The idea that discovering this planet means it's more (or less) likely there's intelligent life out there is pretty speculative.
It's right up there with the (earlier) idea that because we were finding supergiant planets so close to stars, it must mean there aren't many Jupiter-sized planets out there in mid-range orbits to suck up comets in their gravity wells -- so there must be less chance of life, right, 'cause all those comets would scour inner planets clean? That one got floated when they were first finding the big whoppers that caused stars' images to wobble. 'Course, it was based on assumptions about the fundamental role of comets in planetary life -- the whole dinosaur thing was in the news then -- and about how every star system must look like ours, and so on.
We're still in the data collection stage of figuring out extrasolar planets. Our means of seeing them are dependent on flaky situations -- planets that travel through dust trails, planets that are so huge they cause stars to spin funny, stuff like that. We can't say anything really solid about the frequency of different types of planets, because our methods of looking for them are still picking around the edges, seeing the outliers rather than getting any sense of the norm.
(Personally I think some of the outrageously adaptive bacterial life on earth argues pretty strongly for life wherever there's the slightest opening. If you wanna argue the likelihood of extraterrestrial forms, take a look at the conditions bacteria can get by in. Life can get by.)
Until "zany" morning show hosts are prohibited by law from cutting into, fading out, and otherwise shredding music on the air, I can't see the RIAA sweating this one that much. Sure, the sound of "Dangerous Dan the Morning Man" and his "Zoo Crew" of backups might be crystal clear, but nobody wants to record it at the start and finish of "Thunder Road" for posterity.
If this substantially increases the range of local FM stations, suppressing static until the signal's at the point of total breakup, it's just an enhanced advertizing venue to the RIAA people. Their canned programming lists -- and they already feel in control of that area of music distribution -- can just get to more people.
They understand radio, it's a broadcast medium, not a point-to-point one.
It turned out that most people were much happier with half the capability, half the size, and half the price. Palm came later, learned from Newton, aimed better, and ate the market.
Apple tried to market a portable computing device, and it turned out the world wanted a glorified calculator with an address book? Funny how tiny ultraportables then followed.
It may be true that there wasn't enough of a market, particularly at that early adopter cost. Take a look at the reception the Newton got, though, and you sure get the idea that the "first mover" problem was there. Even the idea of "handwriting recognition" was just too freaky for the press back then. (About the cost -- how much did you pay for a Dx266, back when?)
The first Palms were, what, at least a generation and a half later in terms of the basic manufacturing situation and therefore the costs? And even today a Newton looks a heck of a lot more full-featured than a modern Palm.
Disclaimer: I think the Palm is a freaking horrible piece of commercial design, starting with the idea of relearning how you write every letter in the freaking alphabet just to use one, continuing through the bad screen-hog menu design at the bottom, and playing out in virtually every way. They just plain suck. The reason they're popular is they could market themselves to every unimaginative, technology-nervous middle manager in corporate America. What those people wanted was a calculator that could lose their rolodex every two months. They got what they wanted. Uck.
First off, most Web sources of news are basically viewed by their corporate owners as just another channel for content distribution. Your local newspaper posts stories that are slightly-differently-edited versions of ones they'll print (or ones they've printed) in each day's paper, with a few "breaking news" slots where they plug in AP stories during the day usually. They may have a "content management" system in place to send variations on the same thing to your handheld, to pdfs, and so on.
So we have questions about bandwidth, okay -- but we also have questions about how and whether television and newspaper editorial process might break down in trying to get "instant" stories up on a Web site. A process set up to approve stories for tomorrow's paper doesn't necessarily apply to stories that need to go up now. (My two local dailies have really felt their way with that, too.)
particularly those without access to a quality television news service.
Okay, I'll bite... What quality television news service? Gotta get me some of that action. You must not be viewing the local sludge we get here, with the jocular anchors' repartee and all...
I've seen one U.S. "news" program -- Dateline, maybe? -- ask a scant few questions about the preparedness of New York's emergency Fire and Police responses, mentioning specifically the failure to improve the same communications gear that had failed in the earlier WTC attacks. The show mentioning those problems in passing, almost rhetorically -- "Some people wonder..." was the tone. (Apparently the TV network didn't wonder itself. Only some vague "critics" -- that's the tone I mean.) The New York Times published an article about those same problems, around a full year later if I remember right -- and the article's theme was "Why isn't anyone asking these questions?"
If we had quality "news" on TV, the shows would be investigating controversial events, not just... what, commemorating momentous ones? Journalism is about intelligent enquiry. If you had to choose between "intelligent enquiry" and "advocacy" in describing the Fox "News" Network, which would you choose? That network is about reinforcing people's political leanings, not reporting the news. No thanks.
The geeks amongst us should use this commonality to rise up and use our voice for progress and not petty squabbling.
We should yeah, but this is Slashdot, right? Did I take a wrong turn?
Er, maybe we should be working toward a model that emphasizes free wheeling discourse and a respect for dissent rather than idealizing unanimity of purpose. Something scientific-methodish, as geeks generally are in sympathy with the world of science?
I'm not seeing this supposed "monoculture," to use the article's word. Rather that trying to exploit a unanimity that isn't really there except in opposition to The Bad Guys, maybe we should try to build a culture around curiosity.
Take a look at any/. story on the environment, and tell me if you see more informative posts -- "I read such and so about Greenland ice cores" -- or more whining about the supposed arguments of straw man "environmentalist" views. When curiosity gets superceded by hackneyed political views, geeks are just as tedious as the next person.
Pretty classic bit of modern journalism. Our news channels cast anything as a radical conflict. If a reporter gets an assignment, job one is to identify a conflict, and job two is to categorize all sources in terms of which artificially-polarized side the source belongs to.
Look at our primary sources here:
"Apple is uptight about (changes to the interface)," said Brian Wilson, business manager at Unsanity, which has created a number of OS X interface utilities. "But at the same time they haven't given us any grief. We've had neither help nor hassle."
Sounds like a draconian regime of not caring much, doesn't it?
"It's the end of an era," said Greg Landweber, co-developer of Kaleidoscope, one of the most popular Mac customization tools ever created. "Under the old Mac system, doing these little interface tweaks was really easy. You could change almost anything. Now, you can't change the way they work, only their appearance."
Greg Landweber's take, then, is that you can change the appearance, you just can't move the functional elements to completely different locations. Did anyone really use the Kaleidoscope themes that had the window buttons on the side? Those are the ones that just hit the rocks.
I took delivery on my 17" iMac last Friday. Believe me, there's no shortage of tweaks to the UI. I'm running a handful now. If Apple's making noise just now, it's just to emphasize that tweakers are there only at Apple's discretion -- always the case, right?
Just another overstated conflict story where there really isn't much of a conflict, if you ask me.
If only, if only we could have thought outside the box in order to leverage our core competencies... Moving forward, we'll just have to grow something-or-other.
(I cashed out my synergy when the market on that was high.)
The story was in the BBC and the Research center's in Oxford, so I guess it shouldn't surprise me that they actually seem to be studying the 'net -- rather than, say, advocating a reactionary response to it.
Our U.S. equivalent, of course, might be Carnegie Mellon University -- from which we got all sorts of The Internet is Soooooo Scary "studies" for a while. (Remember the Time Magazine article back in 1994 or so that claimed 75% of all Web traffic was pRon? That was based on a C-M U paper. The more recent "study" that said people who browsed a lot tended to be depressed and socially isolated? Guess what University published it. Somebody at Carnegie Mellon has a hateful thing going on, seems like.)
It's advocacy over actual information, as far as U.S. pop media's appetite for "studies" goes.
All we're seeing here is our planet's self-correction mechanisms at work. There is likely nothing that we mere humans can do to permanently change the planet.
The thing people like you don't understand about environmentalists is that they're not arguing about the grand purity of the natural world as much as they're saying "Wake up, we're killing ourselves." This debate is about our survival, not about the world's ability to shrug and adjust. No doubt, the world will make do -- the question is whether human beings will be able to live in it.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in one of his collections in which he tried to make that point like this (paraphrasing):
1. Yes, the world has gone along just fine at different temperatures in the past. Some of the periods which life thrived had significantly higher mean temperatures, it's very true. The ice age(s) weren't entirely without life, no. It's just that --
2. The dominant forms of complex life on the planet have never really survived any radical change in the climate. (He wouldn't use the biased word "complex," but I'm glossing. In one view, prokaryotic organisms are the "dominant" life on earth.)
It isn't that environmentalists think we can destroy the world. It's that they think we can make it unliveable for ourselves. Your glib "I'd like to have six more degrees, what the heck?" is completely ignorant about the potential effects of mean temperature changes on that scale. Take a look into how the Sahara desert came about, will you?
You're playing with your own future, and you dismiss anyone who wants you to think about the consequences as a "whiner." Pretty rash attitude to throw back in the face of the overwhelming weight of the world's scientific opinion. Gee, I hope you're way the hell brighter than the climate scientists who look at ice cores from Greenland...
I think originally it was a maintenance thing that made Apple switch; by far the most common part swap on old PowerBooks was the trackball's setting in the case, just going by my personal experience supporting a bunch of them. Physical trackballs got filthy, it made them much less pleasant to use, and when you destroyed the wheels inside you had to give up your machine for a bit.
Now that we have optical trackballs -- like the one right here -- it'd make more sense. C'mon, this is a no-brainer.
It must be late in the month--we've got another "OS X running on Intel is the only way for Apple to survive" story.
Good grief, yes.
The "News of the Weird" syndicated column publishes little notes when it "retires" a formerly weird story because it's happened too often to make the cut. (Stupid criminals who pose for cameras while destroying them -- stuff like that.) It's past time for Slashdot to retire "Apple -- could it switch to Intel chips?" stories, at least until someone hears Steve Jobs mention it in a keynote speech.
The pros and cons have been gone over maybe sixty-thousand times. Leave it alone, jeez, this is starting to be like an OS wars topic.
As the songwriter, I make less if I write the songs - then the record company invokes a 75% clause, where they only pay the songwriter/recording artist 75% of the Congressionally set statutory rate for writing/publishing the song. Their original argument, around 10 years ago, was that artists who insisted on recording their own songs cut the chances of a hit record, because the record company couldn't recommend potential hit songs for them to record.
Janis Ian would know, she's been covered by just about everybody and nominated for songwriting grammies in three or four decades now. This woman really is the ideal of the singer songwriter, traveling and doing her own work out of the love of it. I saw her two years ago, in a concert at the Minnesota Zoo in the driving rain, and she was just dazzling. Came out about 4'10" tall in huge puffy pumps and just grabbed you.
Talk about your "risk-management" model: these corporations actively discourage their artists from writing original work because they can't stick their studio noses in and make every last album another Johnny Mathis Christmas Compilation. (It'd be fun to go back and figure out when this model started up, and look at the pop songs then. "If the recording execs had gotten their way in nineteen-whatever, we'd still be listening to covers of the Bee Gees or whatever...")
It's all about play balance, isn't it? MMORPGs are hard up against the problem of how to balance appealing to new users against rewarding the die-hard, eight-hours-a-day kiddies. You want the real devotees, but you'll die without new blood. Anyone who's tried to enter one of these games more than a month after it was released knows how quickly the thing gets out of hand.
A while ago/. linked to an interview with the author of The Sims (and a lot of the earlier Sim titles). He talked all over this subject. The newer games are trying conceptual stuff to address this, but at some point in a competitive game, especially a leveling one, you get monster players nobody new can come near. UO is a little older, so they didn't build their game around some larger concept that'd constrain the problem or player behavior.
The ebay option was already there. The only difference here is that UO is offering the cheap catch-ups officially. It's an unimaginative approach, sure, and you wish they could think of a way to address the problem systemically... but when they can sell quick fixes for $30 a pop, do you expect them to think abstractly and long-term? (Do you expect your LAN team to think that way, when just fixing the latest problem makes them heroes and gives them job security?)
Okay, I'm not attributing the view to you, don't take offense. It's a specious argument either way, is all.
The idea that slaves were always malnourished grunt labor is a weird oversimplification at best. Rome is just a particularly good example, because some of the higher officials in Rome could be slaves. The ancient world had all sorts of kinds of slavery -- just as one guy, York, could have radically different experiences under American slavery.
As far as the fallacy of arguing from authority goes, you shouldn't trust Fox to choose experts any more than you trust Slashdot to screen postings. Take a look at that Moon-landings-were-a-fraud "special" they put on the air. Maybe you want to think about motives, too: Fox would put a stupid Moon fraud special on the air because they've got the whole right-wing "Government is evil" thing going on. The guy last night was pretty clearly motivated by a sort of Egyptian archeological boosterism, wasn't he? Ever heard brochures read aloud quite so well? Near as I can tell, I'm not personally dying to confirm the Exodus, or shilling for slavery or anything...
> Slaves don't get fed like kings and recieve
> (what was then) first class medical procedures.
Ever looked into slavery in the Roman period? I'm not claiming to be an expert on this subject, but there are lots of forms of slavery, and not all of them match up with the expectations you seem to have.
Even within any given slave society, there are huge differences in treatment. William Clark's body slave York was a high class personal servant and companion during the Lewis and Clark expedition, but when he fell out of favor with Clark later (apparently for wanting to be with his wife who'd been moved away) he eventually got hired out for rent as a disciplinary measure -- a particularly brutal experience. He was well fed, and got very good care at first, and then later he didn't.
There's nothing at all unimaginable about well-fed, well-cared-for artisan slaves working on a pyramid.
For the National Geographic Society to be slumming with Fox on something like this is really just so danged depressing. C'mon, Fox?? The people who brought you the completely bogus, disingenuous "news" special about the moon landings as a hoax?!? The people who aired that special again even after the storm of laughter from every credible source? You really want to be in bed with these people?
The NGS TV division has sold its soul to the popular media. It started sometime around that 1980s polar bear special where they coated a cage in seal oil and then put someone inside for the polar bear to ferociously "attack." They're hardly above the level of on-the-cheap Discovery Channel documentaries any more; heck, they're basically doing a re-run of the Geraldo Rivera vault thing, as everyone here seems to recognize.
If Nova had run a special on this same topic, I'd have been making time to see it. Fox's version just makes me wince. Their "news" is uninformed advocacy, even when they don't have a "Sensational Mystery" to uncover. Ack.
For science, Nova's the standard. For nature, Nature is easily the best show on. The American Experience is amazingly good for history or biography. NGS doesn't rate any more, they're just cranking out empty filler like this. Too sad.
The airline industry has a lot of "safeties" set up, and they're quite elaborate, but in this particular case one of their levels of protection failed because of the lack of true two-way communication on their cockpit radios. That's not that high-tech a problem, and they have an example, the worst example possible, of how its not being there at least contributed to the deaths of a lot of people, but they haven't addressed it.
No, I'm not arguing that the radio thing was the primary cause of the accident, but it contributed to it, and it could be fixed pretty simply. According to the Salon columnist, anyway, it hasn't been. Which suggests to me, anyway, that despite very sincere and thorough measures taken toward airline safety, the industry isn't necessarily as tech-savvy as it'd need to be to train attendants about laptops with a particular networking ability. Simple point, and I'm not claiming to be any sort of expert, but people here were saying "just educate the airlines about the laptops," and that seems like the bass-ackwards approach.
To give you an idea of how resistant the airline industry is to common-sense upgrades to plane equipment, one of the old Ask the Pilot columns on Salon explained the cause of a runway collision that lost something like 500 lives. The radios they use in cockpits are walkie-talkie style, so when you're talking you can't hear anyone talk to you. One plane didn't hear the other saying it was still on the runway, because they both spoke at the same time.
Seems like UWF devices will get in line by the time they're commercial, according to the article, so fine. But expecting the airline industry to train all its underpaid flight attendants to screen laptops would be a big expense in resources, and it sounds like they should really spend that money elsewhere, on some basics.
The implications of Christianity included such atrocities as the Crusades and the inquisition; does that mean the kernel of its ideas was inherently evil? (I'm inclined to identify those horrors as far closer to the Christian message as I see it in the Bible than Darwin's ideas were to "social Darwinism," but either way it doesn't follow.)
Don't you worry; aboriginal native Americans were having their graves robbed by devout, God-fearing pilgrims before Darwin's father was a twinkle in his grandmother's eye.
First please explain why this guy has a web site explaining how Apple Computer is in league with dark forces because of the "Darwin" underpinnings of OS X. The claims become much more bizarre, of course, but that's his starting point.
Yeah, your basic fundie doesn't have the time to read those opening chapters of Behe, in which he concedes macroevolution in all its guises, for humans too, and tries to narrow the argument to the subcellular structures and processes he thinks he can make sound suitably complex to a lay reader.
Not that Michael Behe's publishing his grand ideas in peer review journals like a real scientist, mind you, but he's still miles more credible than a whole lot of the yahoos who love "Black Box." Sometimes it doesn't seem like they've even read it.
That's a quote from the chapters of Species... in which he anticipates and even suggests possible proofs for potential objections to his theory. Darwin goes on to elaborate quite a bit on the arguments you could have either way about it, of course. The whole watch-watchmaker, "irreducible complexity" canard got its start in those passages of Darwin's. You can even see how it all got settled in the nineteenth century, if you'd like to read up.
Compare and contrast the intellectual honesty Darwin showed in approaching objections to his theory this way with your own duplicity and/or ignorance in quoting him so ridiculously out of context. Doesn't look good for you.
Answers to all your questions are available from Google, of course, in many flavors -- not that you tried. This was just a troll, but #1 on your list is such a lovely, tried-and-true ridiculousness that it just has to get the obvious response:
Where are all of the transitional fossils?
What, you mean all the fossils that actually prompted people to think about all this to start with? The ones people were discovering in the 19th century that caused people like Darwin to wonder, "Hey, the fossil record in South America includes these giant forms of what appear to be relatives of modern animals? What gives?" Those fossils? Go look at the history of evolutionary thought -- this book we're talking about might be a good starting point -- and watch how, as people try to explain the fossils they're finding, they eventually arrive at more and more coherent ideas about how evolution works. It's not like they started up bashing your "perfect" scripture out of a wrongheaded desire to make trouble, and then couldn't find any evidence; they started with the evidence you're saying is absent, and it pushed them, against their wills in a lot of different ways, toward the conclusion that scripture-based world views just didn't explain things. Darwin was trained as a priest in the Anglican church, and he really struggled with his ideas, but trying to explain the physical evidence pushed him along.
You've got it exactly backward, both historically and in terms of how you'd like to argue.
Slashdot Mirror
It's right up there with the (earlier) idea that because we were finding supergiant planets so close to stars, it must mean there aren't many Jupiter-sized planets out there in mid-range orbits to suck up comets in their gravity wells -- so there must be less chance of life, right, 'cause all those comets would scour inner planets clean? That one got floated when they were first finding the big whoppers that caused stars' images to wobble. 'Course, it was based on assumptions about the fundamental role of comets in planetary life -- the whole dinosaur thing was in the news then -- and about how every star system must look like ours, and so on.
We're still in the data collection stage of figuring out extrasolar planets. Our means of seeing them are dependent on flaky situations -- planets that travel through dust trails, planets that are so huge they cause stars to spin funny, stuff like that. We can't say anything really solid about the frequency of different types of planets, because our methods of looking for them are still picking around the edges, seeing the outliers rather than getting any sense of the norm.
(Personally I think some of the outrageously adaptive bacterial life on earth argues pretty strongly for life wherever there's the slightest opening. If you wanna argue the likelihood of extraterrestrial forms, take a look at the conditions bacteria can get by in. Life can get by.)
If this substantially increases the range of local FM stations, suppressing static until the signal's at the point of total breakup, it's just an enhanced advertizing venue to the RIAA people. Their canned programming lists -- and they already feel in control of that area of music distribution -- can just get to more people.
They understand radio, it's a broadcast medium, not a point-to-point one.
Apple tried to market a portable computing device, and it turned out the world wanted a glorified calculator with an address book? Funny how tiny ultraportables then followed.
It may be true that there wasn't enough of a market, particularly at that early adopter cost. Take a look at the reception the Newton got, though, and you sure get the idea that the "first mover" problem was there. Even the idea of "handwriting recognition" was just too freaky for the press back then. (About the cost -- how much did you pay for a Dx266, back when?)
The first Palms were, what, at least a generation and a half later in terms of the basic manufacturing situation and therefore the costs? And even today a Newton looks a heck of a lot more full-featured than a modern Palm.
Disclaimer: I think the Palm is a freaking horrible piece of commercial design, starting with the idea of relearning how you write every letter in the freaking alphabet just to use one, continuing through the bad screen-hog menu design at the bottom, and playing out in virtually every way. They just plain suck. The reason they're popular is they could market themselves to every unimaginative, technology-nervous middle manager in corporate America. What those people wanted was a calculator that could lose their rolodex every two months. They got what they wanted. Uck.
So we have questions about bandwidth, okay -- but we also have questions about how and whether television and newspaper editorial process might break down in trying to get "instant" stories up on a Web site. A process set up to approve stories for tomorrow's paper doesn't necessarily apply to stories that need to go up now. (My two local dailies have really felt their way with that, too.)
particularly those without access to a quality television news service.
Okay, I'll bite... What quality television news service? Gotta get me some of that action. You must not be viewing the local sludge we get here, with the jocular anchors' repartee and all...
I've seen one U.S. "news" program -- Dateline, maybe? -- ask a scant few questions about the preparedness of New York's emergency Fire and Police responses, mentioning specifically the failure to improve the same communications gear that had failed in the earlier WTC attacks. The show mentioning those problems in passing, almost rhetorically -- "Some people wonder..." was the tone. (Apparently the TV network didn't wonder itself. Only some vague "critics" -- that's the tone I mean.) The New York Times published an article about those same problems, around a full year later if I remember right -- and the article's theme was "Why isn't anyone asking these questions?"
If we had quality "news" on TV, the shows would be investigating controversial events, not just... what, commemorating momentous ones? Journalism is about intelligent enquiry. If you had to choose between "intelligent enquiry" and "advocacy" in describing the Fox "News" Network, which would you choose? That network is about reinforcing people's political leanings, not reporting the news. No thanks.
We should yeah, but this is Slashdot, right? Did I take a wrong turn?
Er, maybe we should be working toward a model that emphasizes free wheeling discourse and a respect for dissent rather than idealizing unanimity of purpose. Something scientific-methodish, as geeks generally are in sympathy with the world of science?
I'm not seeing this supposed "monoculture," to use the article's word. Rather that trying to exploit a unanimity that isn't really there except in opposition to The Bad Guys, maybe we should try to build a culture around curiosity.
Take a look at any /. story on the environment, and tell me if you see more informative posts -- "I read such and so about Greenland ice cores" -- or more whining about the supposed arguments of straw man "environmentalist" views. When curiosity gets superceded by hackneyed political views, geeks are just as tedious as the next person.
Look at our primary sources here:
"Apple is uptight about (changes to the interface)," said Brian Wilson, business manager at Unsanity, which has created a number of OS X interface utilities. "But at the same time they haven't given us any grief. We've had neither help nor hassle."
Sounds like a draconian regime of not caring much, doesn't it?
"It's the end of an era," said Greg Landweber, co-developer of Kaleidoscope, one of the most popular Mac customization tools ever created. "Under the old Mac system, doing these little interface tweaks was really easy. You could change almost anything. Now, you can't change the way they work, only their appearance."
Greg Landweber's take, then, is that you can change the appearance, you just can't move the functional elements to completely different locations. Did anyone really use the Kaleidoscope themes that had the window buttons on the side? Those are the ones that just hit the rocks.
I took delivery on my 17" iMac last Friday. Believe me, there's no shortage of tweaks to the UI. I'm running a handful now. If Apple's making noise just now, it's just to emphasize that tweakers are there only at Apple's discretion -- always the case, right?
Just another overstated conflict story where there really isn't much of a conflict, if you ask me.
(I cashed out my synergy when the market on that was high.)
Our U.S. equivalent, of course, might be Carnegie Mellon University -- from which we got all sorts of The Internet is Soooooo Scary "studies" for a while. (Remember the Time Magazine article back in 1994 or so that claimed 75% of all Web traffic was pRon? That was based on a C-M U paper. The more recent "study" that said people who browsed a lot tended to be depressed and socially isolated? Guess what University published it. Somebody at Carnegie Mellon has a hateful thing going on, seems like.)
It's advocacy over actual information, as far as U.S. pop media's appetite for "studies" goes.
The thing people like you don't understand about environmentalists is that they're not arguing about the grand purity of the natural world as much as they're saying "Wake up, we're killing ourselves." This debate is about our survival, not about the world's ability to shrug and adjust. No doubt, the world will make do -- the question is whether human beings will be able to live in it.
Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay in one of his collections in which he tried to make that point like this (paraphrasing):
It isn't that environmentalists think we can destroy the world. It's that they think we can make it unliveable for ourselves. Your glib "I'd like to have six more degrees, what the heck?" is completely ignorant about the potential effects of mean temperature changes on that scale. Take a look into how the Sahara desert came about, will you?
You're playing with your own future, and you dismiss anyone who wants you to think about the consequences as a "whiner." Pretty rash attitude to throw back in the face of the overwhelming weight of the world's scientific opinion. Gee, I hope you're way the hell brighter than the climate scientists who look at ice cores from Greenland...
Now that we have optical trackballs -- like the one right here -- it'd make more sense. C'mon, this is a no-brainer.
Good grief, yes.
The "News of the Weird" syndicated column publishes little notes when it "retires" a formerly weird story because it's happened too often to make the cut. (Stupid criminals who pose for cameras while destroying them -- stuff like that.) It's past time for Slashdot to retire "Apple -- could it switch to Intel chips?" stories, at least until someone hears Steve Jobs mention it in a keynote speech.
The pros and cons have been gone over maybe sixty-thousand times. Leave it alone, jeez, this is starting to be like an OS wars topic.
Who's Radiohead, though? ;-)
Janis Ian would know, she's been covered by just about everybody and nominated for songwriting grammies in three or four decades now. This woman really is the ideal of the singer songwriter, traveling and doing her own work out of the love of it. I saw her two years ago, in a concert at the Minnesota Zoo in the driving rain, and she was just dazzling. Came out about 4'10" tall in huge puffy pumps and just grabbed you.
Talk about your "risk-management" model: these corporations actively discourage their artists from writing original work because they can't stick their studio noses in and make every last album another Johnny Mathis Christmas Compilation. (It'd be fun to go back and figure out when this model started up, and look at the pop songs then. "If the recording execs had gotten their way in nineteen-whatever, we'd still be listening to covers of the Bee Gees or whatever...")
A while ago /. linked to an interview with the author of The Sims (and a lot of the earlier Sim titles). He talked all over this subject. The newer games are trying conceptual stuff to address this, but at some point in a competitive game, especially a leveling one, you get monster players nobody new can come near. UO is a little older, so they didn't build their game around some larger concept that'd constrain the problem or player behavior.
The ebay option was already there. The only difference here is that UO is offering the cheap catch-ups officially. It's an unimaginative approach, sure, and you wish they could think of a way to address the problem systemically... but when they can sell quick fixes for $30 a pop, do you expect them to think abstractly and long-term? (Do you expect your LAN team to think that way, when just fixing the latest problem makes them heroes and gives them job security?)
The idea that slaves were always malnourished grunt labor is a weird oversimplification at best. Rome is just a particularly good example, because some of the higher officials in Rome could be slaves. The ancient world had all sorts of kinds of slavery -- just as one guy, York, could have radically different experiences under American slavery.
As far as the fallacy of arguing from authority goes, you shouldn't trust Fox to choose experts any more than you trust Slashdot to screen postings. Take a look at that Moon-landings-were-a-fraud "special" they put on the air. Maybe you want to think about motives, too: Fox would put a stupid Moon fraud special on the air because they've got the whole right-wing "Government is evil" thing going on. The guy last night was pretty clearly motivated by a sort of Egyptian archeological boosterism, wasn't he? Ever heard brochures read aloud quite so well? Near as I can tell, I'm not personally dying to confirm the Exodus, or shilling for slavery or anything...
Ever looked into slavery in the Roman period? I'm not claiming to be an expert on this subject, but there are lots of forms of slavery, and not all of them match up with the expectations you seem to have.
Even within any given slave society, there are huge differences in treatment. William Clark's body slave York was a high class personal servant and companion during the Lewis and Clark expedition, but when he fell out of favor with Clark later (apparently for wanting to be with his wife who'd been moved away) he eventually got hired out for rent as a disciplinary measure -- a particularly brutal experience. He was well fed, and got very good care at first, and then later he didn't.
There's nothing at all unimaginable about well-fed, well-cared-for artisan slaves working on a pyramid.
The NGS TV division has sold its soul to the popular media. It started sometime around that 1980s polar bear special where they coated a cage in seal oil and then put someone inside for the polar bear to ferociously "attack." They're hardly above the level of on-the-cheap Discovery Channel documentaries any more; heck, they're basically doing a re-run of the Geraldo Rivera vault thing, as everyone here seems to recognize.
If Nova had run a special on this same topic, I'd have been making time to see it. Fox's version just makes me wince. Their "news" is uninformed advocacy, even when they don't have a "Sensational Mystery" to uncover. Ack. For science, Nova's the standard. For nature, Nature is easily the best show on. The American Experience is amazingly good for history or biography. NGS doesn't rate any more, they're just cranking out empty filler like this. Too sad.
No, I'm not arguing that the radio thing was the primary cause of the accident, but it contributed to it, and it could be fixed pretty simply. According to the Salon columnist, anyway, it hasn't been. Which suggests to me, anyway, that despite very sincere and thorough measures taken toward airline safety, the industry isn't necessarily as tech-savvy as it'd need to be to train attendants about laptops with a particular networking ability. Simple point, and I'm not claiming to be any sort of expert, but people here were saying "just educate the airlines about the laptops," and that seems like the bass-ackwards approach.
Seems like UWF devices will get in line by the time they're commercial, according to the article, so fine. But expecting the airline industry to train all its underpaid flight attendants to screen laptops would be a big expense in resources, and it sounds like they should really spend that money elsewhere, on some basics.
And somehow "the Roman Catholics" are further from "Christianity" than social Darwinists are from Darwin? How, exactly?
Don't you worry; aboriginal native Americans were having their graves robbed by devout, God-fearing pilgrims before Darwin's father was a twinkle in his grandmother's eye.
I'm dead serious. "Dr. Dino" is quite the fellah.
Not that Michael Behe's publishing his grand ideas in peer review journals like a real scientist, mind you, but he's still miles more credible than a whole lot of the yahoos who love "Black Box." Sometimes it doesn't seem like they've even read it.
Compare and contrast the intellectual honesty Darwin showed in approaching objections to his theory this way with your own duplicity and/or ignorance in quoting him so ridiculously out of context. Doesn't look good for you.
Where are all of the transitional fossils?
What, you mean all the fossils that actually prompted people to think about all this to start with? The ones people were discovering in the 19th century that caused people like Darwin to wonder, "Hey, the fossil record in South America includes these giant forms of what appear to be relatives of modern animals? What gives?" Those fossils? Go look at the history of evolutionary thought -- this book we're talking about might be a good starting point -- and watch how, as people try to explain the fossils they're finding, they eventually arrive at more and more coherent ideas about how evolution works. It's not like they started up bashing your "perfect" scripture out of a wrongheaded desire to make trouble, and then couldn't find any evidence; they started with the evidence you're saying is absent, and it pushed them, against their wills in a lot of different ways, toward the conclusion that scripture-based world views just didn't explain things. Darwin was trained as a priest in the Anglican church, and he really struggled with his ideas, but trying to explain the physical evidence pushed him along.
You've got it exactly backward, both historically and in terms of how you'd like to argue.