Actually it's Intel's business practices during the time (and before) Athlon was "king of the world" that are at issue. They fed companies "cooperative marketing" funds (read cash handouts and sweetheart pricing deals) via the "Intel Inside" program that were not based on how much Intel product they moved, but rather on them not selling AMD parts. There were companies that wanted to sell more AMD, but couldn't because with the amount of money Intel was giving them, it simply didn't make sense. They would have been crushed by competitors who were willing to play ball with Intel.
Thus was Athlon's marketshare artificially limited, which can be seen as a cause of AMD later falling behind. There was a brief period in the K8 days where AMD was fab capacity limited, but this too is because AMD had not secured enough revenue from Athlon to build as aggressively as they would have otherwise.
As usual, legal entities like the FTC move slowly, and the issues they actually act upon are thus well in the past. Not that Intel stopped engaging in these practices until (possibly) very recently, when other trade organizations around the globe started hammering them and AMD's lawsuit against them was settled in AMD's favor. It's just understandably harder to see the business practice issues when Intel's products are also superior.
Don't worry, I was acknowledging that this was the case. I'm just disagreeing with the notion that having government agents surreptitiously posting on web forums wouldn't be that bad as an actual policy.
Human brainsize was limited to surviving natural birth. With c-section, this is not an issue, and any brainsize is OK. Since a big brain is a very good survival tool, in not too many generations all infants will have brains too big for natural birth, and can only survive with a c-section
See, and this is where the principle of "good enough" I was talking about comes in. While certainly our large brains compared to other animals gave us a significant survival advantage, it is not at all clear that a small increase in brain size will provide a distinct survival advantage over the typical human brain in our current environment. Our current brains are clearly "good enough", so while the existence of C-sections means that genes for brains too large for natural birth may exist in the population, it is not a given that they will ever become a majority much less result in all infants having big brains.
Gene therapy and other procedures allow a long list of fatal diseases(in the absence of modern medicine) to spread throughout the population. This is what I mean by degeneration.
Certain kinds of gene therapy would actually eliminate the diseases, but ignoring that I see what you're saying. Why are you so sure that having people survive with these diseases is a bad thing? Many people with diseases that would be fatal outside of civilization contribute to said civilization, helping ensure its survival. The knowledge acquired by Stephen Hawking may eventually help us get off of this rock, giving us the greatest survival advantage in the history of life on earth.
Yes if the environment changed and modern medicine was no longer available most of these people would die. That's no more a sign of "degeneracy" than an animal adapted for living in trees that dies when they are all cut down. You and I would probably die if civilization collapsed as well; we're all quite used to the benefits of modern agriculture and food distribution. Does that mean that sitting here today our genes are "degenerate"? No, not at all.
Also, in the US, it looks like there is a strong selection to be a poor immigrant from latin america.
Wait, wait... Are you saying that the increase in latin american genes in the US is a sign of the "degeneracy" of white Europeans in the US, or that the influx of latin american genes itself represents degeneracy? The former doesn't make sense, birth rates are as much a matter of culture as of genetics. The second is just foolish and offensive. Being a poor immigrant is not an indication of genetic inferiority (or really anything genetic at all). Most European-Americans come from poor immigrants including (going solely by the odds) yourself.
Plus latin americans are genetically mostly Spanish so either way very little in the way of new genes are coming into America but those bits of native american genes that remain.
And a good education is certain extinction. Any graduate degree results in so few offspring and that branch of humans will be gone in a few centuries.
What branch of humans? The ones with the "having the opportunity or desire to attend a university" gene? There is no such gene, and Lamarckianism is false, going to school does not affect your child's genetic intelligence. If the people who are able to get good educations die out (for some reason) then that will simply make the opportunity available to others.
You seem to suffer from the very problem I was trying to describe -- using our human values to decide what is "good" or "bad" in genes. We humans tend to have preconceived notions about this kind of thing that nature doesn't care about at all. In nature, survival is good, not surviving is bad, and whatever makes that happen is by definition "good" even if it doesn't suite your human sensibilities that make you want to call it "degenerate".
But hey maybe you're right and the future of North America will be dominated by huge-brained yet uneducated Mexicans.:)
That's not entirely true. In performance-sensitive tight loops, it can still make sense to code in ASM to avoid pipeline bubbles and stalls in some very limited situations. Also, the compiler doesn't always take advantage of instructions that it could use.
Yeah and the chip makers release software optimization guides regarding how to avoid such stalls or take advantage of other features, and it's really hard to do that at the C level, and it can be hard for the compiler to know that a certain situation calls for one of these optimizations.
However, determining that takes a lot of effort and a lot of instrumentation, and so you'd better really need that last bit of performance before you go after it.
Agreed, it's basically something you're going to do for the most performance critical part, like the kernel of an HPC algorithm for example.
Yeah well I fucking hate "astroturfers" and marketeers disguising themselves as customers in forums, and having the government do it is ten times worse.
Sure it's not nearly as evil as actually shutting down or censoring the content on forums, but that doesn't mean I like it.
I mean, as an academic paper about conspiracy theories and how they could be defused, it doesn't sound that terrible*. As a government policy? It's shitty, and I don't like it. If the government wants to make more information/propaganda available officially, that's fine with me. Hiding the source of information presented to the people is not how our government should work. Fuck that.
* The observation from the paper that a conspiracy theorist would not believe someone who is coming from an organization involved in the conspiracy is obviously true. And it's also true I think that conspiracy theories can come from having insufficient information (rather than simple craziness). I thought there was some sense behind some of the 9/11 conspiracies... until I talked to a civil engineer who explained to me what would happen when the steel in a skyscraper was merely heated enough to weaken.
Oh no! That's not mental fatigue, that's their mind-control satellite preventing you from concocting further conspiracy theories! It's too late for you, brother, but don't worry. I'll fight on, spreading the truth about the critical role Fluoride and the Cadbury Bunny played in the 9/11 attacks... as soon as I get some Tylenol... Ow...
The assumption seems to be that if these things are shown be the remnants of microorganisms or we get a signal form SETI then we can finally put this God thing to rest.
Nice troll, but actually lots of religious folks are searching for life too. The Catholic Church doesn't think alien life contradicts faith in God, and neither do I.
We also have horses too, and numerous stories of magical ones with horns. That's way more evidence than we have of any alien life.
Unicorn legends are a combination of one-horned mountain goats and narwhals. When a goat loses a horn, the remaining one tends to drift to the center. Sightings of unicorns were sightings of such goats.
Unicorn horns sold in Europe were actually narwhal horns, which have the characteristic spiral shape.
So there is no evidence for unicorns, because the evidence actually points to something else.
If the final analysis of the samples from Mars shows that it came from something else, then your statement will be (basically) true in that the amount of evidence will be the same.
Otherwise, your statement will be the opposite of true.
But yea.. factor in TV advertising, divorced moms who typically end up with custody ranting about how evil fathers/men are and doctors prescribing away 'boys will be boys' (generally at the request of the mom), future generations will have some serious genetics to do battle with.
No wonder males are evolving faster than women. Survival of the fittest.. and men are no longer fit in the battle of the sexes.
"Evolving" might not be the right term. "Changing" might be better.
Except those are really the same thing.
Evolution is simply changes in allele distribution in a population over time. That's all it means. It doesn't have to involve mutation, and it doesn't even have to be towards better adaptation. Natural Selection is the mechanism by which these changes can be selected for or against according to their survival benefit and is why evolution generally tends toward better adaptation, but it needn't be so to be evolution. Even if it isn't a case of sexual selection either. Evolution simply means changes.
Any disadvantageous mutation quickly perish. Very few changes are beneficial.
Only if they are sufficiently detrimental (though many are, and "quickly" is usually while the organism is still a tiny bundle of cells). Also many changes can be mostly neutral and thus have no effect on survival -- if the organism can survive and reproduce, the changes were "good enough", even if we humans might be tempted to call them "disadvantageous". In the long term they may affect the success of the population with those changes, but maybe not.
If the rate of mutation increases rapidly, it is either due to intense environmental pressure, such as arriving on the Galapagos Island, or it is due to the fact that there is no environmental pressure on this genetic treat, and you survive either way. Literally Degeneration.
But if you survive to reproduce, then the changes in your genome weren't "bad". "Good" and "bad" are only in the context of the environment in which they are being tested. So "good" changes are ones that allow you to survive in that environment. But when the environment changes, then the notion of "good" and "bad" could change entirely, and not necessarily in the way that you might have pre-supposed.
"Degeneration" doesn't really mean anything in the context of evolution.
And then there's all his black racist jokes. He's constantly making fun of black hip hop and R&B stars, black culture in general, and even had a lengthy bit about "niggers" which was used not in that brotherly way, but in a distinctly derogatory way. Like "Niggas love to not know! [cheerfully]'Man I don't know that shit!'" and "Niggas always blame the media. 'Oh it's the media. It's just the media.' When I'm gettin money from the ATM, I'm not looking over my shoulder for the media!"
Because we are only rolling around our RC toys and they lack an electron microscope powerful enough?
Yeah I'm sure they're kicking themselves at JPL right now.
"How could we have forgotten to put an electron microscope on the rovers?" "Remember we were going to but then you said the weight would be better spent on some lasers, speakers, and some Pink Floyd?" "Oh yeah! We may not be able to detect microbial fossils, but we were able to conclusively prove during that last dust storm that laser shows are awesome on any planet." "So worth it! High five!"
I gotta wonder what the OP was smoking.:)
The science there is settled, folks. For. Ever.
Hey look, it's the most disingenuous representation of climatology possible!
And the distances involved would be so vast that even finding them (much less communicating with them) is probably out of the question. Is it out there *somewhere*? Probably. Will we ever see it? Extremely unlikely.
Well in your original post you said you predicted this test for life on Mars (and future tests based on your prediction of remaking the same prediction) would be negative. That seemed to strongly imply your "alone in the dark" comment was regarding the rarity of life itself.
That's completely different than saying that intelligent life probably exists out there, but it's too far away for us to have a meaningful interaction with. It's also a pretty trivial statement to say to the crowd who is following the search for life. We already know that barring FTL it's going to be damn hard to find or especially talk to any alien civilization. We'd have to be damn lucky (or life turn out to be damn ubiquitous) to find sentient aliens somewhere as close as Alpha Centauri. Otherwise there's no way to be sure that by the time we detect aliens then send a message back to them that they aren't long extinct, or vice versa on aliens detecting us.
So, like I said, for all practical intents and purposes we're all alone in the vast empty.
Now that I know what you actually meant by that, I just want to say that there's no way you can go from that statement to the previous and following statements that there is and never has been life on Mars.
Every other planet in our solar system has so far proven to be more sterile than an operating theater, devoid of even the simplest life.
Except that's the very thing that's under scrutiny, now isn't it? "So far proven" means little more than we point our telescopes at it and don't see a body literally transformed by life. We're talking about the possibility of simple microbial life, past or present on Mars. If found, even if they're ancient fossils and the planet is currently as dead as a cursory glance seems to indicate, it still means the number of planets that had the potential to host life goes from one to two. It means we have to expand our view of where life can form or survive, and it means we would need to start looking closer at all those other bodies that "so far" we assume are dead.
You could have just as easily said that planetary systems themselves were incredibly rare because outside of our own we hadn't found any. But that's because we lacked the ability to detect them. Now that we do, we're finding them everywhere. Finding life on another planet is much harder than finding a planet itself, so let's let the scientists do their work before we make any more "predictions" eh?
Depending on where the laser comes from, I can also imagine him being either Arrested for Indecent Exposure Man, or Constantly Getting Slapped by Women Who Can See Where He's Looking Man.
From the basic principle that the reaction to stimulus is proportional to the magnitude of stimulus, and the inverse square law. They claim that they can tell whether or not their neighbor is running wi-fi. That implies an extremely high sensitivity and pretty low time scale.
It's not science if you start from a conclusion, even a correct one, and then design an experiment that doesn't actually test the hypothesis.
The test proposed tests a wide variety of EM-"allergy" hypothesis. It may not test all, but it would do a pretty good job of showing that they cause/effect they claim is not what is happening.
There's no science for their conclusion you know, but that apparently doesn't matter.
My cat allergies take a few hours to show up even if I play with a cat, and I have a profound allergy to cats
Fine, then fucking have them sit in the room for a few hours! We're talking about this on slashdot, not actually preparing to perform a scientific tests because none of these idiots want to be subjected to a realistic test of their claims. So can you spare me these trivial details that don't change the fact that these claims are not difficult to test? You can safely assume I would have allowed for that if actually conducting this experiment.
You first need to establish what they think the mythology "EM allergy" is, then you can debunk it. You can't just decide that EM radiation is basically the same thing as peanuts.
"They" seem to think it is, which is how they can tell whether or not their neighbor is currently running their wifi, so there you go.
But then again the question is -- who cares what they think "EM allergy" is? They don't care about science. If we debunk what they think today, they'll come up with something else tomorrow. Either way they'll sue. It's a waste of time.
Finally, after many decades, someone figured out that the cancers were caused by the herbicides used to clear the area around those lines.
See, even the high-voltage power lines I was talking about don't actually do anything. It was something completely mundane -- though of course that word may sound flippant to those suffering from cancer.:P I can only imagine how discovery of the real cause was held back by the sufferer's insistence on attributing their problems to the EM radiation, causing others to not take them seriously.
It's not implausible that something similar might be occurring here,
Maybe though I have a hard time imagining what actual allergen/toxin/whatever could be correlated specifically with wi-fi router proximity...
especially since we know some people are drastically more sensitive to EM radiation and environmental anomalies than others
Wait, what? "Something similar" to the transmission line problem would be something that has nothing to do with the actual EM itself. How'd you get from that to "maybe it really is the wi-fi EM"?
Look, if transmission lines don't have any noticeable effect on their own, then the ridiculously more meager wi-fi radiation isn't harming anyone. Not from next door. There's way more non-wifi radiation bombarding both of us right now than the wi-fi router sitting a few feet from me. Even in similar frequency ranges, though I'd be more worried about frequencies that are actually absorbed by our bodies. Because the only kind of EM "we know some people are more sensitive to" are those kinds that are absorbed by our skin and our eyes.
If there is a similarity to the transmission line situation, it's that these peoples' irrational insistence on attributing the cause of their symptoms to their unique EM detection powers is preventing them from discovering the true cause of their problem. This guy should invest in a carbon monoxide detector. Have his house checked for radon gas, or mold. Replace their mattress and pillows to get rid of dust mites. Maybe go see an allergist and see if there might be a simpler and more plausible explanation for their symptoms.
"I have a headache, my neighbor has wi-fi, therefore I have magical gigahertz band detection powers and my neighbor's wi-fi is causing my headaches" is not sound reasoning. If you want to insist on calling it one of many potential explanations, fine. But to just assume that it must be the cause with no attempt to falsify that belief is silly.
I'm sure there's at least one other non-trivial MMO that has made an effort to be cross-platform, even if I can't think of one.
While at first they ignored Linux, after an incident where people using wine to play World of Warcraft were identified as running 'bots' and banned, Blizzard worked with Cedega and wine to fix the issue and to help improve compatibility going forward. Since then, there have been very few issues running WoW under Linux.
That aside, they got James Cameron? The same guy who directed "Vietnam in Space"? The same guy that directed Pocahontas" (er, I mean "Ferngully")? And "Titanic"? Ick. I think I'll skip the live action version of Alita.
And Terminator and T2 and Aliens.
I'm sure Avatar is horrible because it's similar to stories you've heard before (minus Sigourney Weaver) but obviously he knows how to take good source material and make a bad-ass movie from it.
Unless you can do something comparable to a skin-prick test, you also have to expose the subject to a sufficient dose of the allergen.
Yeah, right. These people are claiming to be able to tell that their neighbor is running wi-fi in their house on the next plot of land down. Put a box that may or may not actually be a wi-fi router right next to them, and this should be like stuffing peanuts down the throat of someone who is allergic to them.
There is no doubt that their accuracy will be no better than random chance.
It's not hard to come up with a BS but convincing looking non-scientific test that could appear to debunk an allergy that is already well accepted by the medical community is valid.
LOL. It's easy to say you're suffering from some ailment. Much more difficult to actually demonstrate it.
This, this, a thousand times this. What the GP doesn't realize is that blind obesiance to 40 years of crap is a serious bug, not a feature, to the vast unwashed masses who actually pay for these big budget releases. He and the rest of the Comic Book Guys hanging out in the nerdcave quite simply cannot do this.
Indeed, and I think it's a bug for anyone who simply wants high-quality material in the Trek universe.
I mean, I love the original series for what it actually was: A campy, low-budget "Wagon Train in space" that managed to have some really powerful episodes that explored sci-fi/human concepts in an inspiring way. It's a great setting for story telling, but the point is the story, not the baggage of minutiae that comes with it.
Stardates were just random numbers they thought sounded cool for the Captain to say, episodes were written by a bunch of different writers who hadn't even seen all the episodes before, and in any case they made up whatever they felt like to suit the story they were trying to tell and their budget. This idea Trekkies have that every detail from every episode taken together should form some coherent, self-consistent whole just doesn't mesh with what the creators of the show actually did. They didn't give a shit about "canon".
Take my favorite example -- Klingons. They were re-imagined for The Search for Spock to make them more menacing villains. And while Trekkies hated this, once it was done they had to accept it as the Holy Gospel. So even though Captain Kirk had never seen any Klingons who looked like that but didn't bat an eye when he saw the "new" Klingons, as far as Trekkies were concerned it was an in-universe fact that Klingons once had smooth heads, and now have ridged heads. They even tried coming up with convoluted explanations (because "Gee maybe the movie had a bigger costume budget than the show" wasn't good enough), until Enterprise finally bothered to actually fill in the totally pointless backstory behind smooth-headed Klingons.
And what were the Trekkies biggest complaints about Enterprise? Not faithful enough to canon! Sheesh!
Get all that baggage out of the way. Just tell a story in the Trek Universe, without worrying that every decal on every panel is "historically" accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's Intel's business practices during the time (and before) Athlon was "king of the world" that are at issue. They fed companies "cooperative marketing" funds (read cash handouts and sweetheart pricing deals) via the "Intel Inside" program that were not based on how much Intel product they moved, but rather on them not selling AMD parts. There were companies that wanted to sell more AMD, but couldn't because with the amount of money Intel was giving them, it simply didn't make sense. They would have been crushed by competitors who were willing to play ball with Intel.
Thus was Athlon's marketshare artificially limited, which can be seen as a cause of AMD later falling behind. There was a brief period in the K8 days where AMD was fab capacity limited, but this too is because AMD had not secured enough revenue from Athlon to build as aggressively as they would have otherwise.
As usual, legal entities like the FTC move slowly, and the issues they actually act upon are thus well in the past. Not that Intel stopped engaging in these practices until (possibly) very recently, when other trade organizations around the globe started hammering them and AMD's lawsuit against them was settled in AMD's favor. It's just understandably harder to see the business practice issues when Intel's products are also superior.
He should be FIRED. He is not qualified to be in that position if that is how he thinks.
Blah blah read the actual paper not what the commentator says numbnuts.
Don't worry, I was acknowledging that this was the case. I'm just disagreeing with the notion that having government agents surreptitiously posting on web forums wouldn't be that bad as an actual policy.
Human brainsize was limited to surviving natural birth. With c-section, this is not an issue, and any brainsize is OK. Since a big brain is a very good survival tool, in not too many generations all infants will have brains too big for natural birth, and can only survive with a c-section
See, and this is where the principle of "good enough" I was talking about comes in. While certainly our large brains compared to other animals gave us a significant survival advantage, it is not at all clear that a small increase in brain size will provide a distinct survival advantage over the typical human brain in our current environment. Our current brains are clearly "good enough", so while the existence of C-sections means that genes for brains too large for natural birth may exist in the population, it is not a given that they will ever become a majority much less result in all infants having big brains.
Gene therapy and other procedures allow a long list of fatal diseases(in the absence of modern medicine) to spread throughout the population. This is what I mean by degeneration.
Certain kinds of gene therapy would actually eliminate the diseases, but ignoring that I see what you're saying. Why are you so sure that having people survive with these diseases is a bad thing? Many people with diseases that would be fatal outside of civilization contribute to said civilization, helping ensure its survival. The knowledge acquired by Stephen Hawking may eventually help us get off of this rock, giving us the greatest survival advantage in the history of life on earth.
Yes if the environment changed and modern medicine was no longer available most of these people would die. That's no more a sign of "degeneracy" than an animal adapted for living in trees that dies when they are all cut down. You and I would probably die if civilization collapsed as well; we're all quite used to the benefits of modern agriculture and food distribution. Does that mean that sitting here today our genes are "degenerate"? No, not at all.
Also, in the US, it looks like there is a strong selection to be a poor immigrant from latin america.
Wait, wait... Are you saying that the increase in latin american genes in the US is a sign of the "degeneracy" of white Europeans in the US, or that the influx of latin american genes itself represents degeneracy? The former doesn't make sense, birth rates are as much a matter of culture as of genetics. The second is just foolish and offensive. Being a poor immigrant is not an indication of genetic inferiority (or really anything genetic at all). Most European-Americans come from poor immigrants including (going solely by the odds) yourself.
Plus latin americans are genetically mostly Spanish so either way very little in the way of new genes are coming into America but those bits of native american genes that remain.
And a good education is certain extinction. Any graduate degree results in so few offspring and that branch of humans will be gone in a few centuries.
What branch of humans? The ones with the "having the opportunity or desire to attend a university" gene? There is no such gene, and Lamarckianism is false, going to school does not affect your child's genetic intelligence. If the people who are able to get good educations die out (for some reason) then that will simply make the opportunity available to others.
You seem to suffer from the very problem I was trying to describe -- using our human values to decide what is "good" or "bad" in genes. We humans tend to have preconceived notions about this kind of thing that nature doesn't care about at all. In nature, survival is good, not surviving is bad, and whatever makes that happen is by definition "good" even if it doesn't suite your human sensibilities that make you want to call it "degenerate".
But hey maybe you're right and the future of North America will be dominated by huge-brained yet uneducated Mexicans. :)
That's not entirely true. In performance-sensitive tight loops, it can still make sense to code in ASM to avoid pipeline bubbles and stalls in some very limited situations. Also, the compiler doesn't always take advantage of instructions that it could use.
Yeah and the chip makers release software optimization guides regarding how to avoid such stalls or take advantage of other features, and it's really hard to do that at the C level, and it can be hard for the compiler to know that a certain situation calls for one of these optimizations.
However, determining that takes a lot of effort and a lot of instrumentation, and so you'd better really need that last bit of performance before you go after it.
Agreed, it's basically something you're going to do for the most performance critical part, like the kernel of an HPC algorithm for example.
Yeah well I fucking hate "astroturfers" and marketeers disguising themselves as customers in forums, and having the government do it is ten times worse.
Sure it's not nearly as evil as actually shutting down or censoring the content on forums, but that doesn't mean I like it.
I mean, as an academic paper about conspiracy theories and how they could be defused, it doesn't sound that terrible*. As a government policy? It's shitty, and I don't like it. If the government wants to make more information/propaganda available officially, that's fine with me. Hiding the source of information presented to the people is not how our government should work. Fuck that.
* The observation from the paper that a conspiracy theorist would not believe someone who is coming from an organization involved in the conspiracy is obviously true. And it's also true I think that conspiracy theories can come from having insufficient information (rather than simple craziness). I thought there was some sense behind some of the 9/11 conspiracies... until I talked to a civil engineer who explained to me what would happen when the steel in a skyscraper was merely heated enough to weaken.
and my brain hurts.
Oh no! That's not mental fatigue, that's their mind-control satellite preventing you from concocting further conspiracy theories! It's too late for you, brother, but don't worry. I'll fight on, spreading the truth about the critical role Fluoride and the Cadbury Bunny played in the 9/11 attacks... as soon as I get some Tylenol... Ow...
Those women and children had it coming. You could tell from their shifty eyes!
- A fellow blogger not representing the establishment.
The assumption seems to be that if these things are shown be the remnants of microorganisms or we get a signal form SETI then we can finally put this God thing to rest.
Nice troll, but actually lots of religious folks are searching for life too. The Catholic Church doesn't think alien life contradicts faith in God, and neither do I.
We also have horses too, and numerous stories of magical ones with horns. That's way more evidence than we have of any alien life.
Unicorn legends are a combination of one-horned mountain goats and narwhals. When a goat loses a horn, the remaining one tends to drift to the center. Sightings of unicorns were sightings of such goats.
Unicorn horns sold in Europe were actually narwhal horns, which have the characteristic spiral shape.
So there is no evidence for unicorns, because the evidence actually points to something else.
If the final analysis of the samples from Mars shows that it came from something else, then your statement will be (basically) true in that the amount of evidence will be the same.
Otherwise, your statement will be the opposite of true.
But yea.. factor in TV advertising, divorced moms who typically end up with custody ranting about how evil fathers/men are and doctors prescribing away 'boys will be boys' (generally at the request of the mom), future generations will have some serious genetics to do battle with.
No wonder males are evolving faster than women. Survival of the fittest.. and men are no longer fit in the battle of the sexes.
Evolution does not work that way!
"Evolving" might not be the right term. "Changing" might be better.
Except those are really the same thing.
Evolution is simply changes in allele distribution in a population over time. That's all it means. It doesn't have to involve mutation, and it doesn't even have to be towards better adaptation. Natural Selection is the mechanism by which these changes can be selected for or against according to their survival benefit and is why evolution generally tends toward better adaptation, but it needn't be so to be evolution. Even if it isn't a case of sexual selection either. Evolution simply means changes.
Any disadvantageous mutation quickly perish. Very few changes are beneficial.
Only if they are sufficiently detrimental (though many are, and "quickly" is usually while the organism is still a tiny bundle of cells). Also many changes can be mostly neutral and thus have no effect on survival -- if the organism can survive and reproduce, the changes were "good enough", even if we humans might be tempted to call them "disadvantageous". In the long term they may affect the success of the population with those changes, but maybe not.
If the rate of mutation increases rapidly, it is either due to intense environmental pressure, such as arriving on the Galapagos Island, or it is due to the fact that there is no environmental pressure on this genetic treat, and you survive either way. Literally Degeneration.
But if you survive to reproduce, then the changes in your genome weren't "bad". "Good" and "bad" are only in the context of the environment in which they are being tested. So "good" changes are ones that allow you to survive in that environment. But when the environment changes, then the notion of "good" and "bad" could change entirely, and not necessarily in the way that you might have pre-supposed.
"Degeneration" doesn't really mean anything in the context of evolution.
And then there's all his black racist jokes. He's constantly making fun of black hip hop and R&B stars, black culture in general, and even had a lengthy bit about "niggers" which was used not in that brotherly way, but in a distinctly derogatory way. Like "Niggas love to not know! [cheerfully]'Man I don't know that shit!'" and "Niggas always blame the media. 'Oh it's the media. It's just the media.' When I'm gettin money from the ATM, I'm not looking over my shoulder for the media!"
I think you're just remembering selectively.
Because we are only rolling around our RC toys and they lack an electron microscope powerful enough?
Yeah I'm sure they're kicking themselves at JPL right now.
"How could we have forgotten to put an electron microscope on the rovers?"
"Remember we were going to but then you said the weight would be better spent on some lasers, speakers, and some Pink Floyd?"
"Oh yeah! We may not be able to detect microbial fossils, but we were able to conclusively prove during that last dust storm that laser shows are awesome on any planet."
"So worth it! High five!"
I gotta wonder what the OP was smoking. :)
The science there is settled, folks. For. Ever.
Hey look, it's the most disingenuous representation of climatology possible!
And the distances involved would be so vast that even finding them (much less communicating with them) is probably out of the question. Is it out there *somewhere*? Probably. Will we ever see it? Extremely unlikely.
Well in your original post you said you predicted this test for life on Mars (and future tests based on your prediction of remaking the same prediction) would be negative. That seemed to strongly imply your "alone in the dark" comment was regarding the rarity of life itself.
That's completely different than saying that intelligent life probably exists out there, but it's too far away for us to have a meaningful interaction with. It's also a pretty trivial statement to say to the crowd who is following the search for life. We already know that barring FTL it's going to be damn hard to find or especially talk to any alien civilization. We'd have to be damn lucky (or life turn out to be damn ubiquitous) to find sentient aliens somewhere as close as Alpha Centauri. Otherwise there's no way to be sure that by the time we detect aliens then send a message back to them that they aren't long extinct, or vice versa on aliens detecting us.
So, like I said, for all practical intents and purposes we're all alone in the vast empty.
Now that I know what you actually meant by that, I just want to say that there's no way you can go from that statement to the previous and following statements that there is and never has been life on Mars.
Every other planet in our solar system has so far proven to be more sterile than an operating theater, devoid of even the simplest life.
Except that's the very thing that's under scrutiny, now isn't it? "So far proven" means little more than we point our telescopes at it and don't see a body literally transformed by life. We're talking about the possibility of simple microbial life, past or present on Mars. If found, even if they're ancient fossils and the planet is currently as dead as a cursory glance seems to indicate, it still means the number of planets that had the potential to host life goes from one to two. It means we have to expand our view of where life can form or survive, and it means we would need to start looking closer at all those other bodies that "so far" we assume are dead.
You could have just as easily said that planetary systems themselves were incredibly rare because outside of our own we hadn't found any. But that's because we lacked the ability to detect them. Now that we do, we're finding them everywhere. Finding life on another planet is much harder than finding a planet itself, so let's let the scientists do their work before we make any more "predictions" eh?
Wow that sounds awful.
But hey, at least they do the 'reboot' thing instead of trying to hold up the toppling tower. :)
I'm gonna go find and chow down on some ninjas right now
The ninjas currently watching you from their hidden vantage points are chuckling (silently) at your ambition.
One flashes the secret ninja symbol for "good luck with that!"
Depending on where the laser comes from, I can also imagine him being either Arrested for Indecent Exposure Man, or Constantly Getting Slapped by Women Who Can See Where He's Looking Man.
Don't know where you get that conclusion.
From the basic principle that the reaction to stimulus is proportional to the magnitude of stimulus, and the inverse square law. They claim that they can tell whether or not their neighbor is running wi-fi. That implies an extremely high sensitivity and pretty low time scale.
It's not science if you start from a conclusion, even a correct one, and then design an experiment that doesn't actually test the hypothesis.
The test proposed tests a wide variety of EM-"allergy" hypothesis. It may not test all, but it would do a pretty good job of showing that they cause/effect they claim is not what is happening.
There's no science for their conclusion you know, but that apparently doesn't matter.
My cat allergies take a few hours to show up even if I play with a cat, and I have a profound allergy to cats
Fine, then fucking have them sit in the room for a few hours! We're talking about this on slashdot, not actually preparing to perform a scientific tests because none of these idiots want to be subjected to a realistic test of their claims. So can you spare me these trivial details that don't change the fact that these claims are not difficult to test? You can safely assume I would have allowed for that if actually conducting this experiment.
You first need to establish what they think the mythology "EM allergy" is, then you can debunk it. You can't just decide that EM radiation is basically the same thing as peanuts.
"They" seem to think it is, which is how they can tell whether or not their neighbor is currently running their wifi, so there you go.
But then again the question is -- who cares what they think "EM allergy" is? They don't care about science. If we debunk what they think today, they'll come up with something else tomorrow. Either way they'll sue. It's a waste of time.
Finally, after many decades, someone figured out that the cancers were caused by the herbicides used to clear the area around those lines.
See, even the high-voltage power lines I was talking about don't actually do anything. It was something completely mundane -- though of course that word may sound flippant to those suffering from cancer. :P I can only imagine how discovery of the real cause was held back by the sufferer's insistence on attributing their problems to the EM radiation, causing others to not take them seriously.
It's not implausible that something similar might be occurring here,
Maybe though I have a hard time imagining what actual allergen/toxin/whatever could be correlated specifically with wi-fi router proximity...
especially since we know some people are drastically more sensitive to EM radiation and environmental anomalies than others
Wait, what? "Something similar" to the transmission line problem would be something that has nothing to do with the actual EM itself. How'd you get from that to "maybe it really is the wi-fi EM"?
Look, if transmission lines don't have any noticeable effect on their own, then the ridiculously more meager wi-fi radiation isn't harming anyone. Not from next door. There's way more non-wifi radiation bombarding both of us right now than the wi-fi router sitting a few feet from me. Even in similar frequency ranges, though I'd be more worried about frequencies that are actually absorbed by our bodies. Because the only kind of EM "we know some people are more sensitive to" are those kinds that are absorbed by our skin and our eyes.
If there is a similarity to the transmission line situation, it's that these peoples' irrational insistence on attributing the cause of their symptoms to their unique EM detection powers is preventing them from discovering the true cause of their problem. This guy should invest in a carbon monoxide detector. Have his house checked for radon gas, or mold. Replace their mattress and pillows to get rid of dust mites. Maybe go see an allergist and see if there might be a simpler and more plausible explanation for their symptoms.
"I have a headache, my neighbor has wi-fi, therefore I have magical gigahertz band detection powers and my neighbor's wi-fi is causing my headaches" is not sound reasoning. If you want to insist on calling it one of many potential explanations, fine. But to just assume that it must be the cause with no attempt to falsify that belief is silly.
Sorry. I originally heard the story in a /. post, and that poster had a link to a news article about it. I have nothin' though.
I'm sure there's at least one other non-trivial MMO that has made an effort to be cross-platform, even if I can't think of one.
While at first they ignored Linux, after an incident where people using wine to play World of Warcraft were identified as running 'bots' and banned, Blizzard worked with Cedega and wine to fix the issue and to help improve compatibility going forward. Since then, there have been very few issues running WoW under Linux.
That aside, they got James Cameron? The same guy who directed "Vietnam in Space"? The same guy that directed Pocahontas" (er, I mean "Ferngully")? And "Titanic"? Ick. I think I'll skip the live action version of Alita.
And Terminator and T2 and Aliens.
I'm sure Avatar is horrible because it's similar to stories you've heard before (minus Sigourney Weaver) but obviously he knows how to take good source material and make a bad-ass movie from it.
Unless you can do something comparable to a skin-prick test, you also have to
expose the subject to a sufficient dose of the allergen.
Yeah, right. These people are claiming to be able to tell that their neighbor is running wi-fi in their house on the next plot of land down. Put a box that may or may not actually be a wi-fi router right next to them, and this should be like stuffing peanuts down the throat of someone who is allergic to them.
There is no doubt that their accuracy will be no better than random chance.
It's not hard to come up with a BS but convincing looking non-scientific test
that could appear to debunk an allergy that is already well accepted by the
medical community is valid.
LOL. It's easy to say you're suffering from some ailment. Much more difficult to actually demonstrate it.
This, this, a thousand times this. What the GP doesn't realize is that blind obesiance to 40 years of crap is a serious bug, not a feature, to the vast unwashed masses who actually pay for these big budget releases. He and the rest of the Comic Book Guys hanging out in the nerdcave quite simply cannot do this.
Indeed, and I think it's a bug for anyone who simply wants high-quality material in the Trek universe.
I mean, I love the original series for what it actually was: A campy, low-budget "Wagon Train in space" that managed to have some really powerful episodes that explored sci-fi/human concepts in an inspiring way. It's a great setting for story telling, but the point is the story, not the baggage of minutiae that comes with it.
Stardates were just random numbers they thought sounded cool for the Captain to say, episodes were written by a bunch of different writers who hadn't even seen all the episodes before, and in any case they made up whatever they felt like to suit the story they were trying to tell and their budget. This idea Trekkies have that every detail from every episode taken together should form some coherent, self-consistent whole just doesn't mesh with what the creators of the show actually did. They didn't give a shit about "canon".
Take my favorite example -- Klingons. They were re-imagined for The Search for Spock to make them more menacing villains. And while Trekkies hated this, once it was done they had to accept it as the Holy Gospel. So even though Captain Kirk had never seen any Klingons who looked like that but didn't bat an eye when he saw the "new" Klingons, as far as Trekkies were concerned it was an in-universe fact that Klingons once had smooth heads, and now have ridged heads. They even tried coming up with convoluted explanations (because "Gee maybe the movie had a bigger costume budget than the show" wasn't good enough), until Enterprise finally bothered to actually fill in the totally pointless backstory behind smooth-headed Klingons.
And what were the Trekkies biggest complaints about Enterprise? Not faithful enough to canon! Sheesh!
Get all that baggage out of the way. Just tell a story in the Trek Universe, without worrying that every decal on every panel is "historically" accurate.