I've heard this "theory" presented time and again in various ways... such as the Dinosaurs were already created fossilized... and craters from impacts millions of years ago were just made that way -- to look like impacts. It's a ridiculous argument that a creator would not only create everything at once, but make it appear WITH A HISTORY to its creation. Why create a fossilized dead animal that only appeared to have existed, left fossilized footprints, fossilized stomach contents from food it never actually ate, but the creator put there for fun... oh and fossilized eggs with baby dinosaurs in them that were not only never laid, but created as dead, fossilized eggs. It's the same with geology. There are scars on the planets from impacts. The moon itself is evidence of an impact with the Earth in its early form. The entire solar system has evidence of its formation over time. To even suggest that a creator would have made them that way is beyond ludicrous. It would imply that the creator was purposefully trying to cover the true process of creation and erase his or her part in it. It would imply that the creator didn't want anyone to know or believe in him/her. The situation is equally as likely as if the universe were created 1 minute ago with everything in existence as it is including everyone's memories of past events that did not actually happen. I have a computer in front of me that I remember buying a few years ago. Software was installed on it and there are saved games on it. But, none of that actually happened because it just popped into existence 1 minute ago as-is. I also have fabricated memories of these past events that never actually happened -- put there by the creator to trick me.
There is no debate on this theory because it isn't really a theory. It's a -- "hey, what if magic did it all?" hypothesis that cannot be proven or disproven because it specifically ignores historical evidence.
It's pretty common for me to open 50 or more tabs at a time. This allows each of them to load their page fully while I'm reading the first page. I can click to close each tab (I use a single close button tab, not one on each tab) and the next page appears for me to read. This is a lot faster than using the task bar or going to a bookmark for each page individually or opening them all in separate windows at once. Also, I can click "open in new tab" on a link and have the link open in a new tab without changing my view of the current page or stealing focus to pop open an new window for the browser.
In short, it's more efficient for what I do. For those that only open 1 or 2 pages at a time and leave one page when they visit a new page, maybe it's not worth their while. I have 8 sessions of firefox open right now with an average 5-6 tabs open in each. One's got 10 tabs open to comic strips I like to read in the morning. Another has 5 slashdot tabs open. Another has e-bay and a college text book selection open with multiple shopping sites in tabs, etc. My task bar couldn't hold 40 or so firefox windows on it along with all of the other programs I have running and be as efficient at finding what I want when I wanted to switch tasks.
As another user stated, it saves on memory resources to use tabs as well. You don't have to use them -- you can even turn tabs off completely in many browsers. I think they're the best invention for the web since the search engine, but maybe they're not for you. Tabs are just a tool. I find them incredibly useful for what I do, but maybe some people like yourself don't have a use for them.
I love the joke about the backstreet boys! haha. I certainly don't know enough about the issue to say whether the crime rate was affected by abortion, lead based paint, or the influx of Japanese VCRs that year... but I believe the reason the reduction in crime was so significant was because all of the predictions and forecasts showed there should have been an exponential increase in crime in the 90s when there was instead a steep decline. The "more cops on the street" theory has been debunked along with "the booming economy of the 90's" and several other theories. Economists and other scientists seem to be grasping at straws to explain the decline. I put my money on the abortion issue as the data I've seen seems to support it (and some studies in other countries that made abortion illegal had significant upheaval 20 years later, which is the reverse), but I do agree that the crime rate would have to depend on a massive number of factors and it's possible that no one thing can explain even a dramatic change in it. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics;-)
This study is a clear case of correlation being seen as causation. I recommend the book Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D Levitt & S J Dubner for a more in-depth study on such issues.
It also happens to have a chapter showing good evidence that the decline in crime in the 90s was directly related to the rise in abortions in the 70's due to Roe v. Wade. The theory is that single young pregnant women of low socio-economic status were more likely to have abortions after they became cheaper, safer, and legal. Had they had children, those children would have been at a high risk of becoming criminals as adults due to being unwanted by the mother or family, their low socio-economic status, being from a broken home, possibly malnutrition or drug use by the mother, etc. Around the time those aborted children from the 70s would have been entering their criminal prime , the crime rates dropped steeply -- nation-wide... simply because there were fewer criminals to fill the ranks.
To attribute the crime rate to leaded gasoline is like attributing global warming to the decline in pirates over the centuries... sure they're correlated (the data points move together and make a pretty line to follow), but one does not cause the other.
I understand that if you don't take the Genesis creation story as fact, you can believe in evolution and still be a Christian. However, I live in the deep south (South Carolina) where most people would consider you to be a non-Christian for believing in evolution. You'd be dismissed as a heretic or member of a cult (like the Mormons) for not believing in "the sacred and literal word of God that is the Bible".
I understand that individuals each have their own beliefs -- even if they fall under the greater umbrella of a particular religion, but region is the belief in the supernatural while evolution is belief in the natural -- they are by definition mutually exclusive. To incorporate "something magical happens" into the process invalidates the science of the study and the theory that makes everything work. This isn't to say that it's impossible for the two processes to co-exist in the universe, but the scientific viewpoint of evolution would be that they do not, have not, and will not co-exist -- because the fundamental idea is to understand the natural process... not the possible supernatural processes that could have taken place. If one is to research the natural processes that lead to evolution, one must omit any religious possibilities for the sake of science... Atheists can do this rather well.
I do not believe that only atheists can believe in evolution, but I do believe that it is an area of study that should be researched without the interference or bias of religious beliefs. It's an exercise in atheism, to some degree. I can understand why one might view anyone who can truly appreciate and believe in the theory of evolution (meaning the natural origin of all life on earth from non-living chemicals)as also being an atheist -- given that most religions propose alternate explanations.
Having said that, I do know a few Buddhists who believe in evolution -- simply because they claim their belief system is not incompatible with evolution. How we got here or where we go next (if anywhere) isn't as important to them as how we choose to behave and treat others.
I recognize that the grandparent poster shouldn't assume that only atheists believe in evolution, but he doesn't explicitly say that. You inferred it, but only because he didn't include others in his statement. I think the issue is more of your wanting to not be excluded from group of people who share the belief in evolution. The grandparent post is correct in saying that atheists believe in evolution -- because they have no alternative theory... save aliens or seed theory -- which just moves the evolution off-world to have begun someplace else.
My point being... you're making an argument over a statement the grandparent poster never made or possibly even intended to imply.:-)
While I follow your line of thinking... it really comes down to the definition of "species" -- which is really a difficult thing to define these days. I hear the definition itself is under review for changes. Some people define different species as being more than 5% different genetically -- enough to where they can no longer mate and produce fertile offspring. There's no easy rule for this anymore, though. Hybridization is more common than scientists once thought -- even between species that were thought to be unable to produce fertile offspring.
I think the gist of the point people are trying to make is that humans evolved separately from Neanderthals and that true Neanderthals no longer exist. Sure, some cross-breeding with the human population in the area likely happened, but how often and to what extent, no one can really say -- yet.
If I recall correctly, the difference between Neanderthals and humans is the same percentage as the difference between humans and chimpanzees. Some scientists say that a human/chimp hybrid might be possible, but clearly we consider ourselves to be separate species.
I think there's not enough evidence to say whether Neanderthal slowly died out as modern humans advanced into their territory... or if they intermingled and merged into one race. Some genetic evidence shows there were some hybrids, but there's no way of knowing how common an occurrence that was. For all we know, it happened once or twice and those offspring spread their genes to more children and so on for a thousand years -- and evolution selected those genes as superior for whatever reason.
Thank you for the links, though -- very informative stuff.
Do you have some facts to back this up? I confess I'm not up on the cutting edge in palaeontology, but the last I heard the interbreeding theory had almost no evidence to support it. This article from Discovery's web site from November of 2006 states there is no evidence for this so far and that the two species separated over 500,000 years ago:
I'm guessing from your harsh criticism of Wiki and the author of the specific page that you must have some pretty solid evidence that I haven't stumbled across yet.
Actually, God is a figment of mankind's collective imagination which allows religious (aka delusional) people to make pretentious, arrogant, and often unfounded statements -- especially in regard to Earth's history and the way people should live their lives.
Aren't you forgetting the whole "The browser is part of the OS" argument Microsoft has been promoting? This is an IE upgrade, which is part of the OS as far as Microsoft is concerned.
As not being an app upgrade system, Windows Media Player is in Microsoft updates as well, but in a lower priority. They even upgrade Office through Microsoft update site (as opposed to the old windows update site). I don't know where you get the idea that it isn't an app update system -- it most certainly is and always has been.
I thought "executive orders" could also be verbal in nature and don't necessarily require any paperwork? -- such as an order in the field to a soldier? Wouldn't intentionally revealing classified information include an implied executive order to rescend it's classified status?
I open about 50 windows at a time, and I like being able to close them all as i read through them with one button in a static position. I don't know where you get the assumption the developers let everyone vote and the majority of the users picked a close button on each tab. No one ever asked my opinion or gave me the option to vote, and I think having a close button for each tab is horrendous. I'm only guessing, but I bet the developers looked at other tab implimentations and went with this because it's similar to other implimentations and works for people who only use a few tabs at a time. I'll be using an extension to turn this off and maybe if enough people use the extension, they'll build the option in to change the interface. I doubt it'd be a huge amount of code to include in the release, but you go ahead and flame on w/ your opponent poster if you like.
Exactly. It's only "biological" activity is attaching to a host cell and injecting genetic instructions into it. The rest of the time, it's a dormant, yet complex protien structure. Some see it as a parasite on the cellular level since it uses the cellular machinery to reproduce itself. I think that argument has merit -- but so does the argument that it, alone, is not alive. It really is a matter of perspective.
I think viruses mostlikely began as a method of transferring DNA and RNA between single-celled organisms much like plasmids and have simply evolved into more diverse and specific structures over time using borrowed DNA from whatever they've infected. I see them as non-living nano-syringes filled with foreign DNA for self-replication. Sometimes, I see them as alive -- in the sense that I wish I could kill them. lol.
Yeah, what do those nobel-prize winning physicists like Hannes Alfvén know, right? Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfv%C3%A9n
Again, I was just introduced to the plasma cosmology theory a few days ago, so I haven't had time to digest the material, but while I aknowledge it's not widely accepted yet, I think crackpot theory is a bit harsh of a description for a theory supported by acclaimed physicists, professors, and people who have won nobel prizes for their other related theories.
I read recently that Plasma Cosmology is beginning to fill the gaps in current theories by including electromagnetic forces on plasma (99% of matter in the universe is plasma) to explain the variances seen in equations that only take gravity into account. I haven't had time to review the theory completely, but it supposedly shows how to run the numbers without the need for dark energy, dark matter, or even an inflationary force in the universe. It allows for a much older universe ( at least 30 times older than the big bang theory predicts if not infinitely old), and solves a lot of paradoxes -- like how we have stars that are older than the universe itself, etc.
Do a google search if you have time. If the theory is true, it's a paradigm shift that'll end the need for this dark matter/energy silliness.
You are kidding, right? Here in South Carolina, nearly everyone I know that got a PS2 had it modded by "a friend who knows a guy" -- That's everyone from college students in dorms to guys living in trailors making minimum wage, but love their games and can't afford to buy 'em all.
Most people I know bought the PS2 not only for the games but also as a cheap DVD player, then got it modded for free games they'd download from newsgroups or bittorrent.
AeroGel -- I think it's more of a glass than a "foam" or "gel", though. It'd be interesting to see if it could be applied to the tank.
Considering it's mostly air and it's formed similar to glass, it could shatter with all the vibration or the air pockets could expand and make it expload during liftoff. I think the conditions to make the aerogel in sufficient quantities would be astronomical in cost (no pun intended). Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
I'd love to have my house insulated with that stuff. It's 100 degrees outside right now w/ a 110 degree heat index.
Too bad you can't delete your own post. You go out of your way to ridicule someone while making yourself sound like an idiot.
Latency is, in computer terms, the time it takes between a request and a response. The hard drive is the slowest piece of equipment on a computer. Therefore, it has the highest latency. The latency IS the bottleneck you describe. When you want to read a file, the latency of the hard drive is the time it takes to locate the file and send it to the hard drive controller. Mirroring the hard drive, as you mention, is a way to decrease latency for read times. RAIDs (especially RAID 5) are ways to decrease latency and increase data throughput.
Faster processors won't help you if you can't feed data to and from them fast enough to use them to capacity. More RAM is helpful and more processor cache is as well, but the biggest bottleneck on a computer is the hard drive. In general, the larger the hard drive, the faster because all things being equal, the outer track of the disk will read more data per spin on a larger disk (higher density) than a smaller one.
If you really want to increase speed, get multiple processors to work on multiple tasks simultaniously and get a RAID 5 setup to pull and store data faster. Of course, get at least a Gig of RAM to work with, but remember anything over the size of your OS and the files and programs you're working with that loads into memory is just wasted RAM. RAM is great to free you from a SWAP file, but beyond a certain amount, you're getting diminishing returns.
I have an Athlon 3400+ with 1 Gig of RAM and 2 SATA 200 Gig drives. When encoding video for DVDs, I use data on one to write to the other and my processor doesn't even hit 80% capacity, nor does my RAM max out. My bottleneck is the hard drives themselves, but it's actually faster for me to have the OS and the raw data on one disk with the output file on a seperate disk than to have a 2-drive RAID mirror in this situation.
I'm switching to RAID 5 with a promise raid controller soon, I think. Much lower latency.
Remember... Lower latency = faster data transfer.
I thought she was Princess of Alderan -- the planet the Death Star blew up that was her home world.
Of course, that was just my take on it. With the new pre-trilogy movies, you could say she was princess because her mother was a queen -- Amidala.
Lucas totally screwed up the whole Queen thing by making the queen elected, thus making Amidala a former queen and senator, though.
He also screwed up the continuity because Leia supposedly actually knew her mother and remembered her, but with the new movies, it would have had to have been a stepmother -- who I presume was also a queen. The queen of Alderan.
I'd be interested to hear other opinions, though.
because that's easier said than done? It'd be a massive job just to put a ton of materials on Mars from Earth, much less enough to increase its mass to sustain an atmosphere. We'd have to build a system to pull rock from the meteor belt and hurl it at Mars, then pray that after the enormous expense we don't shift the orbit of the planet or alter its rotation too much. We're talking about an impossible task just due to the amount of resources it would consume to increase the mass of Mars -- not that it's a bad idea, I just don't see how it'd be feasable.
the average businessman doens't know what GNU is or stands for, but most have heard of linux.
Kleenex doesn't mean tissue under the Kleenex brand anymore, it's any tissue you use for the sniffles these days.
Words have meanings, and they change. Linux is now an OS as far as most people are concerned and the linux kernel is just a part of the linux OS. Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake, Yellowdog, Debian... they're all linux flavors or distributions.
You can call Linux whatever you want, but people will just look at you funny like they did the speaker at a state college near here when he referred to Microsoft's new C# language as "See Pound".
When meanings of words change, they usually get another entry in the dictionary. I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux defined as a Unix-like operating system in your average dictionary soon.
Oh, no wait... American Heritage already has one... I'd expect more soon
Linux -- A trademark for an open-source version of the UNIX operating system.
Police protocol is to put everyone they arrest in handcuffs. This is for everyone's safety and is in most states a legal requirement when making an arrest.
The cashier claimed this guy gave her counterfiet money and had evidence that the notes smeared which is often a sign of counterfieting, so the police had to detain the suspect until the SS arrived.
The SS aren't going to come running down to the store in the next 5 to 10 minutes to clear everything up, so that means the police had to take the person into custody and arrest him until the proper authorities could arrive. They have a charge, a suspect, and evidence. They cuffed him and took him to the station like they're supposed to. (They would have done the same thing if someone claimed he exposed himself and it was just one person's word against another -- they'd book him, make him pay bail and set a trial date, then release him on bail if he paid. Even if the police are inclined to believe your story over the other's, that's how it works. Innocent until proven guilty, but you're arrested on a charge with evidence or testimony.) They followed proper police protocol exactly to the letter and could actually be sued or reprimanded if they did otherwise. If the guy HAD been a criminal and made chase or became violent or reached for a gun, we'd be reading about how idiot police officers ended up losing the guy, shooting him, or having a stand-off where people got hurt. The protocols are in place for everyone's protection.
Yes, it sucks that the cashier was unfamiliar w/ $2 bills and that the officers were unaware that $2 bills' ink can smear under usual funny-money testing markers, but don't assume the officers didn't do what they "should" have done. This guy was an ass trying to get "payback" by paying in unusual currency and he got an unusual situation out of it. I say he got what he deserved.
He can sue for false arrest and emotional pain if he likes at this point and see if the court believes he deserves compensation for his trouble, but it's really noone's "fault" here. The cashier was doing her job to the best of her ability (not everyone knows about $2 bills, $1 and 50 cent coins, etc.) and the bills smeared, so she called the cops as she was trained when a bill failed that test. The cops responded and acted in accordance with how they were trained. The SS arrived, cleared him of the charges, and had him released.
Where he goes from here is his business. He can sue if he thinks he deserves something for the misunderstanding, but I doubt he'll get much of anything.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no debate on this theory because it isn't really a theory. It's a -- "hey, what if magic did it all?" hypothesis that cannot be proven or disproven because it specifically ignores historical evidence.
In short, it's more efficient for what I do. For those that only open 1 or 2 pages at a time and leave one page when they visit a new page, maybe it's not worth their while. I have 8 sessions of firefox open right now with an average 5-6 tabs open in each. One's got 10 tabs open to comic strips I like to read in the morning. Another has 5 slashdot tabs open. Another has e-bay and a college text book selection open with multiple shopping sites in tabs, etc. My task bar couldn't hold 40 or so firefox windows on it along with all of the other programs I have running and be as efficient at finding what I want when I wanted to switch tasks.
As another user stated, it saves on memory resources to use tabs as well. You don't have to use them -- you can even turn tabs off completely in many browsers. I think they're the best invention for the web since the search engine, but maybe they're not for you. Tabs are just a tool. I find them incredibly useful for what I do, but maybe some people like yourself don't have a use for them.
I love the joke about the backstreet boys! haha. I certainly don't know enough about the issue to say whether the crime rate was affected by abortion, lead based paint, or the influx of Japanese VCRs that year... but I believe the reason the reduction in crime was so significant was because all of the predictions and forecasts showed there should have been an exponential increase in crime in the 90s when there was instead a steep decline. The "more cops on the street" theory has been debunked along with "the booming economy of the 90's" and several other theories. Economists and other scientists seem to be grasping at straws to explain the decline. I put my money on the abortion issue as the data I've seen seems to support it (and some studies in other countries that made abortion illegal had significant upheaval 20 years later, which is the reverse), but I do agree that the crime rate would have to depend on a massive number of factors and it's possible that no one thing can explain even a dramatic change in it. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics ;-)
This study is a clear case of correlation being seen as causation. I recommend the book Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything by Steven D Levitt & S J Dubner for a more in-depth study on such issues.
It also happens to have a chapter showing good evidence that the decline in crime in the 90s was directly related to the rise in abortions in the 70's due to Roe v. Wade. The theory is that single young pregnant women of low socio-economic status were more likely to have abortions after they became cheaper, safer, and legal. Had they had children, those children would have been at a high risk of becoming criminals as adults due to being unwanted by the mother or family, their low socio-economic status, being from a broken home, possibly malnutrition or drug use by the mother, etc. Around the time those aborted children from the 70s would have been entering their criminal prime , the crime rates dropped steeply -- nation-wide... simply because there were fewer criminals to fill the ranks.
To attribute the crime rate to leaded gasoline is like attributing global warming to the decline in pirates over the centuries... sure they're correlated (the data points move together and make a pretty line to follow), but one does not cause the other.
You are wise to be suspicious.
I understand that if you don't take the Genesis creation story as fact, you can believe in evolution and still be a Christian. However, I live in the deep south (South Carolina) where most people would consider you to be a non-Christian for believing in evolution. You'd be dismissed as a heretic or member of a cult (like the Mormons) for not believing in "the sacred and literal word of God that is the Bible".
:-)
I understand that individuals each have their own beliefs -- even if they fall under the greater umbrella of a particular religion, but region is the belief in the supernatural while evolution is belief in the natural -- they are by definition mutually exclusive. To incorporate "something magical happens" into the process invalidates the science of the study and the theory that makes everything work. This isn't to say that it's impossible for the two processes to co-exist in the universe, but the scientific viewpoint of evolution would be that they do not, have not, and will not co-exist -- because the fundamental idea is to understand the natural process... not the possible supernatural processes that could have taken place. If one is to research the natural processes that lead to evolution, one must omit any religious possibilities for the sake of science... Atheists can do this rather well.
I do not believe that only atheists can believe in evolution, but I do believe that it is an area of study that should be researched without the interference or bias of religious beliefs. It's an exercise in atheism, to some degree. I can understand why one might view anyone who can truly appreciate and believe in the theory of evolution (meaning the natural origin of all life on earth from non-living chemicals)as also being an atheist -- given that most religions propose alternate explanations.
Having said that, I do know a few Buddhists who believe in evolution -- simply because they claim their belief system is not incompatible with evolution. How we got here or where we go next (if anywhere) isn't as important to them as how we choose to behave and treat others.
I recognize that the grandparent poster shouldn't assume that only atheists believe in evolution, but he doesn't explicitly say that. You inferred it, but only because he didn't include others in his statement. I think the issue is more of your wanting to not be excluded from group of people who share the belief in evolution. The grandparent post is correct in saying that atheists believe in evolution -- because they have no alternative theory... save aliens or seed theory -- which just moves the evolution off-world to have begun someplace else.
My point being... you're making an argument over a statement the grandparent poster never made or possibly even intended to imply.
While I follow your line of thinking... it really comes down to the definition of "species" -- which is really a difficult thing to define these days. I hear the definition itself is under review for changes. Some people define different species as being more than 5% different genetically -- enough to where they can no longer mate and produce fertile offspring. There's no easy rule for this anymore, though. Hybridization is more common than scientists once thought -- even between species that were thought to be unable to produce fertile offspring. I think the gist of the point people are trying to make is that humans evolved separately from Neanderthals and that true Neanderthals no longer exist. Sure, some cross-breeding with the human population in the area likely happened, but how often and to what extent, no one can really say -- yet. If I recall correctly, the difference between Neanderthals and humans is the same percentage as the difference between humans and chimpanzees. Some scientists say that a human/chimp hybrid might be possible, but clearly we consider ourselves to be separate species. I think there's not enough evidence to say whether Neanderthal slowly died out as modern humans advanced into their territory... or if they intermingled and merged into one race. Some genetic evidence shows there were some hybrids, but there's no way of knowing how common an occurrence that was. For all we know, it happened once or twice and those offspring spread their genes to more children and so on for a thousand years -- and evolution selected those genes as superior for whatever reason. Thank you for the links, though -- very informative stuff.
Do you have some facts to back this up? I confess I'm not up on the cutting edge in palaeontology, but the last I heard the interbreeding theory had almost no evidence to support it. This article from Discovery's web site from November of 2006 states there is no evidence for this so far and that the two species separated over 500,000 years ago:
h al_hum.html?category=archaeology
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/11/15/neandert
I'm guessing from your harsh criticism of Wiki and the author of the specific page that you must have some pretty solid evidence that I haven't stumbled across yet.
Actually, God is a figment of mankind's collective imagination which allows religious (aka delusional) people to make pretentious, arrogant, and often unfounded statements -- especially in regard to Earth's history and the way people should live their lives.
Aren't you forgetting the whole "The browser is part of the OS" argument Microsoft has been promoting? This is an IE upgrade, which is part of the OS as far as Microsoft is concerned. As not being an app upgrade system, Windows Media Player is in Microsoft updates as well, but in a lower priority. They even upgrade Office through Microsoft update site (as opposed to the old windows update site). I don't know where you get the idea that it isn't an app update system -- it most certainly is and always has been.
Man, in 1976, I barely left the womb. /born Dec of '76
I thought "executive orders" could also be verbal in nature and don't necessarily require any paperwork? -- such as an order in the field to a soldier? Wouldn't intentionally revealing classified information include an implied executive order to rescend it's classified status?
I open about 50 windows at a time, and I like being able to close them all as i read through them with one button in a static position. I don't know where you get the assumption the developers let everyone vote and the majority of the users picked a close button on each tab. No one ever asked my opinion or gave me the option to vote, and I think having a close button for each tab is horrendous. I'm only guessing, but I bet the developers looked at other tab implimentations and went with this because it's similar to other implimentations and works for people who only use a few tabs at a time. I'll be using an extension to turn this off and maybe if enough people use the extension, they'll build the option in to change the interface. I doubt it'd be a huge amount of code to include in the release, but you go ahead and flame on w/ your opponent poster if you like.
I'm running XP Media Center -- it's a version of Pro, not Home, by the way.
Vaccines are for viruses, antibiotics are for bacteria, but Ebola IS a virus. Maybe you should do some MORE checking before you post, eh?
Exactly. It's only "biological" activity is attaching to a host cell and injecting genetic instructions into it. The rest of the time, it's a dormant, yet complex protien structure. Some see it as a parasite on the cellular level since it uses the cellular machinery to reproduce itself. I think that argument has merit -- but so does the argument that it, alone, is not alive. It really is a matter of perspective. I think viruses mostlikely began as a method of transferring DNA and RNA between single-celled organisms much like plasmids and have simply evolved into more diverse and specific structures over time using borrowed DNA from whatever they've infected. I see them as non-living nano-syringes filled with foreign DNA for self-replication. Sometimes, I see them as alive -- in the sense that I wish I could kill them. lol.
Yeah, what do those nobel-prize winning physicists like Hannes Alfvén know, right? Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannes_Alfv%C3%A9n Again, I was just introduced to the plasma cosmology theory a few days ago, so I haven't had time to digest the material, but while I aknowledge it's not widely accepted yet, I think crackpot theory is a bit harsh of a description for a theory supported by acclaimed physicists, professors, and people who have won nobel prizes for their other related theories.
I read recently that Plasma Cosmology is beginning to fill the gaps in current theories by including electromagnetic forces on plasma (99% of matter in the universe is plasma) to explain the variances seen in equations that only take gravity into account. I haven't had time to review the theory completely, but it supposedly shows how to run the numbers without the need for dark energy, dark matter, or even an inflationary force in the universe. It allows for a much older universe ( at least 30 times older than the big bang theory predicts if not infinitely old), and solves a lot of paradoxes -- like how we have stars that are older than the universe itself, etc. Do a google search if you have time. If the theory is true, it's a paradigm shift that'll end the need for this dark matter/energy silliness.
You are kidding, right? Here in South Carolina, nearly everyone I know that got a PS2 had it modded by "a friend who knows a guy" -- That's everyone from college students in dorms to guys living in trailors making minimum wage, but love their games and can't afford to buy 'em all. Most people I know bought the PS2 not only for the games but also as a cheap DVD player, then got it modded for free games they'd download from newsgroups or bittorrent.
Considering it's mostly air and it's formed similar to glass, it could shatter with all the vibration or the air pockets could expand and make it expload during liftoff. I think the conditions to make the aerogel in sufficient quantities would be astronomical in cost (no pun intended). Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
I'd love to have my house insulated with that stuff. It's 100 degrees outside right now w/ a 110 degree heat index.
Too bad you can't delete your own post. You go out of your way to ridicule someone while making yourself sound like an idiot. Latency is, in computer terms, the time it takes between a request and a response. The hard drive is the slowest piece of equipment on a computer. Therefore, it has the highest latency. The latency IS the bottleneck you describe. When you want to read a file, the latency of the hard drive is the time it takes to locate the file and send it to the hard drive controller. Mirroring the hard drive, as you mention, is a way to decrease latency for read times. RAIDs (especially RAID 5) are ways to decrease latency and increase data throughput. Faster processors won't help you if you can't feed data to and from them fast enough to use them to capacity. More RAM is helpful and more processor cache is as well, but the biggest bottleneck on a computer is the hard drive. In general, the larger the hard drive, the faster because all things being equal, the outer track of the disk will read more data per spin on a larger disk (higher density) than a smaller one. If you really want to increase speed, get multiple processors to work on multiple tasks simultaniously and get a RAID 5 setup to pull and store data faster. Of course, get at least a Gig of RAM to work with, but remember anything over the size of your OS and the files and programs you're working with that loads into memory is just wasted RAM. RAM is great to free you from a SWAP file, but beyond a certain amount, you're getting diminishing returns. I have an Athlon 3400+ with 1 Gig of RAM and 2 SATA 200 Gig drives. When encoding video for DVDs, I use data on one to write to the other and my processor doesn't even hit 80% capacity, nor does my RAM max out. My bottleneck is the hard drives themselves, but it's actually faster for me to have the OS and the raw data on one disk with the output file on a seperate disk than to have a 2-drive RAID mirror in this situation. I'm switching to RAID 5 with a promise raid controller soon, I think. Much lower latency. Remember... Lower latency = faster data transfer.
I thought she was Princess of Alderan -- the planet the Death Star blew up that was her home world. Of course, that was just my take on it. With the new pre-trilogy movies, you could say she was princess because her mother was a queen -- Amidala. Lucas totally screwed up the whole Queen thing by making the queen elected, thus making Amidala a former queen and senator, though. He also screwed up the continuity because Leia supposedly actually knew her mother and remembered her, but with the new movies, it would have had to have been a stepmother -- who I presume was also a queen. The queen of Alderan. I'd be interested to hear other opinions, though.
meteor belt... lol. Sorry, I meant asteroid belt.
because that's easier said than done? It'd be a massive job just to put a ton of materials on Mars from Earth, much less enough to increase its mass to sustain an atmosphere. We'd have to build a system to pull rock from the meteor belt and hurl it at Mars, then pray that after the enormous expense we don't shift the orbit of the planet or alter its rotation too much. We're talking about an impossible task just due to the amount of resources it would consume to increase the mass of Mars -- not that it's a bad idea, I just don't see how it'd be feasable.
the average businessman doens't know what GNU is or stands for, but most have heard of linux. Kleenex doesn't mean tissue under the Kleenex brand anymore, it's any tissue you use for the sniffles these days. Words have meanings, and they change. Linux is now an OS as far as most people are concerned and the linux kernel is just a part of the linux OS. Suse, Red Hat, Mandrake, Yellowdog, Debian... they're all linux flavors or distributions. You can call Linux whatever you want, but people will just look at you funny like they did the speaker at a state college near here when he referred to Microsoft's new C# language as "See Pound". When meanings of words change, they usually get another entry in the dictionary. I wouldn't be surprised to see Linux defined as a Unix-like operating system in your average dictionary soon. Oh, no wait... American Heritage already has one... I'd expect more soon Linux -- A trademark for an open-source version of the UNIX operating system.
Police protocol is to put everyone they arrest in handcuffs. This is for everyone's safety and is in most states a legal requirement when making an arrest. The cashier claimed this guy gave her counterfiet money and had evidence that the notes smeared which is often a sign of counterfieting, so the police had to detain the suspect until the SS arrived. The SS aren't going to come running down to the store in the next 5 to 10 minutes to clear everything up, so that means the police had to take the person into custody and arrest him until the proper authorities could arrive. They have a charge, a suspect, and evidence. They cuffed him and took him to the station like they're supposed to. (They would have done the same thing if someone claimed he exposed himself and it was just one person's word against another -- they'd book him, make him pay bail and set a trial date, then release him on bail if he paid. Even if the police are inclined to believe your story over the other's, that's how it works. Innocent until proven guilty, but you're arrested on a charge with evidence or testimony.) They followed proper police protocol exactly to the letter and could actually be sued or reprimanded if they did otherwise. If the guy HAD been a criminal and made chase or became violent or reached for a gun, we'd be reading about how idiot police officers ended up losing the guy, shooting him, or having a stand-off where people got hurt. The protocols are in place for everyone's protection. Yes, it sucks that the cashier was unfamiliar w/ $2 bills and that the officers were unaware that $2 bills' ink can smear under usual funny-money testing markers, but don't assume the officers didn't do what they "should" have done. This guy was an ass trying to get "payback" by paying in unusual currency and he got an unusual situation out of it. I say he got what he deserved. He can sue for false arrest and emotional pain if he likes at this point and see if the court believes he deserves compensation for his trouble, but it's really noone's "fault" here. The cashier was doing her job to the best of her ability (not everyone knows about $2 bills, $1 and 50 cent coins, etc.) and the bills smeared, so she called the cops as she was trained when a bill failed that test. The cops responded and acted in accordance with how they were trained. The SS arrived, cleared him of the charges, and had him released. Where he goes from here is his business. He can sue if he thinks he deserves something for the misunderstanding, but I doubt he'll get much of anything.