I've heard that squeak, a LISP/small-talk derivative, is ideal for teaching children. I don't really know much about it, but I've read claims that kids can get going with graphics and sound in short order. It's included in the OLPC software.
DO ANY OF YOU MAKE A LIVING DEVELOPING OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE? I make a living developing ON open source software. Do you know understand why I might be rabid in supporting my bread and butter?
I'm sorry, but open-source software doesn't pay the bills. Sure, there are some who are paid by RedHat, Novell, etc., but really, you can't make a living with open-source software. I make a living on open source software. It pays my bills. BTW, are you aware of MySQL and Redhat? Both are companies that make profit by developing and delivering OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE.
So why do slashdotters support it so rabidly? Are there so many few slashdotters that actually earn a living developing software? Plenty of slashdotters make their living developing software. They develop it *using* open source. If you think that means that open source development itself is going to dry up in the near future, you have 15 years of incredible growth to argue against.
And then, if unpaid open-source development starts to dry up, that creates an incentive for *paid* open source development.
The open source community raised €200k to open source the blender code. If PHP or MySQL said, "sorry folks, we can't do it any more, gotta pay the bills", the open source community would whip up cash in sort order. "Gee Boss, we can either migrate our whole system to Windows, or send $30 to the PHP development team." I personally would pay them myself, since I'm an independent contractor.
> Well, if it happens faster than 100 years, then it will be too fast for us to deal with in our major port cities.
You keep saying this, but (other than your extremely dubious assertion about the vital importance of skyscrapers to a functioning port) you never offer any actual reason why this would be the case.
It doesn't matter if people live in skyscrapers or ranch houses. If it all goes underwater, that entire population is looking for a new home, instead of rebuilding and operating the nearby port.
The problem is you keep talking about a single port city, but sea levels are *global*. If sea levels rise, that affects all port cities everywhere. There's no rising sea level scenario where you're only talking about one city.
Water is peculiar in that frozen water has a *smaller volume* than liquid water. So even if an iceberg is floating in water, if it melts, there is a net increase in the volume of water. Add to inland glaciers melting ( the whole continent of Antartica) and the ice shelves, and you're talking about much higher sea levels.
It's balderdash. Ten years would be more than enough time to move the essential port industries of any given city inland, if it were *necessary* to move them that fast (which is highly unlikely in the kind of scenario we're talking about).
Okay, but is it enough time to move *all* port operations of every major port city, all around the world? What about the intense competition for construction equipment and building material. What about the fact that we couldn't ship anything in or out of these sea-logged ports?
> Populations do shift, but only if there is an impetus to do so. If you have a perfectly good life in Ireland,
> why would you leave? Well, you would if there were, say, a potato famine and you were starving. Otherwise,
> people live in the same cities they have for thousands of years.
This is sort of true, but you exaggerate the importance of catastrophe as an impetus. There are other empeti.
There are other impeti, but I the historical record shows that catastrophe evacuating a city permanently has happened many times over. Pompei was still encased in volcanic ash until we dug it out recently.
Thousands of people move to New York City every year just because of the things that are there, that are philosophically attractive to them, e.g., the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, and so forth. Thousands of people also move *out* of the city, to get away from things they don't like, e.g., crime, overcrowding, and smog. Thousands of people move to Florida every year from the northern US, mostly for the weather. Others move north. Many college graduates every year move to a different part of the country just to be farther away from their parents. There are lots of reasons.
Yes, the population of cities fluctuate. But I don't see why you think a natural disaster would change the population in a city in a major way. Lots of people left New Orleans; some came back months and years later; now they are leaving again because very little is being rebuilt, there is little to no infrastructure, and the cost of living is too high. So now people are leaving again. New Orleans is a shell of its former self.
It's not the middle ages anymore. Transportation is cheap now. People move.
But transportation *won't* be as cheap if we lose port cities due to sea levels ( which again, means all around the world) rise. If there's a major impetus, like rising ocean levels turning the state of Florida into an archipelago over the course of three decades, then everyone will be moving in more or less the same direction (inland) rather than all in different directions. (As I think I indicated, I think six centuries is a vastly more likely timeframe, given the extreme slowness, to the point of imperceptibility, of any purported rises of ocean levels thus far. Nonetheless, three decades would be a lot of time for people -- and businesses
"said he would "hit criminals in their wallets" by boosting restitution and ensuring all ill-gotten gains are forfeited, as well as any property used to commit the crimes."
So, what if no one's profiting off of the infringement? Sounds to me like any copyrighted material you download will be considered profit, and even if it isn't, they will still confiscate your computer, router, etc. Maybe even your iPod and stereo!
If they can find a profit anywhere in the chain of stuff you may have downloaded or shared, they may consider your stuff part of the crime.
Just like a mouth smile isn't the perfect arc of a parenthese, the changes in the eye of a true smile aren't a perfect angle. When you smile, the skin wrinkles up around the outside of the eye. This is what these shift-6 characters are representing. You can even have an 'eye smile' without very much going on with the mouth.
Also not that a fake smile does not have the wrinkling of the eyes like a true smile does.
However, ocean levels rising is too gradual to be a major catastrophe at that level.
Well, if it happens faster than 100 years, then it will be too fast for us to deal with in our major port cities.
People like you have been concerned about it since may parents were in gradeschool and to date the anticipated ocean level rises have pretty much entirely failed to materialize. I'm not saying they can't or won't, but I'm saing hat it only happens very slooowly. You said yourself "decades".
And decades and centuries are exactly the amount of time it takes for major cities to be built. That's why I'm saying it would be a slow shift, a 'collapse' in the archaeological sense, on the order of centuries.
I suspect more like centuries, but even if it's decades, that's a long time for the kind of thing you're talking about. Populations shift quite a bit in that amount of time, naturally, even without something like the ocean coming along and making the original location less habitable.
Populations do shift, but only if there is an impetus to do so. If you have a perfectly good life in Ireland, why would you leave? Well, you would if there were, say, a potato famine and you were starving. Otherwise, people live in the same cities they have for thousands of years.
There are specific countries that might become non-viable, notably the Netherlands (which is sinking relative to the land around them, at least partly because draining the water out of the ground reduces its volume and lowers its surface), but civilization as we know it is not going to be ended by a two hundred foot increase in ocean levels over several decades.
I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by civilization as we know it. I'm talking about shipping in food from around the world, oil from the middle east, and manufactured goods from China. A single person driving a gas-guzzling car to work every morning. It's not going to be Mad Max, but just a lower standard of living than we are currently used to.
You're telling me that if the Netherlands sinks, the world as the Dutch know it is basically the same? How about there being no more Netherlands? Unless you mean 'life as we know it' including shifts of population and power occuring every few centuries, with the rise and fall of various empires. I don't think people include mass migrations and the rise and fall of political states as part of their every life, or "the world as they know it".
If it happened over the course of several days, maybe, but that's entirely a different and more catastrophic kind of scenario.
I think we agree that's not what either of us are talking about. Basically I'm saying "life as we know it" is getting up for work in the morning, driving an hour to work in a personal car, buying goods made in China, and pumping gas from Saudi Arabia. I guess you have a different definition of "the world as we know it".
> If we depend on our port cities to feed ourselves with food from around the world.
Actually, virtually every first-world country is a net exporter of food. It's one of the key socio-economic features that macroeconomists look at. It's very hard for developing countries to make any real progress toward a healthy economy unless they can first figure out how to feed their own people without importing food.
Ok, I'll concede on this one. I don't know much about US food importation/exportation. But we do rely on foreign imports for oil and manufactured items.
And if the ocean levels rise, there will still be port cities. Just as many of them. They'll just be in slightly different places.
Right, but my point is that it will take time to build them, it will take decades to get them up to the capacity that they currently operate, and rebuilding will be hindered if we suddenly can't import materials in our underwater ports.
The Big Bang stopped more or less at helium, and things like uranium have to cook in non-equilibrium processes like supernovas. So then what defines the big bang, so that we can say when it ends? I was under the impression that we were in the middle of the big bang, that the big bang is basically the universe itself, it's just that we're sort of in the middle or end of the explosion part. It isn't so bangin' now.
I apologize if I was being overly dramatic. I think you are projecting the Hollywood image on what I'm talking about. It's not an overnight cataclysm where millions die and dogs and raccoons are eating dead bodies in the street. There would be mass migrations, low-level conflicts of gangs, revolutions and civil wars, starvations, but most people would still be alive. I believe it's silly to think that the modern world is somehow immune from the natural disasters that caused so much suffering documented in history. If anything, we are more vulnerable.If we depend on our port cities to feed ourselves with food from around the world. If we can't import food from South America, oil from the middle east, and tractors from China, it will take years to ramp up our home production of food enough to feed everyone. We cannot support our current lifestyles in the US with the domestic production infrastructure we have now. We rely on ports to maintain our lifestyle. Sure, we can eventually ramp up domestic production and become self-sufficient, but that's another process that takes decades.
We can't migrate skyscrapers, and we can rebuild them, but that takes decades. And it will take a lot longer time if we can't import material, food, and fuel from around the world. The skylines we see today are the result of 100 years of constant building. Just as the collapse wouldn't happen overnight, the rebuilding wouldn't happen overnight. It would take another 100 years for Philadelphia to have a skyline like New York does today.
Like I said in my post, which I think you overlooked and then repeated as part of your own argument, the balance of power would shift to those people and cities who are more inland. Instead of NY being the financial capitol, it might be Philadelphia or Denver. The other thing is that our port cities are how we ship goods around the world. So if we lose our ports, there goes the current world market as we know it today. Yes, we can and will rebuilt our ports and global shipping infrastructure, but again, that will take decades if not centuries to get that infrastructure similar to what we have today. Sure, Denver might become the next major financial or political capitol, but it will never be a port city. Port cities are the key here, because they are what creates "the world as we know it today". Yes, we can make a new New York somewhere more inland, but we have to build port cities (and ports and ships) next to the sea. If the sea levels change fast enough, we will have a hard time keeping up with it. Thus we won't be able to maintain the material society we live in today, where most of our food and goods come from overseas. We will still have communication with the rest of the world, but we won't be as materially interconnected, because we rely on ships and ports for the transport of goods.
Just as the past 200 years and the rise of the United States as the global superpower was a major change in the balance of power in the world, the next 100 years would show a shift in the balance of power in various cities and countries. When archaeologists talk about the collapse of a civilization, they are talking about a process that happens over decades or even centuries. At one point, the Aztecs controlled everything that happened in Mesoamerica; 200 years later, the capitol city is a ghost town, and nobody alive then or now considers themselves Aztecs, the rulers of the area. It's the same story with every Empire that doesn't exist today.
Just take what you think I'm saying about a catastrophe, stretch it out over decades or centuries, and get rid of a lot of death. It will be more a slow collapse of our infrastructure and shifts in the balance of power, which has been documented many times archaeologically and historically. There are dozens of lost cities and abandoned capitols buried beneath the sands and the seas. At one time, they were the centers of power in their regions. Somehow or other, the economy and the society collapsed, people migrated to outlying villages and towns, and the 'Empire' just disappeared. It may happen here in the next century; it might happen in the next 1000 years. The Earth is always changing, at different speeds, and human societies are subject to its machinations.
He said that the cult is the underdog, the religion is the mainstream. Both have their fanatical adherents. In the case of the Yankees, they are the mainstream religion, and again, like both sides, they have their fanbois.
This suggestion does not meet the needs for the question submitter, but I'd like to clue in other slashdot readers who might be reading this.
Scry is a great, simple, easy-to-install PHP image gallery. Just download it, unpack it, and upload your photos, organized in folders, to the 'photos' directory. The first time you view the site, Scry will create thumbnails and index images.
It requires write permissions on the server ( to create the thumbnails and index images) and it relies on GD support being compiled in to PHP. It does not have the tagging capabilities that the questioner is looking for, so it's not a solution in that sense. It doesn't require MySQL or any other database. So if you want to put up a photo gallery only by manipulating the file system, Scry is great.
Here too in the US, we have laws against "reckless driving" and "reckless endangerment". Cops can use these charges as sort of a carte blanche for any kind of dangerous driving. But those charges take some interpretation or perspective. A defendant might argue, "Yes, I was texting, but I was in control of my vehicle; I wasn't endangering anybody". A law specifically banning testing while driving is harder to defend against.
Well, I think it's that when you are in close quarters in a well-heated environment, you pick up a lot of germs from the people you're with, and then if/when you go outside, especially without a hat, or if you get wet, your body's response to the cold weakens your immune system response to the point where it allows the germs to get a foothold they otherwise wouldn't have when your cozy, warm and at full immune system response.
Given that the US is generally an innocent-till-proven-guilty society That's true of our legal system, but the court of public opinion is guilty until proven innocent.
As far as congress, they are simply doing what will get their faces, and more importantly their names in the media, so that they will win their next election. They would be getting free campaign advertising out of it, more than money can buy. They look like they are serving the public interest, when there are more pressing issues, which are more difficult to navigate politically. This issue is 'safe'. If they 'convict' the guy, they come out as heroes; if they've suffered an innocent man, then there is little political fallout, in terms of election, special interest group ( and no, pressure from the scientific community is not strong enough to motivate congress ), corporations who finance their campaigns... and they still get their names in the papers and on TV.
It's basically a popularity competition... <sigh> I guess representative democracy is the least worst form of government that has been shown to work. Personally, I'm in favor of direct democracy.
The real concern is rising ocean levels. Human beings build their major settlements around water, because it provides cheap transportation. Almost all of our major financial and capital cities are port cities. If the sea levels rise enough, we could lose all of them all around the world. This wouldn't be the end of humanity, but it would be the end of the current world as we know it. Imagine losing NY, London, Shanghai, etc. all in a few decades. We can't migrate skyscrapers. They would all be underwater like so many mytho-historical cities. So the modern global society would suffer a great loss in terms of infrastructure, and people and cities currently inland enough would slowly rebuild society.
It would be the end of the historical era, and a thousand years from now, archaeologists would be scanning the sea floors for the ancient lost cities of what might be called the 'modern era'.
Blood types are description of antigens (or something like that) on the surface of blood cells. Types A and B are two different antigens; 0 means a lack of antigens. The +/- is the presence or absence of another antigen. So someone who is AB+ has A, B and + antigens, and their blood would be a problem for anybody but AB+ types. 0- has no antigens ( or at least, none of the antigens that cause problems), so they can donate to anyone. 0+ can donate to anyone who has +, B+ can donate to anyone with B+ -- people who are B+ or AB+. I may not be remembering this correctly so anyone more informed, please pipe up.
Since the immune system has learned that your antigens are safe, it only reacts to 'foreign' antigens. If these plastic molecules or structure have no antigens, and they probably don't, then there is no problem with any blood type. But there may be other, non-antigen problems that crop up with this artificial blood. However, the benefits might outweigh the risks in a life-or-death situation.
Creationists . . . I don't even know where to start. Creationism is more reasonable than Flat-earth theory, but not much. The only real defense there is it is hard to make your own experiments to test evolution. You could see how you are a combination of your parents and extrapolate from there. I suppose you could take a weak antibiotic once a month until you develop some resistant bacteria or something, but that is a whole different variety of bad idea. I thought of this experiment once, to 'prove' evolution.
Basically, the most reasonable creationists will argue that mutation can explain variations within a species, but cannot produce new species. So white moths can turn black, but you won't get a fish developing new organs or limbs, or turning into a frog. You can get variation, but not new species. God, with His intelligence, created all the various species in the six days of Creation account for in Genesis.
So what we would have to show is the arising of a new species. Here's the experiment:
Start with a species that is well-described both morphologically and whose entire genome is mapped. I think fruit flies would be a good example, since they have short life spans, are easy to care for, and are probably well understood.
Put the species in a dual-part environment. One part is like their natural environment, where they can survive. The other half of the area is a place where they can't survive very well, but there might be an opportunity to exploit. For fruit flies, this might be a 'flying zone' where they can fly about, and also have a place to land, lay their eggs, whatever they do on land. Also they have food here. The second part would be maybe a water area, that has food. Hopefully, they don't drown in water, but could make it back to shore after treading water a bit.
See if they develop mutations that allow them to exploit the other environment -- i.e., they start eating the food in the water.
If there are no beneficial, selective mutations, put pressure on the 'safe' environment. For fruit flies, take away some space, or limit the amount of food in the safe environment. Or add some radiation to increase mutation rates.
Repeat ad naseum over a few thousand generations.
Document every dead organism that you take out of the environment. Describe it physiologically, map its genome, create an evolutionary tree of the entire population. Put each dead organism on ice you can study it in the future. This data will demonstrate each and every mutation that eventually led to a new species.
If you start to see beneficial mutations that allow it to adapt to the hostile environment, put more pressure on the safe environment. Less space, less food, more radiation, etc.
If need be, branch a population that has adapted to the new environment that only has the hostile conditions. Create another dual-condition space where they must evolve even more to exploit the conditions of the new hostile environment.
If mutation does drive evolution, after several thousand generations, we should see new proteins, tissues, organs, and macro-scale morphological changes. Eventually you will get an organism that cannot reproduce with descendants of the friendly-environment descendants. If it looks different enough, nobody would seriously claim that this is not a new species, a new organism.
Although, some stubborn creationists will argue that this would only be evidence of intelligence design. The intelligent human experimenters, who Genesis tells us are like a God and has the intelligence of God, created the new species, so it can't ( not doesn't, but can't ) happen naturally, without intelligent intervention). There people will never be convinced by any amount of evidence. Whatever natural event that might look like evolution was actually driven by an intelligence, either God or God-like man. But a reasonable interpreter would have to concede that these stressful environments *can* happen in nature, and that new species can evolve without intelligent intervention.
From the outside, it looks more like a corporate state, run by various lobbyist groups and "advisors", with a fun show thrown every four years with spectator participation to keep the masses entertained. I think that's a fairly accurate description of our politics at this point. But ultimately, all governments operate by the consent of the governed. It's simply a numbers game -- there are more subjects than there are rulers. So too is it in the United States. Even slaves can overthrow their masters if they organize themselves and rebel. With the constitution and the history of the United States, we will certainly have a much easier time than slaves would. Unfortuneately, things are still going relatively well in the United States -- the majority of people are not starving or desperate, so we don't quite have the incredible motivation that slaves would have. But the standard of living is getting worse. Hopefully we can set things on the right path again before it gets too much worse.
If we can push our representatives with strength and unity, we can get this veto overridden. And if we push back strongly enough, we can wrest control of our government out of the hands of the corporations. I'm not saying it will be easy, nor will it happen overnight. But if we stick to it, we can do it. Please, don't give up, or we will become serfs again.
You need... a Presidential signature The congress can override a veto with a 2/3rds majority vote.
It's up to us to put pressure on our representatives to do it. Don't give up and leave it in Bush's hands. The United States is a democracy of, by, and for the people. If Bush gets away with vetoing this, it will only be because we let him.
Well, until somebody does "blow open" dark matter, like Einstein did for ether, people will continue to rely on dark matter, because we have a big dark hole in our cosmological model. Dark matter really isn't all that complicated to understand. It's just like the name reads. It says that there is a mass out there that we can't detect at all, but its existence is implied by current theory and calculations.It doesn't really explain what is going on, so much as it just points out what we don't yet completely understand.
If you add up all the visible, detectable matter in the universe, and calculate how much gravity there is keeping the whole universe together, they don't add up. There isn't enough visible matter for the universe to hold together the way it does. As far as we know, only matter generates gravitational pull, so therefore there must be some matter generating gravity that we can't yet detect.
It may very well be that the only way to detect 'dark matter' is we measure it in the missing gravity over and above the gavity generated by 'bright', visible, detectable matter. That may be all there is to dark matter -- it it simply a gravity generating phenomena, like other matter, except that it doesn't interact with the universe in any way other than creating gravitational pull.
If you want people to abandon the 'theory' -- and it isn't really a theory, it's just people describing the gaping hole in the measurement of matter versus the amount of gravity in the universe -- then you have to come up with an alternative explanation that does a better job. Right now dark matter is the best explanation of our observations.
I thought Han Solo stories would be cool -- something ala James Bond. The plots would be the various adventures and tight calls Han had to make as a smuggler. Get rid of the Jedis, get rid of the rebellion and saving the galaxy, show us the dark, seedy, varied underworlds of the galaxy. Show us the dark side of Han.
And generally it provides a more stable work environment. You can decide where in the country you want to work, and if you get fed up with your employer, you can go work for somebody else more easily than in an IT position. You can also work more easily in smaller markets, so you don't have to pay for expensive housing in metropolitan areas. Also, car repair is not something that is about to be outsourced anytime soon.
Yes, you still have to deal with complex problems, trial-and-error fixing, and customer service. So there are benefits and downsides.
I can tell you flat out that privatization has helped the quality of research and pace of progress in the fields that I work in: physics and fundamental computer science...
I've written more papers than I can count for my previous employer... yet I'll never be able to show them to anyone outside of the company, or have them cited in public publications, because they're commercially sensitive and would be easily exploitable by competitors for profit. OK, so privatization helps the pace and quality of research... but doesn't that lead to duplication of effort, and a general stymieing of knowledge in the field? If you are doing some great research, but it only reaches other people in your company, aren't there 50 other companies who are doing the exact same research, but only keeping it internal?
So what happens after a generation or two of all of the cutting edge research happening solely within corporations, who aren't sharing with each other? Wouldn't that basically put a halt to the progress of the field, since in order to learn cutting edge stuff, you would have to go to a company after your degree, and then you are bound up by the confidentiality agreements, and nobody can legally reverse engineer the fruits of your research because of laws like the DMCA?
It might be faster than the university for a while, but after that while, it would seem to peter out to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard that squeak, a LISP/small-talk derivative, is ideal for teaching children. I don't really know much about it, but I've read claims that kids can get going with graphics and sound in short order. It's included in the OLPC software.
And then, if unpaid open-source development starts to dry up, that creates an incentive for *paid* open source development.
The open source community raised €200k to open source the blender code. If PHP or MySQL said, "sorry folks, we can't do it any more, gotta pay the bills", the open source community would whip up cash in sort order. "Gee Boss, we can either migrate our whole system to Windows, or send $30 to the PHP development team." I personally would pay them myself, since I'm an independent contractor.
OK, then, could we seed hurricanes in the ocean where they can do less damage, if we can't stop them?
> Well, if it happens faster than 100 years, then it will be too fast for us to deal with in our major port cities. You keep saying this, but (other than your extremely dubious assertion about the vital importance of skyscrapers to a functioning port) you never offer any actual reason why this would be the case.
It doesn't matter if people live in skyscrapers or ranch houses. If it all goes underwater, that entire population is looking for a new home, instead of rebuilding and operating the nearby port.
The problem is you keep talking about a single port city, but sea levels are *global*. If sea levels rise, that affects all port cities everywhere. There's no rising sea level scenario where you're only talking about one city.
Water is peculiar in that frozen water has a *smaller volume* than liquid water. So even if an iceberg is floating in water, if it melts, there is a net increase in the volume of water. Add to inland glaciers melting ( the whole continent of Antartica) and the ice shelves, and you're talking about much higher sea levels.
It's balderdash. Ten years would be more than enough time to move the essential port industries of any given city inland, if it were *necessary* to move them that fast (which is highly unlikely in the kind of scenario we're talking about).
Okay, but is it enough time to move *all* port operations of every major port city, all around the world? What about the intense competition for construction equipment and building material. What about the fact that we couldn't ship anything in or out of these sea-logged ports?
> Populations do shift, but only if there is an impetus to do so. If you have a perfectly good life in Ireland, > why would you leave? Well, you would if there were, say, a potato famine and you were starving. Otherwise, > people live in the same cities they have for thousands of years. This is sort of true, but you exaggerate the importance of catastrophe as an impetus. There are other empeti.
There are other impeti, but I the historical record shows that catastrophe evacuating a city permanently has happened many times over. Pompei was still encased in volcanic ash until we dug it out recently.
Thousands of people move to New York City every year just because of the things that are there, that are philosophically attractive to them, e.g., the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, and so forth. Thousands of people also move *out* of the city, to get away from things they don't like, e.g., crime, overcrowding, and smog. Thousands of people move to Florida every year from the northern US, mostly for the weather. Others move north. Many college graduates every year move to a different part of the country just to be farther away from their parents. There are lots of reasons.
Yes, the population of cities fluctuate. But I don't see why you think a natural disaster would change the population in a city in a major way. Lots of people left New Orleans; some came back months and years later; now they are leaving again because very little is being rebuilt, there is little to no infrastructure, and the cost of living is too high. So now people are leaving again. New Orleans is a shell of its former self.
It's not the middle ages anymore. Transportation is cheap now. People move.
But transportation *won't* be as cheap if we lose port cities due to sea levels ( which again, means all around the world) rise. If there's a major impetus, like rising ocean levels turning the state of Florida into an archipelago over the course of three decades, then everyone will be moving in more or less the same direction (inland) rather than all in different directions. (As I think I indicated, I think six centuries is a vastly more likely timeframe, given the extreme slowness, to the point of imperceptibility, of any purported rises of ocean levels thus far. Nonetheless, three decades would be a lot of time for people -- and businesses
If they can find a profit anywhere in the chain of stuff you may have downloaded or shared, they may consider your stuff part of the crime.
A few questions: Couldn't this method be defeated by applying various photoshop effects to each frame? Is it a question of how much you change?
Also, wouldn't the video editors change the frame rate and do some other transformations in the video? What about various encoding schemes?
Basically, could you transform it enough to repost it and defeat the matching algorithms?
Just like a mouth smile isn't the perfect arc of a parenthese, the changes in the eye of a true smile aren't a perfect angle. When you smile, the skin wrinkles up around the outside of the eye. This is what these shift-6 characters are representing. You can even have an 'eye smile' without very much going on with the mouth.
Also not that a fake smile does not have the wrinkling of the eyes like a true smile does.
However, ocean levels rising is too gradual to be a major catastrophe at that level.
Well, if it happens faster than 100 years, then it will be too fast for us to deal with in our major port cities.
People like you have been concerned about it since may parents were in gradeschool and to date the anticipated ocean level rises have pretty much entirely failed to materialize. I'm not saying they can't or won't, but I'm saing hat it only happens very slooowly. You said yourself "decades".
And decades and centuries are exactly the amount of time it takes for major cities to be built. That's why I'm saying it would be a slow shift, a 'collapse' in the archaeological sense, on the order of centuries.
I suspect more like centuries, but even if it's decades, that's a long time for the kind of thing you're talking about. Populations shift quite a bit in that amount of time, naturally, even without something like the ocean coming along and making the original location less habitable.
Populations do shift, but only if there is an impetus to do so. If you have a perfectly good life in Ireland, why would you leave? Well, you would if there were, say, a potato famine and you were starving. Otherwise, people live in the same cities they have for thousands of years.
There are specific countries that might become non-viable, notably the Netherlands (which is sinking relative to the land around them, at least partly because draining the water out of the ground reduces its volume and lowers its surface), but civilization as we know it is not going to be ended by a two hundred foot increase in ocean levels over several decades. I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by civilization as we know it. I'm talking about shipping in food from around the world, oil from the middle east, and manufactured goods from China. A single person driving a gas-guzzling car to work every morning. It's not going to be Mad Max, but just a lower standard of living than we are currently used to. You're telling me that if the Netherlands sinks, the world as the Dutch know it is basically the same? How about there being no more Netherlands? Unless you mean 'life as we know it' including shifts of population and power occuring every few centuries, with the rise and fall of various empires. I don't think people include mass migrations and the rise and fall of political states as part of their every life, or "the world as they know it".
If it happened over the course of several days, maybe, but that's entirely a different and more catastrophic kind of scenario.
I think we agree that's not what either of us are talking about. Basically I'm saying "life as we know it" is getting up for work in the morning, driving an hour to work in a personal car, buying goods made in China, and pumping gas from Saudi Arabia. I guess you have a different definition of "the world as we know it".
> If we depend on our port cities to feed ourselves with food from around the world. Actually, virtually every first-world country is a net exporter of food. It's one of the key socio-economic features that macroeconomists look at. It's very hard for developing countries to make any real progress toward a healthy economy unless they can first figure out how to feed their own people without importing food.
Ok, I'll concede on this one. I don't know much about US food importation/exportation. But we do rely on foreign imports for oil and manufactured items.
And if the ocean levels rise, there will still be port cities. Just as many of them. They'll just be in slightly different places.
Right, but my point is that it will take time to build them, it will take decades to get them up to the capacity that they currently operate, and rebuilding will be hindered if we suddenly can't import materials in our underwater ports.
> Instead of NY being the finan
I apologize if I was being overly dramatic. I think you are projecting the Hollywood image on what I'm talking about. It's not an overnight cataclysm where millions die and dogs and raccoons are eating dead bodies in the street. There would be mass migrations, low-level conflicts of gangs, revolutions and civil wars, starvations, but most people would still be alive. I believe it's silly to think that the modern world is somehow immune from the natural disasters that caused so much suffering documented in history. If anything, we are more vulnerable.If we depend on our port cities to feed ourselves with food from around the world. If we can't import food from South America, oil from the middle east, and tractors from China, it will take years to ramp up our home production of food enough to feed everyone. We cannot support our current lifestyles in the US with the domestic production infrastructure we have now. We rely on ports to maintain our lifestyle. Sure, we can eventually ramp up domestic production and become self-sufficient, but that's another process that takes decades.
We can't migrate skyscrapers, and we can rebuild them, but that takes decades. And it will take a lot longer time if we can't import material, food, and fuel from around the world. The skylines we see today are the result of 100 years of constant building. Just as the collapse wouldn't happen overnight, the rebuilding wouldn't happen overnight. It would take another 100 years for Philadelphia to have a skyline like New York does today.
Like I said in my post, which I think you overlooked and then repeated as part of your own argument, the balance of power would shift to those people and cities who are more inland. Instead of NY being the financial capitol, it might be Philadelphia or Denver. The other thing is that our port cities are how we ship goods around the world. So if we lose our ports, there goes the current world market as we know it today. Yes, we can and will rebuilt our ports and global shipping infrastructure, but again, that will take decades if not centuries to get that infrastructure similar to what we have today. Sure, Denver might become the next major financial or political capitol, but it will never be a port city. Port cities are the key here, because they are what creates "the world as we know it today". Yes, we can make a new New York somewhere more inland, but we have to build port cities (and ports and ships) next to the sea. If the sea levels change fast enough, we will have a hard time keeping up with it. Thus we won't be able to maintain the material society we live in today, where most of our food and goods come from overseas. We will still have communication with the rest of the world, but we won't be as materially interconnected, because we rely on ships and ports for the transport of goods.
Just as the past 200 years and the rise of the United States as the global superpower was a major change in the balance of power in the world, the next 100 years would show a shift in the balance of power in various cities and countries. When archaeologists talk about the collapse of a civilization, they are talking about a process that happens over decades or even centuries. At one point, the Aztecs controlled everything that happened in Mesoamerica; 200 years later, the capitol city is a ghost town, and nobody alive then or now considers themselves Aztecs, the rulers of the area. It's the same story with every Empire that doesn't exist today.
Just take what you think I'm saying about a catastrophe, stretch it out over decades or centuries, and get rid of a lot of death. It will be more a slow collapse of our infrastructure and shifts in the balance of power, which has been documented many times archaeologically and historically. There are dozens of lost cities and abandoned capitols buried beneath the sands and the seas. At one time, they were the centers of power in their regions. Somehow or other, the economy and the society collapsed, people migrated to outlying villages and towns, and the 'Empire' just disappeared. It may happen here in the next century; it might happen in the next 1000 years. The Earth is always changing, at different speeds, and human societies are subject to its machinations.
He said that the cult is the underdog, the religion is the mainstream. Both have their fanatical adherents. In the case of the Yankees, they are the mainstream religion, and again, like both sides, they have their fanbois.
This suggestion does not meet the needs for the question submitter, but I'd like to clue in other slashdot readers who might be reading this.
Scry is a great, simple, easy-to-install PHP image gallery. Just download it, unpack it, and upload your photos, organized in folders, to the 'photos' directory. The first time you view the site, Scry will create thumbnails and index images.
It requires write permissions on the server ( to create the thumbnails and index images) and it relies on GD support being compiled in to PHP. It does not have the tagging capabilities that the questioner is looking for, so it's not a solution in that sense. It doesn't require MySQL or any other database. So if you want to put up a photo gallery only by manipulating the file system, Scry is great.
Here too in the US, we have laws against "reckless driving" and "reckless endangerment". Cops can use these charges as sort of a carte blanche for any kind of dangerous driving. But those charges take some interpretation or perspective. A defendant might argue, "Yes, I was texting, but I was in control of my vehicle; I wasn't endangering anybody". A law specifically banning testing while driving is harder to defend against.
Well, I think it's that when you are in close quarters in a well-heated environment, you pick up a lot of germs from the people you're with, and then if/when you go outside, especially without a hat, or if you get wet, your body's response to the cold weakens your immune system response to the point where it allows the germs to get a foothold they otherwise wouldn't have when your cozy, warm and at full immune system response.
As far as congress, they are simply doing what will get their faces, and more importantly their names in the media, so that they will win their next election. They would be getting free campaign advertising out of it, more than money can buy. They look like they are serving the public interest, when there are more pressing issues, which are more difficult to navigate politically. This issue is 'safe'. If they 'convict' the guy, they come out as heroes; if they've suffered an innocent man, then there is little political fallout, in terms of election, special interest group ( and no, pressure from the scientific community is not strong enough to motivate congress ), corporations who finance their campaigns... and they still get their names in the papers and on TV.
It's basically a popularity competition... <sigh> I guess representative democracy is the least worst form of government that has been shown to work. Personally, I'm in favor of direct democracy.
The real concern is rising ocean levels. Human beings build their major settlements around water, because it provides cheap transportation. Almost all of our major financial and capital cities are port cities. If the sea levels rise enough, we could lose all of them all around the world. This wouldn't be the end of humanity, but it would be the end of the current world as we know it. Imagine losing NY, London, Shanghai, etc. all in a few decades. We can't migrate skyscrapers. They would all be underwater like so many mytho-historical cities. So the modern global society would suffer a great loss in terms of infrastructure, and people and cities currently inland enough would slowly rebuild society.
It would be the end of the historical era, and a thousand years from now, archaeologists would be scanning the sea floors for the ancient lost cities of what might be called the 'modern era'.
Blood types are description of antigens (or something like that) on the surface of blood cells. Types A and B are two different antigens; 0 means a lack of antigens. The +/- is the presence or absence of another antigen. So someone who is AB+ has A, B and + antigens, and their blood would be a problem for anybody but AB+ types. 0- has no antigens ( or at least, none of the antigens that cause problems), so they can donate to anyone. 0+ can donate to anyone who has +, B+ can donate to anyone with B+ -- people who are B+ or AB+. I may not be remembering this correctly so anyone more informed, please pipe up.
Since the immune system has learned that your antigens are safe, it only reacts to 'foreign' antigens. If these plastic molecules or structure have no antigens, and they probably don't, then there is no problem with any blood type. But there may be other, non-antigen problems that crop up with this artificial blood. However, the benefits might outweigh the risks in a life-or-death situation.
Basically, the most reasonable creationists will argue that mutation can explain variations within a species, but cannot produce new species. So white moths can turn black, but you won't get a fish developing new organs or limbs, or turning into a frog. You can get variation, but not new species. God, with His intelligence, created all the various species in the six days of Creation account for in Genesis.
So what we would have to show is the arising of a new species. Here's the experiment:
- Start with a species that is well-described both morphologically and whose entire genome is mapped. I think fruit flies would be a good example, since they have short life spans, are easy to care for, and are probably well understood.
- Put the species in a dual-part environment. One part is like their natural environment, where they can survive. The other half of the area is a place where they can't survive very well, but there might be an opportunity to exploit. For fruit flies, this might be a 'flying zone' where they can fly about, and also have a place to land, lay their eggs, whatever they do on land. Also they have food here. The second part would be maybe a water area, that has food. Hopefully, they don't drown in water, but could make it back to shore after treading water a bit.
- See if they develop mutations that allow them to exploit the other environment -- i.e., they start eating the food in the water.
- If there are no beneficial, selective mutations, put pressure on the 'safe' environment. For fruit flies, take away some space, or limit the amount of food in the safe environment. Or add some radiation to increase mutation rates.
- Repeat ad naseum over a few thousand generations.
- Document every dead organism that you take out of the environment. Describe it physiologically, map its genome, create an evolutionary tree of the entire population. Put each dead organism on ice you can study it in the future. This data will demonstrate each and every mutation that eventually led to a new species.
- If you start to see beneficial mutations that allow it to adapt to the hostile environment, put more pressure on the safe environment. Less space, less food, more radiation, etc.
- If need be, branch a population that has adapted to the new environment that only has the hostile conditions. Create another dual-condition space where they must evolve even more to exploit the conditions of the new hostile environment.
If mutation does drive evolution, after several thousand generations, we should see new proteins, tissues, organs, and macro-scale morphological changes. Eventually you will get an organism that cannot reproduce with descendants of the friendly-environment descendants. If it looks different enough, nobody would seriously claim that this is not a new species, a new organism.Although, some stubborn creationists will argue that this would only be evidence of intelligence design. The intelligent human experimenters, who Genesis tells us are like a God and has the intelligence of God, created the new species, so it can't ( not doesn't, but can't ) happen naturally, without intelligent intervention). There people will never be convinced by any amount of evidence. Whatever natural event that might look like evolution was actually driven by an intelligence, either God or God-like man. But a reasonable interpreter would have to concede that these stressful environments *can* happen in nature, and that new species can evolve without intelligent intervention.
If we can push our representatives with strength and unity, we can get this veto overridden. And if we push back strongly enough, we can wrest control of our government out of the hands of the corporations. I'm not saying it will be easy, nor will it happen overnight. But if we stick to it, we can do it. Please, don't give up, or we will become serfs again.
It's up to us to put pressure on our representatives to do it. Don't give up and leave it in Bush's hands. The United States is a democracy of, by, and for the people. If Bush gets away with vetoing this, it will only be because we let him.
Well, until somebody does "blow open" dark matter, like Einstein did for ether, people will continue to rely on dark matter, because we have a big dark hole in our cosmological model. Dark matter really isn't all that complicated to understand. It's just like the name reads. It says that there is a mass out there that we can't detect at all, but its existence is implied by current theory and calculations.It doesn't really explain what is going on, so much as it just points out what we don't yet completely understand.
If you add up all the visible, detectable matter in the universe, and calculate how much gravity there is keeping the whole universe together, they don't add up. There isn't enough visible matter for the universe to hold together the way it does. As far as we know, only matter generates gravitational pull, so therefore there must be some matter generating gravity that we can't yet detect.
It may very well be that the only way to detect 'dark matter' is we measure it in the missing gravity over and above the gavity generated by 'bright', visible, detectable matter. That may be all there is to dark matter -- it it simply a gravity generating phenomena, like other matter, except that it doesn't interact with the universe in any way other than creating gravitational pull.
If you want people to abandon the 'theory' -- and it isn't really a theory, it's just people describing the gaping hole in the measurement of matter versus the amount of gravity in the universe -- then you have to come up with an alternative explanation that does a better job. Right now dark matter is the best explanation of our observations.
I thought Han Solo stories would be cool -- something ala James Bond. The plots would be the various adventures and tight calls Han had to make as a smuggler. Get rid of the Jedis, get rid of the rebellion and saving the galaxy, show us the dark, seedy, varied underworlds of the galaxy. Show us the dark side of Han.
And generally it provides a more stable work environment. You can decide where in the country you want to work, and if you get fed up with your employer, you can go work for somebody else more easily than in an IT position. You can also work more easily in smaller markets, so you don't have to pay for expensive housing in metropolitan areas. Also, car repair is not something that is about to be outsourced anytime soon.
Yes, you still have to deal with complex problems, trial-and-error fixing, and customer service. So there are benefits and downsides.
I'm trying to set up the same lifestyle for myself. What do you do about health insurance?
I've written more papers than I can count for my previous employer
So what happens after a generation or two of all of the cutting edge research happening solely within corporations, who aren't sharing with each other? Wouldn't that basically put a halt to the progress of the field, since in order to learn cutting edge stuff, you would have to go to a company after your degree, and then you are bound up by the confidentiality agreements, and nobody can legally reverse engineer the fruits of your research because of laws like the DMCA?
It might be faster than the university for a while, but after that while, it would seem to peter out to me.