The problem a lot of people here seem to be having is speaking of Joomla as though it is the only thing you use when building a website. Joomla has 5000 extensions written for it, and if you can't find what you need, there's 20 other solutions that will do it for you. Menus are in wierd place? Install a menu module that will put them where you want. Content organization counterintuitive? Install the K2 framework, and organize it however you like. The add-on community is absolutely incredible; I can always find help for problems that I have with module or component conflicts. Joomla rocks.
I absolutely love Joomla. You can make extremely complex sites very quickly, and just like any language/framework, once you learn the ins and outs it becomes very easy to do very complex tasks.
You can build virtually any site you want very quickly with Joomla. There's nothing stopping you from using the Joomla framework to build very fancy things like the menu you mentioned; there are plenty of modules that allow you to code anything you want in a module spot. And once you learn how to build joomla extensions, make your own fancy menu for the rest of the world to use.
I worked for a consulting company doing admin and powerpoint-based work about 10 years ago. I have a degree in History, so nothing really related to computer work in my educational background. Back in the Dot-Com days, I taught myself Flash during down-time at work, quit my job, and then offered to build a website for a local 5-and-dime for free. It wasn't very good, but it padded my resume, and allowed me to get other jobs building smaller, and then larger websites for people freelance until I got hired. This still works, although it's more difficult as you are competing oftentimes against people offshore. Alternatively, make up your own website for a fake company to pad your resume. This is if you want to go into web development; it might not work the same for programming.
Another method is to get enough work so that you can get hired by (multiple) temp agencies; eventually you will get a position, even short term, and then you will be able to have experience enough to get full-time work.
One, Learn Origami with Origami Mastery, has done OK, staying stable at about 30 copies a day for the first two weeks, then dropping down to about 5-10 per day, many on foreign sites. This was my first app, and so I had no expectations. I was disappointed it didn't sell a billion copies, but I didn't really expect it to, as it had lots of competition. I sell it for 99cents here: http://www.origamimastery.com/
However, the second app really disappointed me. I thought I had a eureka moment, because while there were a billion iFart aps, there was nothing juvenile like iBooger or iSnot. I figured if iFart can make a lot, so can something called iSnot. So I made this great little app, very small, doing all my own design and splitting the profits 75-25 with the developer (normally a bad idea but a good one in hindsight) and developed it in less than a week. We had no direct competitors...
It's a funny app whereby you pick a face, hold the phone up to your face facing away and a line of dangling snot, using the accelerometer, comes out, and well, you get the picture. It's funny. Stupid. Guaranteed to make a million bucks like iFart, right? Wrong.
Its done worse than my Origami app. Sold maybe 10 a day or less for the past two weeks. I spent money to get it reviewed, and then asked my friends to download and review it, and also randomly bought people drinks at bars to download and review it the first day. I think its a very very funny and clever app:
www.isnotapp.com
However, the key to success appears to be HEAVY marketing beforehand. The iFart guy, Joel Comm, is an Internet Marketer by trade. That means he has mailing lists and twitter followers in the hundreds of thousands. He knows what he is doing. His competitors do not.
There are other things you can do, which I will be doing, like releasing updates to keep yourself at the top of the daily top sellers.
In the case of Dapple, one look at the screenshot of the game and the price of the app told me everything I needed to know. The game looks NO BETTER than a 99 cent app. He should have sold it at 99cents. That is his first mistake. Drop it down and his volume will increase dramatically.
But he will still never make his 35 grand back. All in all I spent about 1000$ on my development. 325$ for the first apps development costs, 500$ for a mac mini for myself to help with development, and 99$ for applying to the app store as a developer. I will probably make my 1 grand back in a two-three months if all goes well.
And that's with a genius app like iSnot doing poorly.
I am using a Joomla-based calendar. I think it's called JEvents, and the only difficulty is making sure Joomla 1.5 is running in Legacy mode so that you can import the most recent version of the module correctly, but thats a switch in Joomla.. Other than that, it was very simple to set up.
Well, not everyone needs to create custom modules. There are a ton of modules in existence out there already, and while Drupal may be great for building those, I have been able to find all the modules I need without much difficulty. I also did my first CMS site in Joomla, and I had the basic site with a well-designed template up and running in a few days. I would recommend it, IF you are a decent developer and know your stuff pretty well. If you have difficulty finding your way around CSS or HTML you will have problems trying to match your template to a design. I used the BEEZ template that is provided and heavily modified it.
It's very easy to use. It's pretty intuitive, although you have to learn the meaning of a few special terms. But the admin screen for 1.5 is a breeze, at least for me.
I am actually developing a site with Joomla right now for a large client. This was my first time actually developing a fully-functioning CMS-based site like this, even though I have been developing sites for a long time. It is a breeze to use. It was difficult to set up, only because I am not a php and database expert and the server we set it up on did not have all of those things installed from the get-go, but an experienced php/mySQL user can deal with the configuration issues with no problem.
However, Joomla 1.5 is a breeze, as long as you are experienced with CSS/HTML. It is actually mostly intutitive, with the exception of understanding sections vs categories and their relationship to the overall menu structure, but a quick read through the online help for this solved the problem. I went with this over Drupal partly because it is so easy to use, and very robust.
I see. How many of these sites you speak of where people had to go back and make changes after each consecutive version of a browser came out actually kept their sites looking the same over that time? Int he real world, corporations often update the look and feel of their site on a fairly regular basis so as to keep the site "fresh".
It is much more likely in the real world to go back and completely redo the look and often the content of the site, than to have to go back to fix ampersand issues to work with new versions of browsers. IMHO, websites are changed more rapidly in drastic ways more often than broswer revisions come out.
Re:3 million dollars per year is a pittance
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
The answer from most people who support SETI to this argument about radio transmission is that while it may be true that most civilizations wouldn't use radio, at least one would. remember, SETI proponents believbe there are more than one civilization out there, not just one. I believe that if that is the case, eventually we would find a signal from at least one of these civilizations that is or has used radio.
This assumes that we have what aliens want. If it is the case that earth-like planets are fairly common, it would make much more sense for an alien civilization to spend energy colonizing an uninhabited planet rather than a inhabited one.
The issue is that Moore's law also applies to SETI, but in a weird way. Computing power to search and analyze transmissions is increasing at a rate similar to computing power int he normal world, which means that the frequencies and areas being searched will increase dramatically over time. There was an interesting graph I saw by a SETI proponent that showed the amount of sky being searched, the rate of computing power increase, and assumptions about the number of radio-transmitting civilizations out there over time.
Basically, if there are even 10 civilizations in the galaxy that we *could" detect because they have been transmitting, we should actually detect one of them some time in the next 30-40 years. If there is one, then the time goes out to 60-70 years. If there's ~100, the time is something like 20-30 years. So we should know one way or the other within a few decades, so I'm willing to wait. If we continue on in this vein and we DONT find anything, then some of our initial assumptions are very much wrong, which would be informative in any event.
So, I say we continue, at least for a few decades. If we don't find anything by, say, 2050, cut funding!
It's very difficult to print Magic cards that are indistinguishable from the real thing. As I understand it the exact card stock and print specs used are a closely guarded secret, and most judges at events have been trained to look out for fake cards. You can use them to play against your friends, but we are currently having a problem with a guy in our play group who just prints out dual lands and such. He owns the real cards but doesnt want to ruin them by using them all the time. Models in &D are different; no one cares where you got them. No no such things as a "real" teeny pewter dragon, but there sure as hell is such a thing as a real Black Lotus.
I've always found that people who have to deal with customer service in almost any vein often get to deal with some of the most loony people, and the rest of us only rarely get to catch a glimpse through the window of insanity. I used to work at a radio station, and we would get calls and comments from the most crazy people. Specifically, there was this one guy who always (I think he still does) call the radio station and try to get on the air through a lot of devious means. This guy thought that Stephen Spielberg killed John Lennon. We'd also get faxes from people who would write the nuttiest stuff..the one that sticks out in my mind was a bunch of writings that looked like chicken scratch, but actually was this elaborate way of writing normal sentences using mathematical equations and symbols. It was kindof cool...I almost passed it on to the cops because it reminded me of the way the Zodiac killer used to write, and this was in San Francisco.
Nutty people make life more interesting.
I've been to one of those internet seminars where they try to tell you how to make money off of the internet. Many of you seem to think that there is some moral benefit to creating a "useful" site with good content. Not everyone is out there to create a site that will actually be useful to people. Many folks just want to make a quick dollar or two. Someone may make a site that sells some aggregated crap like ebooks or lists of on form or another. They could care less how their site looks; the most important thing is driving people to their business. Location, location, location. When you are competing with established players, you have to do what you can to gain any edge, and if that entails screwing up your site so that it looks horrible, but gets you to the number one spot in a search result, then so be it. To get to this spot is not free by any means; you have to pay just as much, if not more, to position yourself in any one spot in a search result if you are not paying for ads. But often the cost is cheaper, and to a startup business, that is a better idea.
I have a friend who is a salsa teacher and who sells salsa dvds online. He has a lot of crap websites that look horrible, but which always get him to the top of the search results for certain terms. He has specifically told me that the worse a site looks, the better it sells. It's true! Site's like the faux Google site may look like crap, but the numbers are there; sites like that, which contain real content, actually do very well and make their owners a lot of money. The nicer you make a site, especially ones that sell information, and the more you doll it up, the worse it will do. This is totally counterintuitive, since I am myself a designer and web developer, but it does seem to be the case. This is not the case for sites that rely ont heir site just as a business card, but if you are trying to sell something HARD (Act now! For a limited time! Buy this product too and we will throw in more! An added bonus!) these horrible looking sites can do very well.
So, the moral of the story is, don't be so cynical about these sorts of sites. They make our lives as developers and designers hard, but design is not always important. If someone wants to make a quick buck selling something and they screw up th look of their site to try to get to the top of Google's rankings, that's the way it has to be. Each time Google changes stuff around, the SEO people will find some other way around it.
I read about Polywell about two months ago here. After doing some research on it, I was very much enthusiastic about what I found out and wanted to build a website that would look more professional than the one the polywell folks currently have. At that time, they were still trying to find funding and/or investors, and it was my belief that having a real website, like a lot of energy companies and other places where people have ideas that need funding, would help out. I built one, with the idea that even if they decided not to use it, it would still work as a community forum.
I am still trying to get a lot of the information exactly the way I want tit, but the website is here:
http://www.xevioso.com/projects/polywell
Unfortunately, after I sent the message to Dr. Bussard about a month ago to take a look at what I was building, he basically said that while it was a great site, it wasn't going to be useful to them int he near future because of some things coming down the line that would make it unneccesary. Of course, one month later, the Navy resumed funding. And now Dr. Bussard has passed on.
In any event, if people would like to get some good information about this project, please visit the link above.
in that I'm currently a webmaster, and make a great living working from home. I think the key is diversity...large projects require lots of people with a few talents, or a few people with many talents. The latter is generally cheaper and easier to work with, so compamines are often very willing to work with one reliable person who can handle a multitude of tasks.
It's true that there's no way I can keep abreast of all of the technologies, but I try...that's why I read/.
The thing is, the skills required for smaller jobs, which is generally where I make my living, are actually a lot less than what is needed to work on very large projects. That's not to say that any monkey could do them, or if they could, they probably couldn't do it as quick or as well.
I feel strongly that design is an integral part of a good website, and if a company can find a person who can handle the design, development, implementation, QA and installation of a site, they will jump at the chance. I'm also discovering that being able to manage a site by understanding and choosing the right technologies is just as valuable as building the site.
We exist, but the skills required are pretty diverse. I think the main reason not so many of us exist is that many people specialized in one type of web skill and did not jump at the chances they had to learn new skills. On the days I'm not using HTML I'm happily designing sites, or building them in Flash, or doing UI development work.
I will assume your questions are serious and you aren't a troll.
1) Fossils are hard to find because they are hard tomake. Fossilization of a creature occurs very rarely today even when we can view it happenning...you have to have just the right type of environmental conditions in order for a creature to be preserved for a long period of time naturally. Also, remember, sediment continually gets laid down over time for menay reasons, but scientists are only looking at exposed layers, EXCEPT whent hey have reasont o think a fossil will be exactly 6 feet down at exactly this spot. This type of occurrence is rare. We will be finding fossils for a very long time to come.
2) Scientists say we are genetically close, not close in appearance. And no, the dumbest human is NOT more advanced than the smartest ape. I've met many people that are dumber than the smartest ape.
Evolution is not a crock of shit. It's science. Go read a book.
One thing I found interesting about the NYTimes article was the out-and out blunt way in which the paleontologists involved said that this answers specific challenges from Creationists. In the past, even though this would still be seen in scientific journals as a "transitional" species, the cultural relevance to the battle between science and creationism would never get mentioned, or even explored.
So my theory is, after the recent battles between the two ways of thinking in the educational world, and after Eugenie Scott's seminars at the recent scientist convention (I can't remember the name of the organization) wherein she basically said that scientists need to play hardball and come right out and oppose creationism in a very public fashion, I wonder if these paleontologists were doing just that when they mentioned this creature as a transitional form.
There are lots of other transitional creatures out there; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional _fossils) prosynosychus is one that I saw when I took a tourist trip to Cambridge a few years ago. The fact that scientists are bluntly calling this a transitional fossil is almost as interesting as the fossil itself.
Look, it doesnt matter how light the ship is...why the heck would you make it that big unless...you wanted to carry a lot of stuff. Ie, tanks. Artillery. Supplies. That sort of technology, if feasible, would be perfect for transporting an army anywhere in the world in less than a day. So that technology would assist in keeping the plane afloat, as well as the fact that it is incredibly boyant.
Now, something else interesting is looking at the debate in congress recently over the crreation of the Crusader artillery piece. The main argument against it in congress was because a: the opponents believed we didn't need it, and b: it is so heavy that it would be inneffective in a real situation because it would take so long to get there. But with a plane like this, it makes it a much more useful weapon.
A very good use for this plane would be an attack on China. China is known for it's slow responses to crisis events. Once they get going, look out. But they are slow. So imagine they attack Taiwan. For whatever reason. We decide to assist, and God forbid, go to war. We take a bunch of these blimps, load em with tanks, artilelry, you name it, and land it RIGHT SMACK in Tienanment square and occupy the People's Party Congress in less than a day. China wouldn't even know what had hit em. No invasion, no land war, no collateral damage...just boom, instant government change. It could happen.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem a lot of people here seem to be having is speaking of Joomla as though it is the only thing you use when building a website. Joomla has 5000 extensions written for it, and if you can't find what you need, there's 20 other solutions that will do it for you. Menus are in wierd place? Install a menu module that will put them where you want. Content organization counterintuitive? Install the K2 framework, and organize it however you like. The add-on community is absolutely incredible; I can always find help for problems that I have with module or component conflicts. Joomla rocks.
I absolutely love Joomla. You can make extremely complex sites very quickly, and just like any language/framework, once you learn the ins and outs it becomes very easy to do very complex tasks.
You can build virtually any site you want very quickly with Joomla. There's nothing stopping you from using the Joomla framework to build very fancy things like the menu you mentioned; there are plenty of modules that allow you to code anything you want in a module spot. And once you learn how to build joomla extensions, make your own fancy menu for the rest of the world to use.
You and everyone in this particular thread should be assassinated for particularly horrid puns.
I worked for a consulting company doing admin and powerpoint-based work about 10 years ago. I have a degree in History, so nothing really related to computer work in my educational background. Back in the Dot-Com days, I taught myself Flash during down-time at work, quit my job, and then offered to build a website for a local 5-and-dime for free. It wasn't very good, but it padded my resume, and allowed me to get other jobs building smaller, and then larger websites for people freelance until I got hired. This still works, although it's more difficult as you are competing oftentimes against people offshore. Alternatively, make up your own website for a fake company to pad your resume. This is if you want to go into web development; it might not work the same for programming. Another method is to get enough work so that you can get hired by (multiple) temp agencies; eventually you will get a position, even short term, and then you will be able to have experience enough to get full-time work.
Sorry, the iSnot link is http://www.isnotapp.com/
One, Learn Origami with Origami Mastery, has done OK, staying stable at about 30 copies a day for the first two weeks, then dropping down to about 5-10 per day, many on foreign sites. This was my first app, and so I had no expectations. I was disappointed it didn't sell a billion copies, but I didn't really expect it to, as it had lots of competition. I sell it for 99cents here: http://www.origamimastery.com/ However, the second app really disappointed me. I thought I had a eureka moment, because while there were a billion iFart aps, there was nothing juvenile like iBooger or iSnot. I figured if iFart can make a lot, so can something called iSnot. So I made this great little app, very small, doing all my own design and splitting the profits 75-25 with the developer (normally a bad idea but a good one in hindsight) and developed it in less than a week. We had no direct competitors... It's a funny app whereby you pick a face, hold the phone up to your face facing away and a line of dangling snot, using the accelerometer, comes out, and well, you get the picture. It's funny. Stupid. Guaranteed to make a million bucks like iFart, right? Wrong. Its done worse than my Origami app. Sold maybe 10 a day or less for the past two weeks. I spent money to get it reviewed, and then asked my friends to download and review it, and also randomly bought people drinks at bars to download and review it the first day. I think its a very very funny and clever app: www.isnotapp.com However, the key to success appears to be HEAVY marketing beforehand. The iFart guy, Joel Comm, is an Internet Marketer by trade. That means he has mailing lists and twitter followers in the hundreds of thousands. He knows what he is doing. His competitors do not. There are other things you can do, which I will be doing, like releasing updates to keep yourself at the top of the daily top sellers. In the case of Dapple, one look at the screenshot of the game and the price of the app told me everything I needed to know. The game looks NO BETTER than a 99 cent app. He should have sold it at 99cents. That is his first mistake. Drop it down and his volume will increase dramatically. But he will still never make his 35 grand back. All in all I spent about 1000$ on my development. 325$ for the first apps development costs, 500$ for a mac mini for myself to help with development, and 99$ for applying to the app store as a developer. I will probably make my 1 grand back in a two-three months if all goes well. And that's with a genius app like iSnot doing poorly.
Another way to look at this is:
When in human history has encountering a more advanced civilisation ever been good for a less advanced civilisation?
You need to play more computer games with benevolent overlords. Albeit these are few and far between.
I am using a Joomla-based calendar. I think it's called JEvents, and the only difficulty is making sure Joomla 1.5 is running in Legacy mode so that you can import the most recent version of the module correctly, but thats a switch in Joomla.. Other than that, it was very simple to set up.
Well, not everyone needs to create custom modules. There are a ton of modules in existence out there already, and while Drupal may be great for building those, I have been able to find all the modules I need without much difficulty. I also did my first CMS site in Joomla, and I had the basic site with a well-designed template up and running in a few days. I would recommend it, IF you are a decent developer and know your stuff pretty well. If you have difficulty finding your way around CSS or HTML you will have problems trying to match your template to a design. I used the BEEZ template that is provided and heavily modified it.
It's very easy to use. It's pretty intuitive, although you have to learn the meaning of a few special terms. But the admin screen for 1.5 is a breeze, at least for me.
I am actually developing a site with Joomla right now for a large client. This was my first time actually developing a fully-functioning CMS-based site like this, even though I have been developing sites for a long time. It is a breeze to use. It was difficult to set up, only because I am not a php and database expert and the server we set it up on did not have all of those things installed from the get-go, but an experienced php/mySQL user can deal with the configuration issues with no problem. However, Joomla 1.5 is a breeze, as long as you are experienced with CSS/HTML. It is actually mostly intutitive, with the exception of understanding sections vs categories and their relationship to the overall menu structure, but a quick read through the online help for this solved the problem. I went with this over Drupal partly because it is so easy to use, and very robust.
I see. How many of these sites you speak of where people had to go back and make changes after each consecutive version of a browser came out actually kept their sites looking the same over that time? Int he real world, corporations often update the look and feel of their site on a fairly regular basis so as to keep the site "fresh". It is much more likely in the real world to go back and completely redo the look and often the content of the site, than to have to go back to fix ampersand issues to work with new versions of browsers. IMHO, websites are changed more rapidly in drastic ways more often than broswer revisions come out.
The answer from most people who support SETI to this argument about radio transmission is that while it may be true that most civilizations wouldn't use radio, at least one would. remember, SETI proponents believbe there are more than one civilization out there, not just one. I believe that if that is the case, eventually we would find a signal from at least one of these civilizations that is or has used radio.
This assumes that we have what aliens want. If it is the case that earth-like planets are fairly common, it would make much more sense for an alien civilization to spend energy colonizing an uninhabited planet rather than a inhabited one.
The issue is that Moore's law also applies to SETI, but in a weird way. Computing power to search and analyze transmissions is increasing at a rate similar to computing power int he normal world, which means that the frequencies and areas being searched will increase dramatically over time. There was an interesting graph I saw by a SETI proponent that showed the amount of sky being searched, the rate of computing power increase, and assumptions about the number of radio-transmitting civilizations out there over time. Basically, if there are even 10 civilizations in the galaxy that we *could" detect because they have been transmitting, we should actually detect one of them some time in the next 30-40 years. If there is one, then the time goes out to 60-70 years. If there's ~100, the time is something like 20-30 years. So we should know one way or the other within a few decades, so I'm willing to wait. If we continue on in this vein and we DONT find anything, then some of our initial assumptions are very much wrong, which would be informative in any event. So, I say we continue, at least for a few decades. If we don't find anything by, say, 2050, cut funding!
It's very difficult to print Magic cards that are indistinguishable from the real thing. As I understand it the exact card stock and print specs used are a closely guarded secret, and most judges at events have been trained to look out for fake cards. You can use them to play against your friends, but we are currently having a problem with a guy in our play group who just prints out dual lands and such. He owns the real cards but doesnt want to ruin them by using them all the time. Models in &D are different; no one cares where you got them. No no such things as a "real" teeny pewter dragon, but there sure as hell is such a thing as a real Black Lotus.
I've always found that people who have to deal with customer service in almost any vein often get to deal with some of the most loony people, and the rest of us only rarely get to catch a glimpse through the window of insanity. I used to work at a radio station, and we would get calls and comments from the most crazy people. Specifically, there was this one guy who always (I think he still does) call the radio station and try to get on the air through a lot of devious means. This guy thought that Stephen Spielberg killed John Lennon. We'd also get faxes from people who would write the nuttiest stuff..the one that sticks out in my mind was a bunch of writings that looked like chicken scratch, but actually was this elaborate way of writing normal sentences using mathematical equations and symbols. It was kindof cool...I almost passed it on to the cops because it reminded me of the way the Zodiac killer used to write, and this was in San Francisco. Nutty people make life more interesting.
I've been to one of those internet seminars where they try to tell you how to make money off of the internet. Many of you seem to think that there is some moral benefit to creating a "useful" site with good content. Not everyone is out there to create a site that will actually be useful to people. Many folks just want to make a quick dollar or two. Someone may make a site that sells some aggregated crap like ebooks or lists of on form or another. They could care less how their site looks; the most important thing is driving people to their business. Location, location, location. When you are competing with established players, you have to do what you can to gain any edge, and if that entails screwing up your site so that it looks horrible, but gets you to the number one spot in a search result, then so be it. To get to this spot is not free by any means; you have to pay just as much, if not more, to position yourself in any one spot in a search result if you are not paying for ads. But often the cost is cheaper, and to a startup business, that is a better idea. I have a friend who is a salsa teacher and who sells salsa dvds online. He has a lot of crap websites that look horrible, but which always get him to the top of the search results for certain terms. He has specifically told me that the worse a site looks, the better it sells. It's true! Site's like the faux Google site may look like crap, but the numbers are there; sites like that, which contain real content, actually do very well and make their owners a lot of money. The nicer you make a site, especially ones that sell information, and the more you doll it up, the worse it will do. This is totally counterintuitive, since I am myself a designer and web developer, but it does seem to be the case. This is not the case for sites that rely ont heir site just as a business card, but if you are trying to sell something HARD (Act now! For a limited time! Buy this product too and we will throw in more! An added bonus!) these horrible looking sites can do very well. So, the moral of the story is, don't be so cynical about these sorts of sites. They make our lives as developers and designers hard, but design is not always important. If someone wants to make a quick buck selling something and they screw up th look of their site to try to get to the top of Google's rankings, that's the way it has to be. Each time Google changes stuff around, the SEO people will find some other way around it.
I read about Polywell about two months ago here. After doing some research on it, I was very much enthusiastic about what I found out and wanted to build a website that would look more professional than the one the polywell folks currently have. At that time, they were still trying to find funding and/or investors, and it was my belief that having a real website, like a lot of energy companies and other places where people have ideas that need funding, would help out. I built one, with the idea that even if they decided not to use it, it would still work as a community forum. I am still trying to get a lot of the information exactly the way I want tit, but the website is here: http://www.xevioso.com/projects/polywell Unfortunately, after I sent the message to Dr. Bussard about a month ago to take a look at what I was building, he basically said that while it was a great site, it wasn't going to be useful to them int he near future because of some things coming down the line that would make it unneccesary. Of course, one month later, the Navy resumed funding. And now Dr. Bussard has passed on. In any event, if people would like to get some good information about this project, please visit the link above.
I, for one, welcome our new Octosquid overlords.
in that I'm currently a webmaster, and make a great living working from home. I think the key is diversity...large projects require lots of people with a few talents, or a few people with many talents. The latter is generally cheaper and easier to work with, so compamines are often very willing to work with one reliable person who can handle a multitude of tasks. It's true that there's no way I can keep abreast of all of the technologies, but I try...that's why I read /.
The thing is, the skills required for smaller jobs, which is generally where I make my living, are actually a lot less than what is needed to work on very large projects. That's not to say that any monkey could do them, or if they could, they probably couldn't do it as quick or as well.
I feel strongly that design is an integral part of a good website, and if a company can find a person who can handle the design, development, implementation, QA and installation of a site, they will jump at the chance. I'm also discovering that being able to manage a site by understanding and choosing the right technologies is just as valuable as building the site.
We exist, but the skills required are pretty diverse. I think the main reason not so many of us exist is that many people specialized in one type of web skill and did not jump at the chances they had to learn new skills. On the days I'm not using HTML I'm happily designing sites, or building them in Flash, or doing UI development work.
I will assume your questions are serious and you aren't a troll. 1) Fossils are hard to find because they are hard tomake. Fossilization of a creature occurs very rarely today even when we can view it happenning...you have to have just the right type of environmental conditions in order for a creature to be preserved for a long period of time naturally. Also, remember, sediment continually gets laid down over time for menay reasons, but scientists are only looking at exposed layers, EXCEPT whent hey have reasont o think a fossil will be exactly 6 feet down at exactly this spot. This type of occurrence is rare. We will be finding fossils for a very long time to come. 2) Scientists say we are genetically close, not close in appearance. And no, the dumbest human is NOT more advanced than the smartest ape. I've met many people that are dumber than the smartest ape. Evolution is not a crock of shit. It's science. Go read a book.
One thing I found interesting about the NYTimes article was the out-and out blunt way in which the paleontologists involved said that this answers specific challenges from Creationists. In the past, even though this would still be seen in scientific journals as a "transitional" species, the cultural relevance to the battle between science and creationism would never get mentioned, or even explored.
l _fossils) prosynosychus is one that I saw when I took a tourist trip to Cambridge a few years ago. The fact that scientists are bluntly calling this a transitional fossil is almost as interesting as the fossil itself.
So my theory is, after the recent battles between the two ways of thinking in the educational world, and after Eugenie Scott's seminars at the recent scientist convention (I can't remember the name of the organization) wherein she basically said that scientists need to play hardball and come right out and oppose creationism in a very public fashion, I wonder if these paleontologists were doing just that when they mentioned this creature as a transitional form.
There are lots of other transitional creatures out there; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitiona
Look, it doesnt matter how light the ship is...why the heck would you make it that big unless...you wanted to carry a lot of stuff. Ie, tanks. Artillery. Supplies. That sort of technology, if feasible, would be perfect for transporting an army anywhere in the world in less than a day. So that technology would assist in keeping the plane afloat, as well as the fact that it is incredibly boyant. Now, something else interesting is looking at the debate in congress recently over the crreation of the Crusader artillery piece. The main argument against it in congress was because a: the opponents believed we didn't need it, and b: it is so heavy that it would be inneffective in a real situation because it would take so long to get there. But with a plane like this, it makes it a much more useful weapon. A very good use for this plane would be an attack on China. China is known for it's slow responses to crisis events. Once they get going, look out. But they are slow. So imagine they attack Taiwan. For whatever reason. We decide to assist, and God forbid, go to war. We take a bunch of these blimps, load em with tanks, artilelry, you name it, and land it RIGHT SMACK in Tienanment square and occupy the People's Party Congress in less than a day. China wouldn't even know what had hit em. No invasion, no land war, no collateral damage...just boom, instant government change. It could happen.