However, the lack of evolution (even were it to be proved false, although I can't think of any way to empirically prove it impossible), does not imply creationism!
Additionally, were creationism "provable" (it isn't), it would in no way imply that evolution did not occur. A fair number of practicing biologists believe (and please note the word "believe" does not mean "based on a ton of facts") that evolution happens to be the mechanism of creation.
... "back in the day," my students routinely audio-taped my lectures. A fair number would listen to it on high speed & other than having to put up with me sounding like Alvin & the Chipmunks, they liked being able to listen to a lecture a couple of times on the drive home or whatever.
Of course, I live in Mississippi, so I can understand how speeding up some of our native lecturers might actually make them sound like someone from the Northeast instead of a chipmunk;-)
Unschooled procrastinators? Both of these were used to keep blacks from voting in the Jim Crow era. But you knew that, right?
I was alive and living in the Deep South at the time, bubba.
The real "problems" with poll taxes & literacy tests were (a) illegal methods used to prevent blacks from paying the tax (which was actually a minimal fee) & (b) inequitable testing methods applied to whites vs blacks.
Voting is indeed a right of citizenship, but coming with that right are certain responsibilities. (Sounds like my 9th grade civics teacher...) It strikes me as odd that we do more to ensure that those applying for drivers' licenses are trained & knowledgeable than we do to ensure that those registering to vote exhibit any semblance of responsibility.
I believe you have avoided the question of whether our present-day politicians (or politicans in any day) want folks to be responsible voters. In particular, I don't think politicians want voters to think about what they're doing.
While I can certainly see the "logic" for providing an "easier" way for voters overseas to cast absentee ballots, this extends a concern that I've long had about the voting process...
By making it brainlessly easy for someone to vote, are we not making it so the voter does not have to plan to vote. And if a person doesn't plan to vote, how informed is their choice going to be?
Many states have already implemented "motor voter" systems where folks don't even have to explicitly register to vote -- it's just attached to their drivers license registration. Literacy tests & poll taxes -- once of which helps ensure that the voter can read the ballot & the other further forces voters to plan to vote -- were thrown out long ago as infringements on the civil rights of unschooled procrastinators.
I believe whole-heartedly that the political establishment of the United States does not want voters to be informed or to pre-plan the act of voting. The reasons for this ought to be self-evident to those of us who are capable of reading a ballot or planning our activities more than 10 minutes into the future.
Turning briefly to "secure" online voting (so this comment stays "on topic"), maybe the Verisign system couldn't be decrypted but it would be very possible for a determined attacker to simply mangle the packets so the votes wouldn't count.
Presumably, what just happened is that her lawyer wrote a nice letter to the RIAA which said, in essence, "My client is a Mac user and we would be thoroughly delighted to embarrass the bejesus out of you in both a court of law and the international press. Name a date and courthouse, punk, and bring it on."
Probably one thing you left out -- a little "hint" about the countersuit that would be filed if RIAA didn't back off.
Could you imagine a class action against RIAA for slander, libel, etc. just involving the subpoenae they've already let out? It's enough to make a Mississippi anti-tobacco lawyer drool;-)
"If 100 telemarketing companies (and their 2 paltry million employees) say it shouldn't, well, majority rules in a democracy. 25 to 1, we win."
To quote just about every Republican I've ever met who was literate, "This isn't a democracy, it's a republic." And the way this particular republic is being run right now, money talks & bullsh*t walks, so I'll put my bets with the Direct Marketers Ass.
<CUT TO THE CHASE>
I believe the court's objection was to how the FTC implemented its plan. From the CNN story cited earlier in this thread:
"The rulemaking process requires an agency to fairly apprise interested parties of all significant subjects and issues involved, so that they can participate in the process," the court paper said.
This means that the court is regarding this as a "rule change," a process that requires the federal agency to solicit comments & adhere to set procedures. Whether implementing a no-call list is in fact a "rule change" & not a Congressional mandate to the FTC looks like something the Supreme Court will have to decide.
So we return to the original point: Who is more likely to throw the most money at this, the Direct Marketers Ass. or 50 million people who probably wouldn't have signed up for the list if it hadn't been free?
... if the college is providing network access in student housing, there really is no way to tell what's going on unless the network is scanned regularly.
Would be nice if they could interact with a USB keychain drive better (keep your home directory on that, so you can write to it).
I haven't tried it with a USB keychain drive, but it is mentioned in the KNOPPIX documentation. The online docs explain how to set up a persistent/home with KNOPPIX 3.1, but the capability is built into 3.2.
Actually, the old page is still there. It appears that the current entry page on the KNOPPIX site is just a "splash" screen put up to protest the EU Parliament considering "software patents." The old German and English pages are still there. You just have to try some of the hyperlinks...
I recently "discovered" KNOPPIX as a nice way to have a Linux environment (and some favorite tools) anywhere.
I've handed out a number of copies of the CD, too, to friends & colleagues who aren't brave enough to go through the whole repartition shindig to put a dual boot installation on their Windows box but who are curious about Linux. Knoppix has raised more than a few eyebrows around here. While I'm not exactly a "Linux evangelist," I do enjoy watching people expand their horizons. KNOPPIX (and now GNOPPIX) can be useful tools for winning "converts," if that's important to you.
GNOPPIX means that now I can hand 'em two CDs & say, "This one brings up the KDE desktop & this one brings up GNOME, so you can see what all the brouhaha is about."
That is, I'll be able to do that after the GNOPPIX site recovers from being/.ed or puts up a few gazillion more mirrors;-) It may be faster just to wait for the KNOPPIX folks to finish their DVD image...
The vice president was kind enough to inform us all that adjusting the prices was impossible due to "anti trust" violations.
Ain't that a hoot? Couldn't it just as easily be argued that the artificially inflated prices that are routinely charged for CDs are an anti-trust violation?
IIRC, the original argument for pricing CDs at triple the going rate for LPs back in the early '80s was that the manufacturers had to recoup R&D costs. And shouldn't 20+ years be sufficient to recoup those costs? Seems to me that the "industry" has been charging grossly inflated prices for years as a group effort...
Actually the "cure a cold with a shot of malaria" is a very rough paraphrase of an old Woody Guthrie political witticism...
To the topic: The follow-up pointing out that a glucose-muching bacterially powered nanobot would have to be very resistant to mutation is valid. The next question then is, "Is it really possible to engineer a bacterium that resists mutation?"
Well, if a massive bacterial infection sounds like a good cure for diabetes, you might want to sign up for my new cure for the common cold: a shot of malaria.;-)
But the idea of sugar-powered nanobots is pretty nifty, so give yourself a triple word score & I can avoid the "M" word. Seems that those nanobots would need some pretty sophisticated membrane technology, though...
With all the techno-dweebs on this site and all the fasntastic opinions about whitelists and blacklists and graylists and modifying SMTP and replacing SMTP and handshakes and authentication and a million other solutions, perhaps someone, somewhere, will finally being to make a dent in actually dealing with the spam problem.
Unfortunately, all we're doing is ranting on/. about it, throwing out ideas that none of us can find the time to implement. "Talk doesn't cook rice," as the old proverb goes.
Meanwhile, the spammers are working long hours to kill the goose that laid their golden egg.
The sysadmins are known in our organization as the "illiterati". What we are not sure about is whether it's can't read or won't read, but we know for sure they don't read...
I thought about audio books, but the sysadmins don't listen, either. <SIGH^2>
To the topic: All the manuals in the world, no matter how thorough & thoughtfully written, are of no use if the people who need to read them are busier worrying about their golf game. And the doubly sad thing, is that these guys "know it all" & therefore don't think they need any "practical" manuals.
Call me slow, but you hit the McBride head right on the nail with this. How many of us have encountered Usenet trolls that threaten to sue everyone in sight?
Raymond may be guilty of feeding the troll but the kind of threats he made in his open letter are very analogous to those of us who have confronted newsgroup trolls with "Come on, buddy, have at it, file the suit & see what I can sling back at ya". Frustration builds up, the insults become intolerable & a little venom flows.
When I'm chasing my daughter's boyfriend, it is!;-)
Seriously, though, why put a monitor in the car? Why not just put a governor on the engine, perhaps one that picks up speed limits from some sort of wireless system attached to the speed limit sign?
Let's see... 64-bit WinXP is due some time next year. Longhorn some (ambiguous) time after that. I know/. is the home of the *NIX faithful, but that's a very small percentage out in the real world.
Are we about to enter 18 months to 2 years of mostly running 32-bit apps on 64-bit hardware? (Or even longer than that, if we recall that "32-bit Win95" was really 16-bit in sheep's clothing.) And what's a "generation" for hardware? 2 years?
There will probably be some nice bargains on 32-bit boxen later this year & next, I'm sure. And they're gonna run those old 32-bit apps just fine. Then, when they wear out in 2-3 years, you can upgrade to 64-bit hardware to actually run 64-bit apps.
In other words, that first train trip is going to take you to an amusement park that's still under construction.
The FreeBSD Project, a volunteer organization, provides a full 4.4BSD-Lite2
based operating system for the 32 and 64-bit Intel and AMD platforms and the 64-bit Alpha and UltraSPARC platforms.
The words "64-bit... AMD platforms" suggests that it will run on Opteron. Now, whether it or not it is "really" 64-bit or 32-bit while running on Opteron is a question I'll leave for somebody who knows...;-)
"Science fiction" has become a catchall for anything that's weird & "unreal" but doesn't qualify as horror. Someone down the thread mentions the blurring of sci-fi with fantasy & I concur on that.
Sometimes, things get blurred based on who the author is. I suppose anything that Arthur C. Clarke ever wrote gets called sci-fi, while anything Stephen King writes is horror. The Dark Tower books are as sci-fi as it gets, IMO, but betcha you'll find 'em lurking over in the monsters-under-the-bed section.
But back to the topic: If I want to see "bad science," I don't go to a theatre. I go to the undergrad labs;-)
I think the name for the device you describe is a "peristaltic pump". And they ought to be cheaper from scientific supply companies than from medical supply houses.
A peristaltic pump ought to work well in a water cooling rig.
But the ultimate quiet water cooling system would be to locate your PC over an artesian well & just dump the water after it flows through the system once. Might even run a nice lawn sprinkler system with the effluent.
Again, with decent engineering of code, Javascript isn't half bad. The fact that it does absolutly nothing to encourage said engineering is a failure of the part of the language. (Especially given its namesake.)
The same could be said for Perl, except that there is "use strict". And "use strict" always brings to mind the image of a leather-clad female software engineer threatening the coders with a whip & chain... Ok, ok, so I'm a pervert;-)
So, shall we tie up JavaScript kludgers & force them to submit to some form of "use strict"? Discipline is what they need! Heck, I might write some bad code just to meet that leather-clad supervisor!
Microsoft's existing standard will be very close to the final W3C standard. Netscape's was even more proprietary because it introduced new tags that are not even in the HTML 4.0 standard (Layers, anyone?)
Is this a time warp? Netscape deprecated layers with version 6.
I don't mind a defense of Microsoft, but please do it with 2003 examples!
BTW, http://www.talltech.com/student/imos98student/j_ch u/dhtml/standards.htm was/.ed or just plain not online. Looking at the URL, I'm led to believe this was a student paper from 1998 submitted in a category called IMOs. Student opinion from 5 years ago?
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, were creationism "provable" (it isn't), it would in no way imply that evolution did not occur. A fair number of practicing biologists believe (and please note the word "believe" does not mean "based on a ton of facts") that evolution happens to be the mechanism of creation.
Of course, I live in Mississippi, so I can understand how speeding up some of our native lecturers might actually make them sound like someone from the Northeast instead of a chipmunk ;-)
I was alive and living in the Deep South at the time, bubba.
The real "problems" with poll taxes & literacy tests were (a) illegal methods used to prevent blacks from paying the tax (which was actually a minimal fee) & (b) inequitable testing methods applied to whites vs blacks.
Voting is indeed a right of citizenship, but coming with that right are certain responsibilities. (Sounds like my 9th grade civics teacher...) It strikes me as odd that we do more to ensure that those applying for drivers' licenses are trained & knowledgeable than we do to ensure that those registering to vote exhibit any semblance of responsibility.
I believe you have avoided the question of whether our present-day politicians (or politicans in any day) want folks to be responsible voters. In particular, I don't think politicians want voters to think about what they're doing.
By making it brainlessly easy for someone to vote, are we not making it so the voter does not have to plan to vote. And if a person doesn't plan to vote, how informed is their choice going to be?
Many states have already implemented "motor voter" systems where folks don't even have to explicitly register to vote -- it's just attached to their drivers license registration. Literacy tests & poll taxes -- once of which helps ensure that the voter can read the ballot & the other further forces voters to plan to vote -- were thrown out long ago as infringements on the civil rights of unschooled procrastinators.
I believe whole-heartedly that the political establishment of the United States does not want voters to be informed or to pre-plan the act of voting. The reasons for this ought to be self-evident to those of us who are capable of reading a ballot or planning our activities more than 10 minutes into the future.
Turning briefly to "secure" online voting (so this comment stays "on topic"), maybe the Verisign system couldn't be decrypted but it would be very possible for a determined attacker to simply mangle the packets so the votes wouldn't count.
Probably one thing you left out -- a little "hint" about the countersuit that would be filed if RIAA didn't back off.
Could you imagine a class action against RIAA for slander, libel, etc. just involving the subpoenae they've already let out? It's enough to make a Mississippi anti-tobacco lawyer drool ;-)
To quote just about every Republican I've ever met who was literate, "This isn't a democracy, it's a republic." And the way this particular republic is being run right now, money talks & bullsh*t walks, so I'll put my bets with the Direct Marketers Ass.
<CUT TO THE CHASE>
I believe the court's objection was to how the FTC implemented its plan. From the CNN story cited earlier in this thread:
This means that the court is regarding this as a "rule change," a process that requires the federal agency to solicit comments & adhere to set procedures. Whether implementing a no-call list is in fact a "rule change" & not a Congressional mandate to the FTC looks like something the Supreme Court will have to decide.
So we return to the original point: Who is more likely to throw the most money at this, the Direct Marketers Ass. or 50 million people who probably wouldn't have signed up for the list if it hadn't been free?
... if the college is providing network access in student housing, there really is no way to tell what's going on unless the network is scanned regularly.
I haven't tried it with a USB keychain drive, but it is mentioned in the KNOPPIX documentation. The online docs explain how to set up a persistent /home with KNOPPIX 3.1, but the capability is built into 3.2.
Actually, the old page is still there. It appears that the current entry page on the KNOPPIX site is just a "splash" screen put up to protest the EU Parliament considering "software patents." The old German and English pages are still there. You just have to try some of the hyperlinks...
I've handed out a number of copies of the CD, too, to friends & colleagues who aren't brave enough to go through the whole repartition shindig to put a dual boot installation on their Windows box but who are curious about Linux. Knoppix has raised more than a few eyebrows around here. While I'm not exactly a "Linux evangelist," I do enjoy watching people expand their horizons. KNOPPIX (and now GNOPPIX) can be useful tools for winning "converts," if that's important to you.
GNOPPIX means that now I can hand 'em two CDs & say, "This one brings up the KDE desktop & this one brings up GNOME, so you can see what all the brouhaha is about."
That is, I'll be able to do that after the GNOPPIX site recovers from being /.ed or puts up a few gazillion more mirrors ;-) It may be faster just to wait for the KNOPPIX folks to finish their DVD image...
IIRC, the original argument for pricing CDs at triple the going rate for LPs back in the early '80s was that the manufacturers had to recoup R&D costs. And shouldn't 20+ years be sufficient to recoup those costs? Seems to me that the "industry" has been charging grossly inflated prices for years as a group effort...
Actually the "cure a cold with a shot of malaria" is a very rough paraphrase of an old Woody Guthrie political witticism...
To the topic: The follow-up pointing out that a glucose-muching bacterially powered nanobot would have to be very resistant to mutation is valid. The next question then is, "Is it really possible to engineer a bacterium that resists mutation?"
But the idea of sugar-powered nanobots is pretty nifty, so give yourself a triple word score & I can avoid the "M" word. Seems that those nanobots would need some pretty sophisticated membrane technology, though...
Unfortunately, all we're doing is ranting on /. about it, throwing out ideas that none of us can find the time to implement. "Talk doesn't cook rice," as the old proverb goes.
Meanwhile, the spammers are working long hours to kill the goose that laid their golden egg.
I thought about audio books, but the sysadmins don't listen, either. <SIGH^2>
To the topic: All the manuals in the world, no matter how thorough & thoughtfully written, are of no use if the people who need to read them are busier worrying about their golf game. And the doubly sad thing, is that these guys "know it all" & therefore don't think they need any "practical" manuals.
Call me slow, but you hit the McBride head right on the nail with this. How many of us have encountered Usenet trolls that threaten to sue everyone in sight?
Raymond may be guilty of feeding the troll but the kind of threats he made in his open letter are very analogous to those of us who have confronted newsgroup trolls with "Come on, buddy, have at it, file the suit & see what I can sling back at ya". Frustration builds up, the insults become intolerable & a little venom flows.
When I'm chasing my daughter's boyfriend, it is! ;-)
Seriously, though, why put a monitor in the car? Why not just put a governor on the engine, perhaps one that picks up speed limits from some sort of wireless system attached to the speed limit sign?
Rule #1 for dating my daughter: Keep your head low & run in a zigzag pattern.
When I saw this word, I immediately thought of politicians. Their "ethics" are definitely nano-scale!
Are we about to enter 18 months to 2 years of mostly running 32-bit apps on 64-bit hardware? (Or even longer than that, if we recall that "32-bit Win95" was really 16-bit in sheep's clothing.) And what's a "generation" for hardware? 2 years?
There will probably be some nice bargains on 32-bit boxen later this year & next, I'm sure. And they're gonna run those old 32-bit apps just fine. Then, when they wear out in 2-3 years, you can upgrade to 64-bit hardware to actually run 64-bit apps.
In other words, that first train trip is going to take you to an amusement park that's still under construction.
The words "64-bit ... AMD platforms" suggests that it will run on Opteron. Now, whether it or not it is "really" 64-bit or 32-bit while running on Opteron is a question I'll leave for somebody who knows... ;-)
Sometimes, things get blurred based on who the author is. I suppose anything that Arthur C. Clarke ever wrote gets called sci-fi, while anything Stephen King writes is horror. The Dark Tower books are as sci-fi as it gets, IMO, but betcha you'll find 'em lurking over in the monsters-under-the-bed section.
But back to the topic: If I want to see "bad science," I don't go to a theatre. I go to the undergrad labs ;-)
A peristaltic pump ought to work well in a water cooling rig.
But the ultimate quiet water cooling system would be to locate your PC over an artesian well & just dump the water after it flows through the system once. Might even run a nice lawn sprinkler system with the effluent.
The same could be said for Perl, except that there is "use strict". And "use strict" always brings to mind the image of a leather-clad female software engineer threatening the coders with a whip & chain... Ok, ok, so I'm a pervert ;-)
So, shall we tie up JavaScript kludgers & force them to submit to some form of "use strict"? Discipline is what they need! Heck, I might write some bad code just to meet that leather-clad supervisor!
Is this a time warp? Netscape deprecated layers with version 6.
I don't mind a defense of Microsoft, but please do it with 2003 examples!
BTW, http://www.talltech.com/student/imos98student/j_ch u/dhtml/standards.htm was /.ed or just plain not online. Looking at the URL, I'm led to believe this was a student paper from 1998 submitted in a category called IMOs. Student opinion from 5 years ago?