I agree that this was mainly an opportunity to test the SM-3. We keep hearing about how we've had an anti-satellite (ASAT) capability since 1975 and that the SM-3 is an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) device rather than ASAT. So, why didn't we use our ASAT capability? You would think that if we wanted to take out a satellite, we would have used our anti-satellite technology. The fact that we didn't is proof of your argument.
> 1. I thought the theory of evolution revolved around land creatures evolving from sea creatures, not the other way around.
All land-dwelling animals developed from sea-dwelling animals. Some of these have since returned to the sea, including all marine mammals. The theory of evolution by natural selection is an explanation of the mechanisms that underly such changes.
> 2. If dolphins really did evolve from land creatures with four legs, why would they start devolving all of a sudden?
First, a bit about semantics. Devolve is a word used by people that think that the word evolve means to change from a "lower" animal to a "higher" animal and can therefore have an opposite direction. However, the word evolve actually means change, of any kind. An animal lineage that evolves a pair of legs can also evolve to lose those legs.
Second, dolphins are not evolving into legged animals. This particular animal had an extra set of fins where a four-legged animal has hind legs. Some believe that this represents a set of ancestral instructions for building hind limbs being turned back on. Why would a dolphin have these instructions for building hind limbs if they didn't use to have them?
Third, the fact that land animals evolved from aquatic species doesn't imply that aquatic species are inferior. No one believes that people living in Spain are inferior to people living in Mexico because people in Mexico are (to some degree) descended from Spaniards. One wouldn't speak of Mexicans that move to Spain as devolving just because their ancestors used to live there.
> 3. Isn't it possible that the secondary set of fins is actually a mutation or disorder caused by all the crap we've been dumping into the ocean?
Yes. A mutation is a change to an animal's genetic instructions and this dolphin clearly has that. This mutation may or may not have been caused by man-made "crap". However, it turns out that the source of the mutation doesn't affect the question of whether dolphins evolved from land animals or not. A mutation caused by artificial chemicals that turns off suppression of hind limb development still implies that dolphins have all of the instructions for building hind limbs.
The truth is that it has already been so well established that dolphins evolved from land creatures that touting this animal as proof of evolution is kind of like finding a drop of blood next to a mangled corpse and declaring that the drop is evidence of a terrible tragedy; while probably true, it's a bit redundant.
He isn't trying to imply that Macs are cheaper. He's saying that day-to-day use of even the cheapest Mac you can buy is more enjoyable than use of a super tricked-out Windows box.
It's a statement about Mac OS X's superior user experience to current versions of Windows that even by spotting Windows over $2000 in extra hardware, it can't beat OS X.
What if the iMac included a DVI input along with the output? That way, you could use the 24" iMac as a monitor to a separate computer. It should be pretty cheap and easy for Apple to add this and implement it such that the display would auto-sense the external connection and switch to it when used.
Sorry for the delay responding, but I just realized you responded.
I don't know what site you picked out in your Google search, but the explanation you found was wrong.
The mole is NOT a unit of volume. The mole is simply a quantity of items, usually atoms or molecules. A mole of any element is simply an Avogadro's number of atoms (6.02 x 10^23 atoms). You can't determine the volume, even in relative terms, by simply comparing moles of different compounds.
Also, since moles are counts of objects, you can't add moles of one compound with moles of a different compound and get a meaningful answer. A mole of hydrogen is a different unit than a mole of oxygen, just as a mole of oranges (6.02x10^23 oranges) is different than a mole of apples (6.02x10^23 apples) and adding the two doesn't give you 2 moles of anything.
Saying that 2 moles of H2 + 1 mole of O2 -> 2 moles H2O is similar to saying that 1 mole of men + 1 mole of women -> 1 mole of couples. The number of people involved didn't change, we're just grouping them differently.
The burning of Hydrogen in Oxygen is an explosive chemical reaction because the chemical reaction isn't 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O. It's 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O + lots of heat. This heat expands the water vapor (gaseous water) greatly resulting in an explosion, as defined by Wikipedia, amongst others.
Besides these links, try googling the following: hydrogen explosion balloon experiment
In fact, if they get new jobs quickly, as is likely (some already have), they'll be at 200% earning capacity.
Well, now that you put it that way, I'm sure those employees are all jumping for joy at their new "raises". Look, Apple screwed them over. They didn't kill them or chop off their arms and prevent them from ever being employed again, that's true. But Apple's move was shitty and low class and they should know better. Who do they think they are, EA?
On top of this, it really makes one wonder what the hell is going on with the management there to have to reverse course so abruptly.
There is a minimum level of commitment an employee makes when employed. There are social norms about workplace behavior, 2 weeks notice, etc. More closely parallel, I personally feel a commitment to a new employer strongly enough to prevent me from taking late offers from other potential employers I was interviewing even if the 2nd offer was a little better. If I accept a $50,000 job offer from one employer and the next day get a second offer for $55,000 I'm going to stay with the first employer because I made an agreement by accepting their offer.
That being said, there is a definite asymmetry between employer and employee in companies of any size, especially ones as large as Apple Computers. If one of Apple's employees quits, Apple's India operation would have lost about 3% (1/30th) of it's capacity. Contrast that to the 100% earning capacity lost by the employees Apple just stabbed in the back.
No, hydrogen is explosive. I'm not sure what neat trick you saw, but I would guess it was likely a decrease in pressure after an explosion caused by two gases combining to become a much denser liquid. In other words the container (attached to a balloon?) contained the explosion and then the water vapor condensed lowering the overall pressure.
Anyway, one of the reasons why to use hydrogen is that the hydrogen/oxygen reaction has an extremely high specific impulse for a chemical rocket. Here is a Wikipedia link that explains more, but basically it is generally one of the most efficient chemical rocket fuels available.
Also, of course, it (water) is super cheap, abundant and safe to lift.
This wasn't a case of a company going belly up or a single developer having the misfortune of getting hired on at an existing branch just in time for it to get whacked. Apple came in to India, went through all of the paper work and planning to set up operations, hired a bunch of people, etc. The expectation for anyone considering this job is that all of this implies an intention to stay for longer than 5 months. That and the fact I'm sure that the jobs were posted as permanent positions. Geez, even most contract work is for periods of time longer than those people were employed! Imagine you left your company for this great opportunity or had been unemployed for some time and finally found salvation. Just when you were getting used to things BAM, "it's not you, it's me." And not just for you,but for the whole operation!
Whether you want to believe it or not, there is a minimum level of commitment inherent in creating and recruiting for open positions. Apple had gone way past the point of no return and should have stuck it out for at least a couple of years before reevaluating.
If you still don't agree, imagine your wife deciding to leave you after 5 days for some better looking or richer guy. Not that this would be fun after any length of time, but this would show the same kind of complete disrespect for others that Apple has just demonstrated.
(btw, I'm writing this on my Mac Mini, so don't assume I'm generally anti-Apple)
I think you have it backwards. The author's concern about people tunnelling from home isn't that a compromised work machine will take-over the remote worker's home machine. He's a firewall admin and could care less about your home machine's health, in and of itself. What he is concerned about is the fact that your previously compromised home box can tunnel right through all of that hard work he's done trying to build a secure firewall and have IP access to attack the internal network's soft underbelly. SSH, IPSEC and other tunnelling solutions are putting untrustworthy machines directly inside the firewall.
A more secure way would be to only allow non-port forwarded, remote desktop-style connections to a single cluster of terminal server machines. This would prevent direct remote attacks from the home machine against anything other than the terminal server on the terminal server ports. A compromised home machine could still allow someone to tunnel and login to the terminal server as you via remote control, but at least you have limited the attacker's access to a machine that you control and that isn't compromised. While your credentials would be compromised (via the keylogger/session shadower the attacher installed on your home machine), the attacker would only be able to do what you could do on the terminal server. You would be screwed when they detect "you" attempting to compromise internal security or sneaking out sensitive information, but the network would be much safer.
Alternately, if you don't have a terminal server-style (RDP, Citrix, LTSP, etc.) environment set up, you could have the tunnel gateway only allow RDP/Citrix/X access to the user's work desktop with similar security attributes.
In the last 500 million years of life, not one of the "great extinctions" even came close to turning the Earth into a dry, frozen world with little or no atmosphere. And yet, you seem to think that putting people on just such worlds (the Moon, Mars) are going to help? That makes zero sense.
First things first, the liklihood of a catastrophe large enough to wipe out humanity is geologically small. The most likely forms for such catastrophe would be man-made, such as nuclear or biological war and even these aren't likely to wipe out humanity by themselves. We can afford to wait a very long time for technology to make colonies cheaper and more practical.
Second, for the forseeable future, any Lunar or Martian colonies will be dependent on a healthy Earth to supply them. If Earth gets wiped out, these colonies are all dead within a generation. It will take a great while before we have the technological and financial ability to create truly self-sufficient colonies on Mars and even longer to do so on the Moon. In the meantime, you're wasting your survival money.
Third, any disaster that could threaten an unprotected humanity here on Earth could be better (and much more cheaply) survived by building self-contained shelters/cities here on Earth. If you really want to prevent a calamity from wiping out humanity, it is much easier and cheaper to build Terran colonies than Martian ones.
Here on Earth, a Terran colony would only have to be self-contained until the conditions improved enough to go outside again. Even if that is 50-100 years, it's much better than on Mars or the Moon, where it is never going to get better. A more realistic scenario would have a staged recovery on Earth, with full self-containment only necessary for a short period of time, if at all. Maybe you would only have to be entirely self-contained for 5 years, after which you could start to pull in filtered air and water from the surface while you continue to shelter in the colony. That's not possible anywhere else in the Solar System.
Let's review what Earth would offer would-be survivalists only months after an asteroid strike of the proportions that wiped out the dinosaurs:
1. Ideal gravity 2. Ideal atmosphere 3. Abundant liquid water 4. Ideal soil conditions 5. Ideal temperature 6. Ideal Solar flux 7. Zero travel costs
The rest of the Solar System is a very inhospitible place to live, let alone raise children and flourish. Even an Earth ruined by war, global warming, or impact is literally a "hospitable sustaining womb" relative to any other place in the Solar System and can not be beat. It may not help you get to see Mars in your lifetime, but the best place to escape a catastrophe on Earth is Earth.
I agree on the main characters, but they did a better job on the bit parts. The music teacher in Lisa's sax scene is spot on. And if you watch Bart zoom by on the skateboard, you can pick out Moe, Comic Book Guy and Bleeding Gums Murphy. They even have Chief Wiggum, although as someone else has mentioned he's a less stout bobbie.
One more thing I thought was interesting was the special effect to get Maggie onto the couch. Instead of having Marge carry her in, they composited her in. It all happens so fast that I missed it the first time.
The version of Ruby that ships on Mac OS X Tiger is 1.8.2, but it doesn't work well with Rails. So you'll need to upgrade your Ruby installation as well as install a newer version of Rails (as of this writing, use version 1.8.4).
So my question is: if Apple thinks Ruby on Rails is such hot shit, why doesn't they just upgrade their version to 1.8.4 via Software Update?
Basically, all I'm saying is that you seem to be reacting to the teachers' rather sensible advice to make sure they get extra practice in developing useful skills that come harder to them as an attack on your character. I doubt your kid's teachers are telling you to get them more social and physical skills because they are afraid they might grow up to be scientists or mathematicians. What they are seeing is the beginning of social retardation and there is very much something wrong with that. What they want is for your children to be able to enjoy human relationships while they become scientists or mathematicians. Listen to yourself. Your over defensiveness actually has you arguing that your kids would be better off as social outcasts! Trust me: your kids are much more likely to end up on a shrink's couch complaining about how Daddy made them do math problems instead of letting them play with other kids than about how Daddy made them play with other kids instead of letting them do more math problems.
Your children are in danger of falling into the same social death-spiral that many of us nerds have suffered. We all got to where we are now because:
We received positive feedback as a result of some non-social activity.
We received less positive or negative feed back as a result of social activity.
This, understandably, caused us to spend more time with our strength and avoid our perceived weakness. Predictably, this lead to improvement in our non-social skill and continued or increased positive feedback from that. Similarly, we got worse at (or were left behind in) our social skills and received continued or increasing negative feedback from that. Unchecked, it doesn't take very long before this leads a kid that is better at drawing or science than being popular to expand that gap into one of social isolation and a defensive contempt for things in which s/he is weak.
Instead of allowing your children to follow us down this path, a more creative strategy would be to focus on helping them improve in the areas of their weakness. While it is good to continue to reward them for excelling in their strengths, spend more energy and focus on making time spent practicing in areas of weakness more rewarding so that they continue to have opportunities for growth there. There is some amount of trade-off a person has to make in the time spent, and you want them to continue to get better at their strengths. However, allowing them to inadvertently "min-max" their INT at the expense of their STR, DEX, or CHA would constitute a failed WIS check on your part.
Most parents feel that they would like their children to do better than they have done and not make the same mistakes they have made. Please take the advice of your children's teachers and spend more time focusing on enabling your children to improve on their weaknesses. Don't do it because the teachers are smarter than you; they're not. Instead, do it because you are big enough to admit that our worst flaws aren't that our strengths could be stronger, but that our weaknesses truly are weaknesses. By being secure enough in your strengths to admit that your flaws really are flaws, you'll be better able to help your children avoid the same issues.
Ranger Smith: Did you know that the first MagCap was designed to be a perfect tree world? Where none withered, where every one would be sappy. It was a disaster. No tree would accept the program. Entire crops were lost.
the substance of the earth and universe came into being through a means other than a deity.
That's pretty much the whole point of cosmology and fundamental physics, isn't it? The quest of science is to find ever more accurate and predictive explanations for how the universe works. Saying, "because God made it that way" is pretty much the antithesis of this quest. It is either a content-free answer to the question (equivalent to saying "because that's the way it is") or an answer that depends on also believing another theory ([insert your religion here]) that is itself based on little evidence, almost none of which is repeatable and may therefore conflict without hope of resolution with someone else's theory ([insert other religion here]).
As a matter of fact, there is a decent explanation of how matter came into being called the Standard Model, a portion of which incorporates E=mc^2. It's not perfect and will end up being superseded by something else, but that doesn't really matter because it is already much more powerful and predictive than "because God made it."
Even if we didn't have a theory that was so powerful as the Standard Model, it is still a simpler explanation (in the Occam's Razor sense) to say, "I don't know; let's go find out," than to posit an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving (yet undetectable, let alone communicative) intelligence that has always existed and is somehow exempt from the rules of logic you wish to impose on everything else. Indeed, the leap from "I don't know how matter formed from non-matter yet" to the vague, non-denominational "Must be due to a powerful intelligence" reeks of the anthropomorphism so pervasive within our species' thought process. Throw in the concept that the entire universe (which is billions of light years across with at least as many stars as there are grains of sand on Earth) gets created as a by-product of creating a cozy place for us and you're really stretching credibility. But to make the leap from "I don't know" to "Well, I guess one of the many gods described by scrolls written by profoundly ignorant people well over two thousand years ago from an even longer oral tradition clearly borrowed from even earlier generations of similarly superstitious people must be right," is too large a chasm to be considered rational.
Until it can be empirically proved that no God existed, both theories should retain the uncertain authenticity they deserve, and both sides should earn the right to be respected of their beliefs.
Respecting someone's right to believe something is different from respecting someone's beliefs and while I agree with the former, most people's religious beliefs deserve very little respect as explanations of physical reality.
People that state that they don't believe in macro-evolution (evolution of kind, such as dogs and cats having a common ancestor) do so because they are:
Ignorant of the mountain of fossil and genetic evidence that all life that we know of descends from a common ancestor in distant geological time.
Refuse to budge from a literal interpretation of an Nth generation of translation of a single book written hundreds or thousands of years before people knew anything about biology or geology by people suffering the above described ignorance. This refusal is usually tied (in fundamentalist Christians, anyway) to the tenet that the Bible is the Word of God, rather than the words of men writing about God. If something in the Bible is false, then it can't very well be the Word of God, can it? And if it's a fallible work of man, what else could be wrong?
Both of the above
Pardon my lack of respect for the hypothesis that God miracled each "kind" into existence, but
So many conclusions, so much jumping, so little logic.
First and foremost, this is most likely not a life form. Such a finding would be the greatest discovery in fundamental biology since pinning down the function and structure of DNA. The announcement of such discoveries by frauds and the mistaken are much more common than the actual thing. However, it is possible that these are extraterrestrial spores. If the second unpublished paper describing reproduction is accurate (a big "if"), then they most likely are extremeophiles and are possibly extraterrestrial in origin.
DNA is not a requirement for life, as many commenters here have written. DNA (and/or RNA) is at the core of all life on Earth because all present life forms appear to have a common ancestor that used these molecules for it's genetics. The fundamental mechanism used to replicate oneself is the most likely of traits to be highly conserved in evolutionary biology and this is exactly what we are seeing. However, this does not imply that DNA (or RNA) is the only such mechanism possible, especially when the environment that fostered the transition from inorganic to organic is in a different temperature/pressure regime (300 degrees C!). Just as DNA would be useless as a genetic mechanism in the kinds of environments the paper's authors say they see replication in, a molecule that is useful in that environment would not likely be chemically functional in our relatively frigid and low pressure Earth surface environment.
Therefore, absence of DNA is not unexpected.
If this does turn out to be extraterrestrial life, then the possibility that life could drift from world to world becomes a fact. This does not, however, mean that the origin of life here on Earth is due to such transport. Just because it is possible doesn't mean it has happened, let alone is responsible for the modern biosphere.
The people that make the instant leap from the possibility of interplanetary spores surviving to the assumption that this must be how life began here have always puzzled me. After all, the life in such a scenario had to develop somewhere before traveling to Earth. Why is it so difficult to believe that the life we see today is truly indigenous?
I think I now realize why these people are so ardent that life came from somewhere else: they continue to be mired in the historical notion that the beginning of life required some unique event to get started. In this way, they have much in common with creationists and the general public. The lesson to take from this if it is real is not that life came from space, but that life springs out of non-life with relative ease.
Regarding fan traps - that's great if the tool can prevent it. But why are you seeing it in the first place? Is this a measure in a fact table that is repeated across many rows and requires complete grouping to be additive? Is it a measure in a snowflake dimension(rare)? Or is it a column in a relational (not dimensional) model that is also supporting reporting? If the latter case then, I wonder if a better solution is a reporting model that would potentially solve this as well as dozens of different performance problems at the same time?
We're not quite that sophisticated yet. We're reporting from an offline copy of an OLTP updated nightly that has some pre-joined optimization. We are looking at using more data warehousing techniques, but this is perceived as enough of a challenge for us in training, time and money that it is a project for later on.
The reason we worry about fan traps is that we know our end-users would get themselves into trouble with them if they had to report off of the relational schema directly and this in itself would stop us from rolling out tools to let them make their own reports. With a semantic layer in between the relational schema and the user and with neat graphical tools for them to use, allowing them direct access to the data becomes feasible. We hope.
What technology was being used for this and what kinds of errors? One of our hopes for using Business Universes or Data Models is that they can be used to shield users from common mistakes that would lead to incorrect reports.
For example, one common problem we run into is aggregation of quantities in hierarchical one-to-many relationships, AKA fan traps. Essentially, when you have table A -= table B -= table C (where '-=' represents a one-to-many relationship) and you need to be able to sum on a measure in table B and see fields in table C, you will end up getting incorrect sums. This is due to the fact that the measure from B is repeated for each related row in C, which throws off the sum. Business Universes can (supposedly) prevent users from getting themselves into trouble with fan traps if you set them up properly.
One of the most exciting features in SQL Server 2005 for me is the new Report Builder. SQL Server 2005 includes a new ClickOnce WinForms app called Report Builder that allows end-users to design their own reports from a business-user friendly data model. It is very similar to Business Object's WebIntelligence for those of you familiar with that product, but with an apparently more affordable licensing arrangement.
Essentially, the data architect takes the OLTP or data warehouse and abstracts it via metadata into Business entities with which end users are familiar. In Business Objects, this semantic layer is called a Business Universe and in SQLServer Reporting Services it's called the Data Model. Because this semantic layer understands how the data should be put together, it writes the underlying SQL necessary to give the user the answer they want. In principle and demos, it is very slick. We'll soon see how the two stack up in reality at my place of business, as we're setting up both this week to play with.
GUI developers - watch the Channel 9 video
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
·
· Score: 1
If you've ever developed a GUI app before, watch the Sparkle Demo given by the developers. I mean it. I'm a Linux guy who just bought a Mac (which I love), but goddamnit is Sparkle cool fucking shit. Dangerous as all get-out in terms of UI guidelines, but really cool.
I'm serious - watch the video. This one product is going to change the look of GUI apps for years to come.
This isn't about porting the Windows look and feel to other platforms at all. It's about Microsoft trying to replace HTML for the UI of Web-based apps with something they can control.
Those of you who grew up taking the web for granted may not realize this, but HTML and the Web were designed to create hyper-text documents, not apps. Thus, the "HT" beginning to HTML. Making applications in pure HTML was a lot like those old Create Your Own Adventure books where you choose your way through the adventure by turning to page X to do one thing and page Y to do another.
Since the whole web architecture was designed for reading linked documents, it has had to be mutilated with all sorts of add-on technologies (many of them proprietary) in order to make web applications feasible. And still, the UI and the method for creating that UI are inferior to native apps. But, since the benefits of web app deployment are just too appealing to give up, we just keep mutating and evolving a web document system.
And that's where XAML and this announcement come in. Microsoft knows there is a huge demand for a richer web application UI (Flash, I'm looking at you!) and has decided that now is it's opportunity to take over from HTML.
However, the only way it can take over the API for the web is to make sure it is cross-platform enough for web app developers to adopt it. In other words, this is about getting web developers to choose their API (and therefore often their tools) for web development.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that this was mainly an opportunity to test the SM-3. We keep hearing about how we've had an anti-satellite (ASAT) capability since 1975 and that the SM-3 is an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) device rather than ASAT. So, why didn't we use our ASAT capability? You would think that if we wanted to take out a satellite, we would have used our anti-satellite technology. The fact that we didn't is proof of your argument.
This is a link to the paper cited in the article:
http://www.current-biology.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0960982207021938
> 1. I thought the theory of evolution revolved around land creatures evolving from sea creatures, not the other way around.
All land-dwelling animals developed from sea-dwelling animals. Some of these have since returned to the sea, including all marine mammals. The theory of evolution by natural selection is an explanation of the mechanisms that underly such changes.
> 2. If dolphins really did evolve from land creatures with four legs, why would they start devolving all of a sudden?
First, a bit about semantics. Devolve is a word used by people that think that the word evolve means to change from a "lower" animal to a "higher" animal and can therefore have an opposite direction. However, the word evolve actually means change, of any kind. An animal lineage that evolves a pair of legs can also evolve to lose those legs.
Second, dolphins are not evolving into legged animals. This particular animal had an extra set of fins where a four-legged animal has hind legs. Some believe that this represents a set of ancestral instructions for building hind limbs being turned back on. Why would a dolphin have these instructions for building hind limbs if they didn't use to have them?
Third, the fact that land animals evolved from aquatic species doesn't imply that aquatic species are inferior. No one believes that people living in Spain are inferior to people living in Mexico because people in Mexico are (to some degree) descended from Spaniards. One wouldn't speak of Mexicans that move to Spain as devolving just because their ancestors used to live there.
> 3. Isn't it possible that the secondary set of fins is actually a mutation or disorder caused by all the crap we've been dumping into the ocean?
Yes. A mutation is a change to an animal's genetic instructions and this dolphin clearly has that. This mutation may or may not have been caused by man-made "crap". However, it turns out that the source of the mutation doesn't affect the question of whether dolphins evolved from land animals or not. A mutation caused by artificial chemicals that turns off suppression of hind limb development still implies that dolphins have all of the instructions for building hind limbs.
The truth is that it has already been so well established that dolphins evolved from land creatures that touting this animal as proof of evolution is kind of like finding a drop of blood next to a mangled corpse and declaring that the drop is evidence of a terrible tragedy; while probably true, it's a bit redundant.
He isn't trying to imply that Macs are cheaper. He's saying that day-to-day use of even the cheapest Mac you can buy is more enjoyable than use of a super tricked-out Windows box.
It's a statement about Mac OS X's superior user experience to current versions of Windows that even by spotting Windows over $2000 in extra hardware, it can't beat OS X.
What if the iMac included a DVI input along with the output? That way, you could use the 24" iMac as a monitor to a separate computer. It should be pretty cheap and easy for Apple to add this and implement it such that the display would auto-sense the external connection and switch to it when used.
Sorry for the delay responding, but I just realized you responded.
I don't know what site you picked out in your Google search, but the explanation you found was wrong.
The mole is NOT a unit of volume. The mole is simply a quantity of items, usually atoms or molecules. A mole of any element is simply an Avogadro's number of atoms (6.02 x 10^23 atoms). You can't determine the volume, even in relative terms, by simply comparing moles of different compounds.
Also, since moles are counts of objects, you can't add moles of one compound with moles of a different compound and get a meaningful answer. A mole of hydrogen is a different unit than a mole of oxygen, just as a mole of oranges (6.02x10^23 oranges) is different than a mole of apples (6.02x10^23 apples) and adding the two doesn't give you 2 moles of anything.
Saying that 2 moles of H2 + 1 mole of O2 -> 2 moles H2O is similar to saying that 1 mole of men + 1 mole of women -> 1 mole of couples. The number of people involved didn't change, we're just grouping them differently.
The burning of Hydrogen in Oxygen is an explosive chemical reaction because the chemical reaction isn't 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O. It's 2H2 + O2 -> 2H2O + lots of heat. This heat expands the water vapor (gaseous water) greatly resulting in an explosion, as defined by Wikipedia, amongst others.
Besides these links, try googling the following: hydrogen explosion balloon experiment
MPL and GPL according to the License FAQ.
In fact, if they get new jobs quickly, as is likely (some already have), they'll be at 200% earning capacity.
Well, now that you put it that way, I'm sure those employees are all jumping for joy at their new "raises". Look, Apple screwed them over. They didn't kill them or chop off their arms and prevent them from ever being employed again, that's true. But Apple's move was shitty and low class and they should know better. Who do they think they are, EA?
On top of this, it really makes one wonder what the hell is going on with the management there to have to reverse course so abruptly.
There is a minimum level of commitment an employee makes when employed. There are social norms about workplace behavior, 2 weeks notice, etc. More closely parallel, I personally feel a commitment to a new employer strongly enough to prevent me from taking late offers from other potential employers I was interviewing even if the 2nd offer was a little better. If I accept a $50,000 job offer from one employer and the next day get a second offer for $55,000 I'm going to stay with the first employer because I made an agreement by accepting their offer.
That being said, there is a definite asymmetry between employer and employee in companies of any size, especially ones as large as Apple Computers. If one of Apple's employees quits, Apple's India operation would have lost about 3% (1/30th) of it's capacity. Contrast that to the 100% earning capacity lost by the employees Apple just stabbed in the back.
No, hydrogen is explosive. I'm not sure what neat trick you saw, but I would guess it was likely a decrease in pressure after an explosion caused by two gases combining to become a much denser liquid. In other words the container (attached to a balloon?) contained the explosion and then the water vapor condensed lowering the overall pressure.
Anyway, one of the reasons why to use hydrogen is that the hydrogen/oxygen reaction has an extremely high specific impulse for a chemical rocket. Here is a Wikipedia link that explains more, but basically it is generally one of the most efficient chemical rocket fuels available.
Also, of course, it (water) is super cheap, abundant and safe to lift.
How about "betrayed"?
This wasn't a case of a company going belly up or a single developer having the misfortune of getting hired on at an existing branch just in time for it to get whacked. Apple came in to India, went through all of the paper work and planning to set up operations, hired a bunch of people, etc. The expectation for anyone considering this job is that all of this implies an intention to stay for longer than 5 months. That and the fact I'm sure that the jobs were posted as permanent positions. Geez, even most contract work is for periods of time longer than those people were employed! Imagine you left your company for this great opportunity or had been unemployed for some time and finally found salvation. Just when you were getting used to things BAM, "it's not you, it's me." And not just for you,but for the whole operation!
Whether you want to believe it or not, there is a minimum level of commitment inherent in creating and recruiting for open positions. Apple had gone way past the point of no return and should have stuck it out for at least a couple of years before reevaluating.
If you still don't agree, imagine your wife deciding to leave you after 5 days for some better looking or richer guy. Not that this would be fun after any length of time, but this would show the same kind of complete disrespect for others that Apple has just demonstrated.
(btw, I'm writing this on my Mac Mini, so don't assume I'm generally anti-Apple)
I think you have it backwards. The author's concern about people tunnelling from home isn't that a compromised work machine will take-over the remote worker's home machine. He's a firewall admin and could care less about your home machine's health, in and of itself. What he is concerned about is the fact that your previously compromised home box can tunnel right through all of that hard work he's done trying to build a secure firewall and have IP access to attack the internal network's soft underbelly. SSH, IPSEC and other tunnelling solutions are putting untrustworthy machines directly inside the firewall.
A more secure way would be to only allow non-port forwarded, remote desktop-style connections to a single cluster of terminal server machines. This would prevent direct remote attacks from the home machine against anything other than the terminal server on the terminal server ports. A compromised home machine could still allow someone to tunnel and login to the terminal server as you via remote control, but at least you have limited the attacker's access to a machine that you control and that isn't compromised. While your credentials would be compromised (via the keylogger/session shadower the attacher installed on your home machine), the attacker would only be able to do what you could do on the terminal server. You would be screwed when they detect "you" attempting to compromise internal security or sneaking out sensitive information, but the network would be much safer.
Alternately, if you don't have a terminal server-style (RDP, Citrix, LTSP, etc.) environment set up, you could have the tunnel gateway only allow RDP/Citrix/X access to the user's work desktop with similar security attributes.
In the last 500 million years of life, not one of the "great extinctions" even came close to turning the Earth into a dry, frozen world with little or no atmosphere. And yet, you seem to think that putting people on just such worlds (the Moon, Mars) are going to help? That makes zero sense.
First things first, the liklihood of a catastrophe large enough to wipe out humanity is geologically small. The most likely forms for such catastrophe would be man-made, such as nuclear or biological war and even these aren't likely to wipe out humanity by themselves. We can afford to wait a very long time for technology to make colonies cheaper and more practical.
Second, for the forseeable future, any Lunar or Martian colonies will be dependent on a healthy Earth to supply them. If Earth gets wiped out, these colonies are all dead within a generation. It will take a great while before we have the technological and financial ability to create truly self-sufficient colonies on Mars and even longer to do so on the Moon. In the meantime, you're wasting your survival money.
Third, any disaster that could threaten an unprotected humanity here on Earth could be better (and much more cheaply) survived by building self-contained shelters/cities here on Earth. If you really want to prevent a calamity from wiping out humanity, it is much easier and cheaper to build Terran colonies than Martian ones.
Here on Earth, a Terran colony would only have to be self-contained until the conditions improved enough to go outside again. Even if that is 50-100 years, it's much better than on Mars or the Moon, where it is never going to get better. A more realistic scenario would have a staged recovery on Earth, with full self-containment only necessary for a short period of time, if at all. Maybe you would only have to be entirely self-contained for 5 years, after which you could start to pull in filtered air and water from the surface while you continue to shelter in the colony. That's not possible anywhere else in the Solar System.
Let's review what Earth would offer would-be survivalists only months after an asteroid strike of the proportions that wiped out the dinosaurs:
1. Ideal gravity
2. Ideal atmosphere
3. Abundant liquid water
4. Ideal soil conditions
5. Ideal temperature
6. Ideal Solar flux
7. Zero travel costs
The rest of the Solar System is a very inhospitible place to live, let alone raise children and flourish. Even an Earth ruined by war, global warming, or impact is literally a "hospitable sustaining womb" relative to any other place in the Solar System and can not be beat. It may not help you get to see Mars in your lifetime, but the best place to escape a catastrophe on Earth is Earth.
I agree on the main characters, but they did a better job on the bit parts. The music teacher in Lisa's sax scene is spot on. And if you watch Bart zoom by on the skateboard, you can pick out Moe, Comic Book Guy and Bleeding Gums Murphy. They even have Chief Wiggum, although as someone else has mentioned he's a less stout bobbie.
One more thing I thought was interesting was the special effect to get Maggie onto the couch. Instead of having Marge carry her in, they composited her in. It all happens so fast that I missed it the first time.
So my question is: if Apple thinks Ruby on Rails is such hot shit, why doesn't they just upgrade their version to 1.8.4 via Software Update?
Basically, all I'm saying is that you seem to be reacting to the teachers' rather sensible advice to make sure they get extra practice in developing useful skills that come harder to them as an attack on your character. I doubt your kid's teachers are telling you to get them more social and physical skills because they are afraid they might grow up to be scientists or mathematicians. What they are seeing is the beginning of social retardation and there is very much something wrong with that. What they want is for your children to be able to enjoy human relationships while they become scientists or mathematicians. Listen to yourself. Your over defensiveness actually has you arguing that your kids would be better off as social outcasts! Trust me: your kids are much more likely to end up on a shrink's couch complaining about how Daddy made them do math problems instead of letting them play with other kids than about how Daddy made them play with other kids instead of letting them do more math problems.
This, understandably, caused us to spend more time with our strength and avoid our perceived weakness. Predictably, this lead to improvement in our non-social skill and continued or increased positive feedback from that. Similarly, we got worse at (or were left behind in) our social skills and received continued or increasing negative feedback from that. Unchecked, it doesn't take very long before this leads a kid that is better at drawing or science than being popular to expand that gap into one of social isolation and a defensive contempt for things in which s/he is weak.
Instead of allowing your children to follow us down this path, a more creative strategy would be to focus on helping them improve in the areas of their weakness. While it is good to continue to reward them for excelling in their strengths, spend more energy and focus on making time spent practicing in areas of weakness more rewarding so that they continue to have opportunities for growth there. There is some amount of trade-off a person has to make in the time spent, and you want them to continue to get better at their strengths. However, allowing them to inadvertently "min-max" their INT at the expense of their STR, DEX, or CHA would constitute a failed WIS check on your part.
Most parents feel that they would like their children to do better than they have done and not make the same mistakes they have made. Please take the advice of your children's teachers and spend more time focusing on enabling your children to improve on their weaknesses. Don't do it because the teachers are smarter than you; they're not. Instead, do it because you are big enough to admit that our worst flaws aren't that our strengths could be stronger, but that our weaknesses truly are weaknesses. By being secure enough in your strengths to admit that your flaws really are flaws, you'll be better able to help your children avoid the same issues.
Ranger Smith: Did you know that the first MagCap was designed to be a perfect tree world? Where none withered, where every one would be sappy. It was a disaster. No tree would accept the program. Entire crops were lost.
That's pretty much the whole point of cosmology and fundamental physics, isn't it? The quest of science is to find ever more accurate and predictive explanations for how the universe works. Saying, "because God made it that way" is pretty much the antithesis of this quest. It is either a content-free answer to the question (equivalent to saying "because that's the way it is") or an answer that depends on also believing another theory ([insert your religion here]) that is itself based on little evidence, almost none of which is repeatable and may therefore conflict without hope of resolution with someone else's theory ([insert other religion here]).
As a matter of fact, there is a decent explanation of how matter came into being called the Standard Model, a portion of which incorporates E=mc^2. It's not perfect and will end up being superseded by something else, but that doesn't really matter because it is already much more powerful and predictive than "because God made it."
Even if we didn't have a theory that was so powerful as the Standard Model, it is still a simpler explanation (in the Occam's Razor sense) to say, "I don't know; let's go find out," than to posit an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving (yet undetectable, let alone communicative) intelligence that has always existed and is somehow exempt from the rules of logic you wish to impose on everything else. Indeed, the leap from "I don't know how matter formed from non-matter yet" to the vague, non-denominational "Must be due to a powerful intelligence" reeks of the anthropomorphism so pervasive within our species' thought process. Throw in the concept that the entire universe (which is billions of light years across with at least as many stars as there are grains of sand on Earth) gets created as a by-product of creating a cozy place for us and you're really stretching credibility. But to make the leap from "I don't know" to "Well, I guess one of the many gods described by scrolls written by profoundly ignorant people well over two thousand years ago from an even longer oral tradition clearly borrowed from even earlier generations of similarly superstitious people must be right," is too large a chasm to be considered rational.
Until it can be empirically proved that no God existed, both theories should retain the uncertain authenticity they deserve, and both sides should earn the right to be respected of their beliefs.
Respecting someone's right to believe something is different from respecting someone's beliefs and while I agree with the former, most people's religious beliefs deserve very little respect as explanations of physical reality.
People that state that they don't believe in macro-evolution (evolution of kind, such as dogs and cats having a common ancestor) do so because they are:
Pardon my lack of respect for the hypothesis that God miracled each "kind" into existence, but
DNA is not a requirement for life, as many commenters here have written. DNA (and/or RNA) is at the core of all life on Earth because all present life forms appear to have a common ancestor that used these molecules for it's genetics. The fundamental mechanism used to replicate oneself is the most likely of traits to be highly conserved in evolutionary biology and this is exactly what we are seeing. However, this does not imply that DNA (or RNA) is the only such mechanism possible, especially when the environment that fostered the transition from inorganic to organic is in a different temperature/pressure regime (300 degrees C!). Just as DNA would be useless as a genetic mechanism in the kinds of environments the paper's authors say they see replication in, a molecule that is useful in that environment would not likely be chemically functional in our relatively frigid and low pressure Earth surface environment.
Therefore, absence of DNA is not unexpected.
If this does turn out to be extraterrestrial life, then the possibility that life could drift from world to world becomes a fact. This does not, however, mean that the origin of life here on Earth is due to such transport. Just because it is possible doesn't mean it has happened, let alone is responsible for the modern biosphere.
The people that make the instant leap from the possibility of interplanetary spores surviving to the assumption that this must be how life began here have always puzzled me. After all, the life in such a scenario had to develop somewhere before traveling to Earth. Why is it so difficult to believe that the life we see today is truly indigenous?
I think I now realize why these people are so ardent that life came from somewhere else: they continue to be mired in the historical notion that the beginning of life required some unique event to get started. In this way, they have much in common with creationists and the general public. The lesson to take from this if it is real is not that life came from space, but that life springs out of non-life with relative ease.
Regarding fan traps - that's great if the tool can prevent it. But why are you seeing it in the first place? Is this a measure in a fact table that is repeated across many rows and requires complete grouping to be additive? Is it a measure in a snowflake dimension(rare)? Or is it a column in a relational (not dimensional) model that is also supporting reporting? If the latter case then, I wonder if a better solution is a reporting model that would potentially solve this as well as dozens of different performance problems at the same time?
We're not quite that sophisticated yet. We're reporting from an offline copy of an OLTP updated nightly that has some pre-joined optimization. We are looking at using more data warehousing techniques, but this is perceived as enough of a challenge for us in training, time and money that it is a project for later on.
The reason we worry about fan traps is that we know our end-users would get themselves into trouble with them if they had to report off of the relational schema directly and this in itself would stop us from rolling out tools to let them make their own reports. With a semantic layer in between the relational schema and the user and with neat graphical tools for them to use, allowing them direct access to the data becomes feasible. We hope.
What technology was being used for this and what kinds of errors? One of our hopes for using Business Universes or Data Models is that they can be used to shield users from common mistakes that would lead to incorrect reports.
For example, one common problem we run into is aggregation of quantities in hierarchical one-to-many relationships, AKA fan traps. Essentially, when you have table A -= table B -= table C (where '-=' represents a one-to-many relationship) and you need to be able to sum on a measure in table B and see fields in table C, you will end up getting incorrect sums. This is due to the fact that the measure from B is repeated for each related row in C, which throws off the sum. Business Universes can (supposedly) prevent users from getting themselves into trouble with fan traps if you set them up properly.
One of the most exciting features in SQL Server 2005 for me is the new Report Builder. SQL Server 2005 includes a new ClickOnce WinForms app called Report Builder that allows end-users to design their own reports from a business-user friendly data model. It is very similar to Business Object's WebIntelligence for those of you familiar with that product, but with an apparently more affordable licensing arrangement.
Essentially, the data architect takes the OLTP or data warehouse and abstracts it via metadata into Business entities with which end users are familiar. In Business Objects, this semantic layer is called a Business Universe and in SQLServer Reporting Services it's called the Data Model. Because this semantic layer understands how the data should be put together, it writes the underlying SQL necessary to give the user the answer they want. In principle and demos, it is very slick. We'll soon see how the two stack up in reality at my place of business, as we're setting up both this week to play with.
If you've ever developed a GUI app before, watch the Sparkle Demo given by the developers. I mean it. I'm a Linux guy who just bought a Mac (which I love), but goddamnit is Sparkle cool fucking shit. Dangerous as all get-out in terms of UI guidelines, but really cool.
I'm serious - watch the video. This one product is going to change the look of GUI apps for years to come.
This isn't about porting the Windows look and feel to other platforms at all. It's about Microsoft trying to replace HTML for the UI of Web-based apps with something they can control.
Those of you who grew up taking the web for granted may not realize this, but HTML and the Web were designed to create hyper-text documents, not apps. Thus, the "HT" beginning to HTML. Making applications in pure HTML was a lot like those old Create Your Own Adventure books where you choose your way through the adventure by turning to page X to do one thing and page Y to do another.
Since the whole web architecture was designed for reading linked documents, it has had to be mutilated with all sorts of add-on technologies (many of them proprietary) in order to make web applications feasible. And still, the UI and the method for creating that UI are inferior to native apps. But, since the benefits of web app deployment are just too appealing to give up, we just keep mutating and evolving a web document system.
And that's where XAML and this announcement come in. Microsoft knows there is a huge demand for a richer web application UI (Flash, I'm looking at you!) and has decided that now is it's opportunity to take over from HTML.
However, the only way it can take over the API for the web is to make sure it is cross-platform enough for web app developers to adopt it. In other words, this is about getting web developers to choose their API (and therefore often their tools) for web development.