOT fact. Given currently available evidence it hasn't truly progressed beyond partially tested hypothesis. Micro-evolution, a.k.a. Natural Selection IS fact however.
Can you please clarify for the class what the difference between the two might be? Is it like the difference between 'micro-walking' that gets you to the corner shop, and 'macro-walking' that gets you to the next town?
There's a difference between being smart with some humility and getting in everyone's face telling them that you are smarter than them and that with only your help can humanity survive.
Running a country is a difficult job.
Would you prefer it done by:
(a) Someone smarter than you
(b) Someone stupider than you
They DIDN'T because they CAN'T, because JUST like in the SCO case, there IS NO INFRINGING CODE IN LINUX.
And even if there were, they STILL couldn't, because as a Linux distributor themselves Novell have put any code of theirs that is in Linux under the GPL.
Copyright isn't a problem; Novell are distributing Linux themselves under the GPL, which is all the licence anyone needs. Patents might be another matter... but if that particular balloon ever goes up then the American software industry will self-destruct in quarrelling over who infringed who. Not sure anyone wants to start that off.
'Big Blue' is a nickname for a well-known computer company called 'IBM'. This company designed, built and programmed a computer called 'Deep Blue', which then beat a man called 'Garry Kasparov' at a game called 'chess'. So now you know.
After it was discovered that IBM was tinkering using chess experts (that is, humans) to tinker with its software between matches, they're personae non gratae in the chess world now.
I assume then that human chess masters are kept sequestered and incommunicado between matches, to prevent them cheating by consulting other players and discussing their opponent and how best to beat them?
Bear in mind that this self-validating conclusion comes from Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe who is intimately tied to the theory of panspermia.
Bear in mind also that Wickramsinghe is intimately tied to the whole Hoyle cosmology. Fred Hoyle never accepted the Big Bang model, and to the end of his days maintained the Steady State universe, which is infinitely old and maintained against entropy and expansion by 'continuous creation'. In such a universe, panspermia has colossal advantages - the origin of life can be as many vigintillions of years back as you like, and such vast timescales allow it to permeate every possible niche in the cosmos, even randomly drifting on ice slower than light. A steady state universe in which life has once arisen ought to be absolutely riddled with the stuff, so panspermia becomes a very viable model for how life began on Earth.
In a Universe which is only about three times older than the Earth, the advantage panspermia gives are substantially less; the range of worlds on which Earth life might have originated becomes reduced dramatically, and the depth of time since when life might have been spreading in the Universe is suddenly finite and short.
Even if the claim is true, we are just transferring the problem from how life originated on Earth? to How life originated in the universe?.
That makes a big difference, though. It's a question of probability. If life cannot spread through space, then it must have begun here of its own accord, and so we're looking for a theory that allows good odds that life will start on any planet chemically and environmentally favourable for it to do so. If life, once started somewhere in the Universe, can spread through space by natural means (i.e. without first needing to evolve intelligence and build starships), then we're allowed much longer odds, because of the far wider range of space and time. If you have a million worlds all rolling the dice on abiogenesis, you have far better chances than with only one.
Hardly. Adams' writings are more consistent, structured, and believable than Hubbard's.
What nonsense. Adams changed the whole story substantially every few years. The radio told one story, then the record told another, then the books told yet another, and then there was the other version of which we do not speak for horror at the memory of the Babel Fish Puzzle, and then there was the TV series...
Oh wait, hang on. That only qualifies the saga all the more for religious status:-)
For nurds like me, this is like finding the Holy Grail
If you're going to emphasise a word in bold, you really ought to take care to spell it correctly. Especially when it's right there in the site title at the top of every page.
The upshot of this is that the ISPs are peering with the BBC so they don't get complaints from customers that one of the biggest sites in the world is slow or have to pay over the odds to an upstream provider and the BBC is peering with ISPs to make sure that they don't get hit with a bill for the 10s of Gbps of bandwidth they have available to them.
It occurs to me that, if anything, the ISPs should be paying the BBC. They should cough up for the privilege of being able to provide BBC services to their customers, in the same way that Virgin were recently asked to pay for the privilege of being able to provide Sky channels to their customers. They wouldn't like the alternative: try explaining to your customers why they can't get the BBC website, while Mr Jones next door using a rival ISP can, and see how long they're still your customers.
Hrm... can anybody find more information about this program
They seem to be fond of the Have I Got News For You missing words round. From their campaign against Cosmopolitan:
"The night I got my promotion, my girlfriend said she was going to xxxxx all night."
"There's something so taboo about giving a girl xxxxx."
"This chick leaned against the dresser and xxxxx. I obliged. .."
"My girl xxxxx in a semi-public place. The risk...triggers an insane orgasm."
"I go wild when a girl xxxxx the xxxxx of my xxxxx while running her nails xxxxx."
Actually, that last one probably turns me on more than it would if they'd left the actual words in. Leaving something to the imagination works:-)
When a retired law enforcement agent, now a consultant for MIM, went to this website and clicked the word "Cunnilingus," he observed. . . a photo that "depicted a naked female lying on her back with her right leg lifted near her right breast as a male engaged in oral/vaginal sex upon her genitals"... Some may call that "Adult Sex Ed," but we call it "pornography."
Er, actually, we call it 'cunnilingus'. Which is why it was displayed when he clicked the word 'cunnilingus'. What was he expecting to see behind a link to 'cunnilingus' - Sydney Opera House? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Great herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain?
You are accepting the answers realclimate.org provides as absolute truth. Guess what? That's also a politically motivated site. They are not interested in trying to present all the information of GW, they are interested in pushing the case that it is real and humans are causing it.
I am confused here. Which of the statements made by the grandparent do you think are incorrect? Are you claiming that human activity does not release more carbon dioxide than volcanic activity? Or are you just denigrating the source, in the hope that nobody will notice your total failure to address the facts themselves?
Yeah, you'd think having a 250-foot tall robot would be cool but the damn thing needs an extension cord and the battery only works for five minutes.
Damn silly system, that, born of government pork spending and design by committee. Build a proper robot instead - pack a bloody nuclear reactor onboard, it'll keep running forever off that.
I'd also recommend that admin passwords to the thing's main computer not be dictionary words, and be longer than three characters. Just a security precaution.
Germany had a huge, well-equipped veteran army, a long record of successful conquests, a credible plan of attack, overwhelming air support, and an enemy who was wholly unprepared.
Given the likelihood that SCO executives were just hoping to get bought out and cash in their stock options, this isn't WW2. This is 'The Mouse That Roared'. Except rather less funny.
Thorium good, but if possible, fusion even better.
If you want to see thorium-fuelled fission reactors in operation, you'll probably want to go to India. They're sitting on about a quarter of the world's thorium supply, and quite reasonably think that they ought to get some use out of the stuff.
Could you fill me in on just what systems make lots of countries capable of delivering munitions to the moon?
A W88 warhead masses something like 360kg. A Saturn V rocket was capable of sending 47,000kg to the Moon, or 118,000kg to Low Earth Orbit. Assuming linear scaling, to get a payload of 360kg to the Moon would require an LEO capacity of some 900kg. Such capacity is available to the US, Europe, Russia, China, India... basically, anyone who's remotely likely ever to want to nuke a target on the Moon is capable of doing so.
As for anyone who positions themselves on the moon - well they sit at the top of a large gravity well. I think you might want to consider this a bit more.
A self-sufficient moonbase would be a fearsome adversary indeed. Given some form of cargo launcher - a railgun would do nicely - they could fling rocks at any target on Earth, which would strike at escape velocity. Nasty. I am not certain, however, of the strategic utility of this weapon. It would take a couple of days for the rocks to arrive, by which time their intended victims would surely have nuked the crap out of the aggressor's targets on Earth. It would make a decent deterrent - an enemy might take out all your assets on Earth, but nothing could reach the Moon quickly enough to prevent retaliation - but it's no First Strike weapon.
the U.S., which I honestly believe is no longer capable of carrying out a project like this
The project is to survey from orbit, and to explore with rovers on the ground, the Moon. The US is doing the very same right now - except on Mars.
The only component of the project the US has not already performed is the robot sample return. NASA have never bothered with robots returning tiny samples; they seem to rub along somehow with the six massive shovel-loads of Moon rock brought back by Apollo.
Slashdot Mirror
And more to the point, because this site bills itself as a site carrying 'news for nerds' and so attracts an audience with a disproportionate interest in scientific issues. Taxation and terrorism are of merely mundane interest, and may perhaps qualify as 'stuff that matters', but really, who cares? We're dealing here with a central concept of science which is frequently undermined by political ideologies. That strikes close to the heart of many Slashdotters, to whom the progress of science and a rational understanding of the world are very important indeed.
Can you please clarify for the class what the difference between the two might be? Is it like the difference between 'micro-walking' that gets you to the corner shop, and 'macro-walking' that gets you to the next town?
Running a country is a difficult job.
Would you prefer it done by:
(a) Someone smarter than you
(b) Someone stupider than you
But how can you be so sure that's due to atheistic gravity, and not Intelligent Falling?
And even if there were, they STILL couldn't, because as a Linux distributor themselves Novell have put any code of theirs that is in Linux under the GPL.
Copyright isn't a problem; Novell are distributing Linux themselves under the GPL, which is all the licence anyone needs. Patents might be another matter... but if that particular balloon ever goes up then the American software industry will self-destruct in quarrelling over who infringed who. Not sure anyone wants to start that off.
'Big Blue' is a nickname for a well-known computer company called 'IBM'. This company designed, built and programmed a computer called 'Deep Blue', which then beat a man called 'Garry Kasparov' at a game called 'chess'. So now you know.
I assume then that human chess masters are kept sequestered and incommunicado between matches, to prevent them cheating by consulting other players and discussing their opponent and how best to beat them?
Panspermia: When God masturbates. Ev-e-ry sperm is sa-cred! Ev-e-ry sperm is gre-e-e-at!
Bear in mind also that Wickramsinghe is intimately tied to the whole Hoyle cosmology. Fred Hoyle never accepted the Big Bang model, and to the end of his days maintained the Steady State universe, which is infinitely old and maintained against entropy and expansion by 'continuous creation'. In such a universe, panspermia has colossal advantages - the origin of life can be as many vigintillions of years back as you like, and such vast timescales allow it to permeate every possible niche in the cosmos, even randomly drifting on ice slower than light. A steady state universe in which life has once arisen ought to be absolutely riddled with the stuff, so panspermia becomes a very viable model for how life began on Earth.
In a Universe which is only about three times older than the Earth, the advantage panspermia gives are substantially less; the range of worlds on which Earth life might have originated becomes reduced dramatically, and the depth of time since when life might have been spreading in the Universe is suddenly finite and short.
That makes a big difference, though. It's a question of probability. If life cannot spread through space, then it must have begun here of its own accord, and so we're looking for a theory that allows good odds that life will start on any planet chemically and environmentally favourable for it to do so. If life, once started somewhere in the Universe, can spread through space by natural means (i.e. without first needing to evolve intelligence and build starships), then we're allowed much longer odds, because of the far wider range of space and time. If you have a million worlds all rolling the dice on abiogenesis, you have far better chances than with only one.
What nonsense. Adams changed the whole story substantially every few years. The radio told one story, then the record told another, then the books told yet another, and then there was the other version of which we do not speak for horror at the memory of the Babel Fish Puzzle, and then there was the TV series...
Oh wait, hang on. That only qualifies the saga all the more for religious status :-)
I am lost in a maze of twisty little GOTO, all alike...
If you're going to emphasise a word in bold, you really ought to take care to spell it correctly. Especially when it's right there in the site title at the top of every page.
It occurs to me that, if anything, the ISPs should be paying the BBC. They should cough up for the privilege of being able to provide BBC services to their customers, in the same way that Virgin were recently asked to pay for the privilege of being able to provide Sky channels to their customers. They wouldn't like the alternative: try explaining to your customers why they can't get the BBC website, while Mr Jones next door using a rival ISP can, and see how long they're still your customers.
They seem to be fond of the Have I Got News For You missing words round. From their campaign against Cosmopolitan:
"The night I got my promotion, my girlfriend said she was going to xxxxx all night." ."
"There's something so taboo about giving a girl xxxxx."
"This chick leaned against the dresser and xxxxx. I obliged. .
"My girl xxxxx in a semi-public place. The risk...triggers an insane orgasm."
"I go wild when a girl xxxxx the xxxxx of my xxxxx while running her nails xxxxx."
Actually, that last one probably turns me on more than it would if they'd left the actual words in. Leaving something to the imagination works :-)
Er, actually, we call it 'cunnilingus'. Which is why it was displayed when he clicked the word 'cunnilingus'. What was he expecting to see behind a link to 'cunnilingus' - Sydney Opera House? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Great herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain?
I am confused here. Which of the statements made by the grandparent do you think are incorrect? Are you claiming that human activity does not release more carbon dioxide than volcanic activity? Or are you just denigrating the source, in the hope that nobody will notice your total failure to address the facts themselves?
Damn silly system, that, born of government pork spending and design by committee. Build a proper robot instead - pack a bloody nuclear reactor onboard, it'll keep running forever off that.
I'd also recommend that admin passwords to the thing's main computer not be dictionary words, and be longer than three characters. Just a security precaution.
Germany had a huge, well-equipped veteran army, a long record of successful conquests, a credible plan of attack, overwhelming air support, and an enemy who was wholly unprepared.
Given the likelihood that SCO executives were just hoping to get bought out and cash in their stock options, this isn't WW2. This is 'The Mouse That Roared'. Except rather less funny.
PJ's local pub?
If you want to see thorium-fuelled fission reactors in operation, you'll probably want to go to India. They're sitting on about a quarter of the world's thorium supply, and quite reasonably think that they ought to get some use out of the stuff.
Burn CDs, hand one out to everyone in the country, job done.
A W88 warhead masses something like 360kg. A Saturn V rocket was capable of sending 47,000kg to the Moon, or 118,000kg to Low Earth Orbit. Assuming linear scaling, to get a payload of 360kg to the Moon would require an LEO capacity of some 900kg. Such capacity is available to the US, Europe, Russia, China, India... basically, anyone who's remotely likely ever to want to nuke a target on the Moon is capable of doing so.
As for anyone who positions themselves on the moon - well they sit at the top of a large gravity well. I think you might want to consider this a bit more.
A self-sufficient moonbase would be a fearsome adversary indeed. Given some form of cargo launcher - a railgun would do nicely - they could fling rocks at any target on Earth, which would strike at escape velocity. Nasty. I am not certain, however, of the strategic utility of this weapon. It would take a couple of days for the rocks to arrive, by which time their intended victims would surely have nuked the crap out of the aggressor's targets on Earth. It would make a decent deterrent - an enemy might take out all your assets on Earth, but nothing could reach the Moon quickly enough to prevent retaliation - but it's no First Strike weapon.
The project is to survey from orbit, and to explore with rovers on the ground, the Moon. The US is doing the very same right now - except on Mars.
The only component of the project the US has not already performed is the robot sample return. NASA have never bothered with robots returning tiny samples; they seem to rub along somehow with the six massive shovel-loads of Moon rock brought back by Apollo.