The cost of high-bandwidth leased lines (T3, T1, OC3, etc) for business purposes is dropping. As the dot-bombs have fallen out the pod bay doors, there are more salesmen for fewer big-byte customers.
Home access prices have to go up to make up the difference in revenues - baby needs fresh minks, and the yacht would look better with new paint.
Note how broadband-only providers are not raising the rates as fast as AT&T and compadres. Yet.
The price will rise to whatever the market will bear...
What you are postulating as a universal principle is actually a specific feature of the American judicial system.
For example, in France, once charges are brought against you, you will be assumed guilty until you can prove your innocence. This system works fine for the French, and indeed it seems that a fair and evenhanded application of justice can proceed from either premise, if the rest of the rules are structured appropriately. (Slashdot frog-bashing will now once again begin.)
"Fairness" is served when the outcome of legal proceedings reflects justice tempered by an appropriate smidgen of mercy. The starting presupposition does not necessarily predicate the outcome, if the system works.
oil reserves are supposed to RUN OUT in 30, 40 years
Not quite. Oil demand will outstrip production in far less time, basically, because the presidents' chums, oops, I mean the righteous, god-fearing conservative oil barons, have no need to invest in capital improvements to the drilling and extraction infrastructure.
They will simply wait for the price to go through the roof due to scarcity, then the same assholes, oops, I meant anti-environmentalist oil-hogs that tend to infest slashdot, oops, I meant god-fearing righteous conservative citizens can complain about welfare mothers using up all the cheap oil while Congress votes in a massive government subsidy to get production back in gear.
That's how we're planning to play it out in the US, anyway, your mileage may vary.
Check out www.linuxbios.org and you'll see that you DON'T need a BIOS to run your OS. Since modern OSes don't use the BIOS anyway, you can replace it with your bootloader and boot your machine in less than 3 seconds.
The big beowulfs all seem to be moving to this method now (combined with wake-on-lan) to save power.
Perhaps calling the other guy a moron was a bit, um, premature?
...seeing as how he's a camel developer for Evolution. And the reason the RFCs are unreadable is because they use words like "pedagogical" (and byzantine grammatical structures) not because MIME is complicated.
Tons of interesting information and viewpoint. Thank you.
I would define Unix mail as mail (rfc822 format) downloaded and stored locally on a per-user basis. IMAP, Exchange, and other remote protocols are very different beasts.
I would define that as "home user" Email. Very specifically not corporate or academic strength.
I don't think "unix mail" is all that useful a handle, but if I was going to use it I'd be referring to mail that stayed on unix hosts - usually in mbox format - as opposed to mail downloaded to user PCs with unknown operating systems.
Corporations and other profit-making legal entities can't dedicate specific PCs to single users cost-effectively in most situations, and they certainly can't effectively manage storage and back-up email stores if the Email messages are scattered over many failure-prone end-user hard drives. IMAPv4 and whatever the proprietary boyz are shopping this week purposely keep the email on the server, so that evidence can be extracted (or destroyed, if you work for Enron) from server backups, and so that filtering and surveying of mail data is easily possible.
For example, some corporations sweep their drives for return & delivery receipts over a month old and delete them.
Another example, corporations doing highly sensitive government contracts will sweep their email stores for classified information leaks.
Another example, I need to get my Email regardless of whether I'm on my laptop at a remote site, at my desk in town, or at home tunneled through SSH. Downloading it to one of these boxes makes it inaccessable to the others.
The list goes on, but basically downloading email to a local drive is primarily for AOL users and basement hackers. That being the case, your points about maildir are excellent - let the filesystem handle most of the details. I'd add that if you must run a db for speed reasons (such as a subject line db used by an IMAP server) do it so that it can be deleted and/or recreated on the fly from the contents of the maildir. No need to create additional dependencies.
Motorola and 3com both sell cable modems specifically engineered for your situation. Sell or return your existing box and buy one. Your TV cable and the modem link will plug into one box, which will in turn connect via ethernet to a single PC, or to a cheap ethernet hub (or switch) which can then be connected to multiple PCs.
If you'd rather do it the hard way, get an old PC from the recycling bin (or some corporate dumpster) and run linux/IPtables or OpenBSD/packetfilter and use gated to manage the routing. The PC will be your router/firewall.
If you choose the second option, you are going to retain the linksys, so be sure to get the latest firmware download for it because those things are notoriously crackable. If you choose the first, be careful with the ethernet side of the cabling - you will need a different cable (a crossover or hub-to-hub cable) from a cable modemhub or switch than you would from the cable modemPC.
Oh, that's just because Birches like to hang together.
Re:i believe this outdates previous records
on
Faces from the Ice Age
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Perhaps some sort of protolanguage arose during this time. Intentional burials are the first evidence we have for any sort of symbolic act. These things all indicate the very beginnings of symbolic thought.
I'd say symbolic thought probably precedes the activity that makes it distinguishable (archeologically) by millenia. For example, gorillas and whales are believed to be able to grasp fairly abstract concepts, definitely including symbolic representation in the case of gorillas. Perhaps symbolic representation 60,000 years ago was ritually restricted to song cycles (not necessarily language-songs like Australian dreamwalk songs, but symbolic sounds like whalesong). Guesswork of this sort is fun, the paucity of the archeological record is what makes it interesting.
You must admit that, since we're talking about the very beginnings of symbolic thought (and that we, currently, are capable of language and symbolic thought far beyond this level) it's only appropriate to remind everyone here that these are not "people" we're talking about as we are people today.
I see your point although I don't really agree with it; I think proto-hominids were people in all the ways that I personally measure people today. That's not to say I don't realize they were different people (just like Bushmen are different from Boers) but rather that I'd have phrased the observation a bit differently myself. Thank you for amplifying your comments, it was very gracious of you.
Re:i believe this outdates previous records
on
Faces from the Ice Age
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
That early, people were not "people" as they are today.
Depending on how you meant that, it's either very obvious or it's a good example of the tendency to dehumanize other races and tribes. Would you care to elaborate?
It seems that capacity for symbolic representation began in the Upper Paleolithic
Unless the archeological record is incomplete. I think it's just as likely that earlier art did not survive - there has to be some upper limit to the shelf life of prehistoric art, so maybe that's the barrier we've found and it has nothing to do with hominid capacities at all.
I think you need a time machine to know for sure, but I'd like to hear the basis of your dating anyway!
Trees love CO2 (during daylight hours, that is) but hate gasoline engine exhausts. German super-diesels and biodiesel exhaust are better for them, naturlich.
Nonetheless, your post was once again funny as hell - I especially liked the Exxon reference. You go dude, I'd mod you up if I had points!
Yeah, I comprendo, those grapes were probably sour. Or some undeserving, lazy minority got them first?
I s'pose I shouldn't be replying to anonymous digs; the real Monday has probably been replaced by a troll toting a copy of "the Fountainhead". Hard to tell.
You're right, I'm not suprised that your responses have to be vetted by management. But, I'd love to know what guidelines IBM has for hackers' interaction with the rest of the GNU/Linux/Internet community. Are you allowed to criticise IBM management, or other IBM products, for example?
When you make a budget, always include a bogus item (example:.5 million paperclips) for the bean-counters to eliminate. Otherwise, they will cut something real. The beanie boys have to justify their existence by quantifying how much money they saved the company through budget analysis and streamlining.
When you lobby for something from the government, always extend your request well into the realm of the ludicrous. That gives the lawgivers something to eliminate, thus demonstrating their statesmanship, technical savvy and willingness to compromise.
So; if you want to pass a law requiring digital copyright protection in all computers, ask for digital copyright protection in toasters and vibrators too. Then weep crocodile tears when your real legislative objective becomes "a reasonable compromise between affected parties".
"You know, a DEAL deal. Maybe he's a republican!" -Crapgame (Don Rickles) in "Kelly's Heroes"
gravity will pull the probe to the bottom of the pocket, continuing to melt the ice underneath it (while the water at the top of the pocket will refreeze).
Only if the probe is really blazingly hot, I think. But won't the coupling of the water pocket to the surrounding ice bleed off the heat energy before the (less efficient) coupling between the (presumably solid) heater and the (solid) ice causes the ice to melt? If you try to put a skirt around the heat element, you won't get the thing to sink at all.
Try this experiment with your soldering iron: leave it turned up to highest setting resting point-downward on a block of lead. It will only sink a certain amount before the (efficient) liquid-coupled heat sink overwhelms the (less efficient) gravity-driven solid contact. On second thought, don't do the experiment, take my word for it. We really don't need to do such energy-wasteful experimentation, somebody just needs to explain this better than me.
Hopefully (I really don't know what insolation is available on Europa - the sun's pretty far off) we can get enough juice from solar panels to keep the probe insanely hot, thus allowing the "sinking bubble of water" concept to function. If not, we could still go with the nuke-plant idea but put it on the surface to avoid unnecessary risk of contaminating the inner sea.
Once the ice-melter gets down a ways (e.g. half a mile), I'd think that you'd have to worry about the ice above it freezing to the wire, thus preventing the ice-melter from burrowing any deeper.
I was figuring more like about four feet! But, it doesn't matter as long as the unreeling spool is on the probe and not on the surface. The line will serve for communication from the probe, too, and freezing it in solid will protect it from the inevitable terrorist attacks.
My linux laptop is a Toshiba P-166 and it runs as fast as my Windows P3 desktop for nearly all everyday tasks (email, text editing, doc prep, etc.).
Plus I can run snort, etherape, lophtcrack, all kindsa nifty network stuff on the laptop's 3com PCMCIA interface if I need to. Not as fast as on a real laptop, but I got this one from the recycling bin at Pigeon Point so what the hell.
Seems like if they could make the probe kinda warm it would eventually sink through any amount of ice.
Given an infinite amount of heat energy, sure. But if the probe's just "kinda warm", it will merely create a stable pocket of water around itself. The water will never get significantly above 32 degrees (F) ya know.
Eventually the area of the boundary between the liquid pocket and the surrounding ice will be sufficent that you'll be losing heat faster than you're putting it in - unless you are talking a lot more heat than "kinda warm" - the kind of heat we might refer to as "unbelieveably blazing hot consuming titanic amounts of energy".
Hey, how 'bout this: Leave a solar array on the surface, make the submersible part as small as possible (camera, heat elements, and spool of fine wire). Then you can power the heater electrically from a wire you unwind as your blazing hot ice-melter sinks.
You heard it first on Slashdot! (Of course, I *am* a former rocket scientist, so we might be cheating)....
Heh, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest" - have I dated myself better now?
I didn't say you never needed a handout, I said (cut'n'pasted quote)you've never had to look far for a handout. Comprendez, or did too much tax-subsidized education curdle your brain? Making businesses pay taxes to support the environment that makes their profits possible is not facism by any real definition of the word (except Brezhnev's, where facism means "anything you don't like"). If you want to make a less inane criticism, complain about the socialist police state, not a mythical facist welfare state.
God, I've never felt like a troll before. Guess I'll have to dye my hair blue and go live under a bridge! And you can go pull the beam out of your eye.
Joe 90 year old president of large corporation didn't get where he is without doing research before making strategic business moves
Uh, that'd be nice if we had a meritocracy, or even a well-regulated capitalism.
Unfortunately, Joe 90 year old usually got where he is because he had the family influence and inherited wealth to buy his way to the top. Laissez-faire capitalism favors those who already have the capital, and the entrenched wealth tends to nepotism regardless of ability. Government corruption and incompetence in regulated capitalisms can lead to equally bad outcomes.
Not that I'm against capitalism, you understand; it's much more successful in large economies than any alternatives available.
I'm just pointing out the realities of current (American, at least) business practices. I don't have any sympathy for the stupid gits either; hey, maybe this sort of thing will introduce a little Darwinian selection on the hereditary CEO class.
The genetic code is understood perfectly well: we know exactly how bases map to codons map to amino acids, and we've known for over 40 years. The mechanisms of DNA replication and transcription are also understood to exsquisite detail, as is the mechanism of translation from mRNA to protein.
If this is true, you will be able to explain the algorithm controlling the spindle-structures that reorder subroutines during meosis.
If you can do so, and link to proof, you should publish a book too!
Let me highlight some of your comment to make my point:
. If you measure a meteorite sample and it's similar in isotope ratios to that of mercury, you can reasonably conclude that the sample probbably came from mercury. If you do further analysis and find many other isotope ratios that are the same as they are on mercury, it becomes increasingly likely that your rock is really from mercury. This is not pseudo-science at all, though from reading the article the hypothesis that the rock is from mercury is still pretty tentative.
You see, you're not committing the error I'm harping on. You described a hypothesis as likely, which is appropriate given your understanding of the data. You haven't stated a tentative hypothesis as though it were a known fact, and you've given independently verifiable background information to support your theories.
A creationist (one of those people who thinks G-d likes to torment his creations by playing tricks on them) would say that the rock was composed as it is in order to test the faithful. This worldview is as internally consistent as your own, and it's even harder to refute.
A person who believes in an unbounded universe could point out, postulating that infinity is real and not a mathematical conceit, that the rock could've come from a mercury-like planet in another galaxy, and the circumstances of it's transit here caused it to arrive at a time and place consistent with rocks being ejected from Mercury. Again, this is a difficult argument to comprehensively refute, since the concept of infinity expressed as a physical construct requires all things to exist.
But regardless of which religion or philosophy one chooses, stating that it's from Mercury because Mercury is (astronomically speaking) close by and rocks on mercury are identical in composition is simply invoking the time-worn laws of similarity and contagion - the same laws behind the construction of voodoo dolls.
Anyone really capable of deeper comprehension than these surface issues will use less absolute terms - as you did, in your post. Tying the origin of rock samples to certain planets on the basis of isotope composition is logically weak, and thus should always be stated equivocally.
I wasn't trying to say that scientific peer review is anything like a jury trial. Maybe that's how some people see it - but a jury trial can convince a judge to send you to the electric chair, while scientific peer review can only make you wish you'd been sent there.
Heh. Sadly, I have to admin several humongeous HP-UX boxes. Vendors of turn-key systems love HP-UX because it rarely changes in any significant way; they can concentrate on adding features to their products instead of trying to keep up with improvements in the underlying operating system. Big improvements in an OS frequently break applications - ask the people who try to keep up with Microsoft, for example, or linux (wait, I just finished porting to IPchains and now I gotta do IPtables? Wah!).
I'm not kidding when I say there are patches to HP's NFS just about weekly. Sometimes they hit four or five bugs in a single week, so they can wait a week for the next ONC/NFS Cumulative Patch Release.
The best thing about HP-UX is the Veritas file system, which (obviously) HP is in no way responsible for. Other than that it's an incredibly weak and old-fashioned OS (list your favorite bug - how about the way the standard backup utilities corrupt and/or delete their lame implementation of ACLs?). That HP/Compaq is discontinuing DEC's unix for this crap is a sad commentary on their business model.
Gotta go now, HP-UX's NFS just suddenly decided all its (already mounted) volumes are read-only and the users are freaking out.
Slashdot Mirror
The cost of high-bandwidth leased lines (T3, T1, OC3, etc) for business purposes is dropping. As the dot-bombs have fallen out the pod bay doors, there are more salesmen for fewer big-byte customers.
Home access prices have to go up to make up the difference in revenues - baby needs fresh minks, and the yacht would look better with new paint.
Note how broadband-only providers are not raising the rates as fast as AT&T and compadres. Yet.
The price will rise to whatever the market will bear...
What you are postulating as a universal principle is actually a specific feature of the American judicial system.
For example, in France, once charges are brought against you, you will be assumed guilty until you can prove your innocence. This system works fine for the French, and indeed it seems that a fair and evenhanded application of justice can proceed from either premise, if the rest of the rules are structured appropriately. (Slashdot frog-bashing will now once again begin.)
"Fairness" is served when the outcome of legal proceedings reflects justice tempered by an appropriate smidgen of mercy. The starting presupposition does not necessarily predicate the outcome, if the system works.
They will simply wait for the price to go through the roof due to scarcity, then the same assholes, oops, I meant anti-environmentalist oil-hogs that tend to infest slashdot, oops, I meant god-fearing righteous conservative citizens can complain about welfare mothers using up all the cheap oil while Congress votes in a massive government subsidy to get production back in gear.
That's how we're planning to play it out in the US, anyway, your mileage may vary.
Check out www.linuxbios.org and you'll see that you DON'T need a BIOS to run your OS. Since modern OSes don't use the BIOS anyway, you can replace it with your bootloader and boot your machine in less than 3 seconds.
The big beowulfs all seem to be moving to this method now (combined with wake-on-lan) to save power.
Perhaps calling the other guy a moron was a bit, um, premature?
...seeing as how he's a camel developer for Evolution. And the reason the RFCs are unreadable is because they use words like "pedagogical" (and byzantine grammatical structures) not because MIME is complicated.
I don't think "unix mail" is all that useful a handle, but if I was going to use it I'd be referring to mail that stayed on unix hosts - usually in mbox format - as opposed to mail downloaded to user PCs with unknown operating systems.
Corporations and other profit-making legal entities can't dedicate specific PCs to single users cost-effectively in most situations, and they certainly can't effectively manage storage and back-up email stores if the Email messages are scattered over many failure-prone end-user hard drives. IMAPv4 and whatever the proprietary boyz are shopping this week purposely keep the email on the server, so that evidence can be extracted (or destroyed, if you work for Enron) from server backups, and so that filtering and surveying of mail data is easily possible.
For example, some corporations sweep their drives for return & delivery receipts over a month old and delete them.
Another example, corporations doing highly sensitive government contracts will sweep their email stores for classified information leaks.
Another example, I need to get my Email regardless of whether I'm on my laptop at a remote site, at my desk in town, or at home tunneled through SSH. Downloading it to one of these boxes makes it inaccessable to the others.
The list goes on, but basically downloading email to a local drive is primarily for AOL users and basement hackers. That being the case, your points about maildir are excellent - let the filesystem handle most of the details. I'd add that if you must run a db for speed reasons (such as a subject line db used by an IMAP server) do it so that it can be deleted and/or recreated on the fly from the contents of the maildir. No need to create additional dependencies.
Motorola and 3com both sell cable modems specifically engineered for your situation. Sell or return your existing box and buy one. Your TV cable and the modem link will plug into one box, which will in turn connect via ethernet to a single PC, or to a cheap ethernet hub (or switch) which can then be connected to multiple PCs.
If you'd rather do it the hard way, get an old PC from the recycling bin (or some corporate dumpster) and run linux/IPtables or OpenBSD/packetfilter and use gated to manage the routing. The PC will be your router/firewall.
If you choose the second option, you are going to retain the linksys, so be sure to get the latest firmware download for it because those things are notoriously crackable. If you choose the first, be careful with the ethernet side of the cabling - you will need a different cable (a crossover or hub-to-hub cable) from a cable modemhub or switch than you would from the cable modemPC.
Oh, that's just because Birches like to hang together.
I think you need a time machine to know for sure, but I'd like to hear the basis of your dating anyway!
Trees love CO2 (during daylight hours, that is) but hate gasoline engine exhausts. German super-diesels and biodiesel exhaust are better for them, naturlich.
Nonetheless, your post was once again funny as hell - I especially liked the Exxon reference. You go dude, I'd mod you up if I had points!
Yeah, I comprendo, those grapes were probably sour. Or some undeserving, lazy minority got them first?
I s'pose I shouldn't be replying to anonymous digs; the real Monday has probably been replaced by a troll toting a copy of "the Fountainhead". Hard to tell.
You're right, I'm not suprised that your responses have to be vetted by management. But, I'd love to know what guidelines IBM has for hackers' interaction with the rest of the GNU/Linux/Internet community. Are you allowed to criticise IBM management, or other IBM products, for example?
When you make a budget, always include a bogus item (example: .5 million paperclips) for the bean-counters to eliminate. Otherwise, they will cut something real. The beanie boys have to justify their existence by quantifying how much money they saved the company through budget analysis and streamlining.
When you lobby for something from the government, always extend your request well into the realm of the ludicrous. That gives the lawgivers something to eliminate, thus demonstrating their statesmanship, technical savvy and willingness to compromise.
So; if you want to pass a law requiring digital copyright protection in all computers, ask for digital copyright protection in toasters and vibrators too. Then weep crocodile tears when your real legislative objective becomes "a reasonable compromise between affected parties".
"You know, a DEAL deal. Maybe he's a republican!" -Crapgame (Don Rickles) in "Kelly's Heroes"
10 imaginary points to you for noticing. I haven't actually earned much karma on these posts, though - I posted them at +1 to start with.
Try this experiment with your soldering iron: leave it turned up to highest setting resting point-downward on a block of lead. It will only sink a certain amount before the (efficient) liquid-coupled heat sink overwhelms the (less efficient) gravity-driven solid contact. On second thought, don't do the experiment, take my word for it. We really don't need to do such energy-wasteful experimentation, somebody just needs to explain this better than me.
Hopefully (I really don't know what insolation is available on Europa - the sun's pretty far off) we can get enough juice from solar panels to keep the probe insanely hot, thus allowing the "sinking bubble of water" concept to function. If not, we could still go with the nuke-plant idea but put it on the surface to avoid unnecessary risk of contaminating the inner sea.
I was figuring more like about four feet! But, it doesn't matter as long as the unreeling spool is on the probe and not on the surface. The line will serve for communication from the probe, too, and freezing it in solid will protect it from the inevitable terrorist attacks.
My linux laptop is a Toshiba P-166 and it runs as fast as my Windows P3 desktop for nearly all everyday tasks (email, text editing, doc prep, etc.).
Plus I can run snort, etherape, lophtcrack, all kindsa nifty network stuff on the laptop's 3com PCMCIA interface if I need to. Not as fast as on a real laptop, but I got this one from the recycling bin at Pigeon Point so what the hell.
Given an infinite amount of heat energy, sure. But if the probe's just "kinda warm", it will merely create a stable pocket of water around itself. The water will never get significantly above 32 degrees (F) ya know.
Eventually the area of the boundary between the liquid pocket and the surrounding ice will be sufficent that you'll be losing heat faster than you're putting it in - unless you are talking a lot more heat than "kinda warm" - the kind of heat we might refer to as "unbelieveably blazing hot consuming titanic amounts of energy".
Hey, how 'bout this: Leave a solar array on the surface, make the submersible part as small as possible (camera, heat elements, and spool of fine wire). Then you can power the heater electrically from a wire you unwind as your blazing hot ice-melter sinks.
You heard it first on Slashdot! (Of course, I *am* a former rocket scientist, so we might be cheating)....
Heh, "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest" - have I dated myself better now?
I didn't say you never needed a handout, I said (cut'n'pasted quote)you've never had to look far for a handout. Comprendez, or did too much tax-subsidized education curdle your brain? Making businesses pay taxes to support the environment that makes their profits possible is not facism by any real definition of the word (except Brezhnev's, where facism means "anything you don't like"). If you want to make a less inane criticism, complain about the socialist police state, not a mythical facist welfare state.
God, I've never felt like a troll before. Guess I'll have to dye my hair blue and go live under a bridge! And you can go pull the beam out of your eye.
I just want to live up to your so-elegantly stated expectations... your mastery of the language is impressive!
Unfortunately, Joe 90 year old usually got where he is because he had the family influence and inherited wealth to buy his way to the top. Laissez-faire capitalism favors those who already have the capital, and the entrenched wealth tends to nepotism regardless of ability. Government corruption and incompetence in regulated capitalisms can lead to equally bad outcomes.
Not that I'm against capitalism, you understand; it's much more successful in large economies than any alternatives available.
I'm just pointing out the realities of current (American, at least) business practices. I don't have any sympathy for the stupid gits either; hey, maybe this sort of thing will introduce a little Darwinian selection on the hereditary CEO class.
If you can do so, and link to proof, you should publish a book too!
You see, you're not committing the error I'm harping on. You described a hypothesis as likely, which is appropriate given your understanding of the data. You haven't stated a tentative hypothesis as though it were a known fact, and you've given independently verifiable background information to support your theories.
A creationist (one of those people who thinks G-d likes to torment his creations by playing tricks on them) would say that the rock was composed as it is in order to test the faithful. This worldview is as internally consistent as your own, and it's even harder to refute.
A person who believes in an unbounded universe could point out, postulating that infinity is real and not a mathematical conceit, that the rock could've come from a mercury-like planet in another galaxy, and the circumstances of it's transit here caused it to arrive at a time and place consistent with rocks being ejected from Mercury. Again, this is a difficult argument to comprehensively refute, since the concept of infinity expressed as a physical construct requires all things to exist.
But regardless of which religion or philosophy one chooses, stating that it's from Mercury because Mercury is (astronomically speaking) close by and rocks on mercury are identical in composition is simply invoking the time-worn laws of similarity and contagion - the same laws behind the construction of voodoo dolls.
Anyone really capable of deeper comprehension than these surface issues will use less absolute terms - as you did, in your post. Tying the origin of rock samples to certain planets on the basis of isotope composition is logically weak, and thus should always be stated equivocally.
Well, you've overextended my analogy (metaphor?).
I wasn't trying to say that scientific peer review is anything like a jury trial. Maybe that's how some people see it - but a jury trial can convince a judge to send you to the electric chair, while scientific peer review can only make you wish you'd been sent there.
Heh. Sadly, I have to admin several humongeous HP-UX boxes. Vendors of turn-key systems love HP-UX because it rarely changes in any significant way; they can concentrate on adding features to their products instead of trying to keep up with improvements in the underlying operating system. Big improvements in an OS frequently break applications - ask the people who try to keep up with Microsoft, for example, or linux (wait, I just finished porting to IPchains and now I gotta do IPtables? Wah!).
I'm not kidding when I say there are patches to HP's NFS just about weekly. Sometimes they hit four or five bugs in a single week, so they can wait a week for the next ONC/NFS Cumulative Patch Release.
The best thing about HP-UX is the Veritas file system, which (obviously) HP is in no way responsible for. Other than that it's an incredibly weak and old-fashioned OS (list your favorite bug - how about the way the standard backup utilities corrupt and/or delete their lame implementation of ACLs?). That HP/Compaq is discontinuing DEC's unix for this crap is a sad commentary on their business model.
Gotta go now, HP-UX's NFS just suddenly decided all its (already mounted) volumes are read-only and the users are freaking out.