Why bother when you can use gmail or any one of a number of excellent webmail clients.
6 very important reasons spring to mind:
1. WebMail is *really* slow compared to PINE 2. FireFox with a webmail system in it takes up many times the screen space 3. I don't especially want to trust a third party with my private data 4. I don't want my mail to be inaccessible when some 3rd party web mail server goes tits-up 5. If I run my own MTA I can do some useful automated stuff with things like procmail 6. I happen to like the interface
I'm sure I could think of plenty of other reasons if pushed. Asking "why bother?" on the assumption that everyone's requirements must be identical to yours is pretty arrogant...
If that were true, where are all the Linux server exploits being actively being used it the wild.
Linux server exploits _are_ being actively used in the wild. If you don't keep your server patched up then you stand a pretty good chance of being rootkitted. However, Linux distros tend to be pretty hot on security updates, meaning that a fully up to date system has very few known security holes. I suspect there are also more "idiot" server admins in charge of Windows servers than Linux servers (that is not to say that Windows admins are idiots, I just suspect there is a higher proportion of clued up admins in the Linux world).
However, the server world is very different from the desktop world - in the server world you can be relatively trustful that the admin won't go and install some random shiny new screensaver, etc. whereas on the desktop most people are not (and do not have access to) qualified admins.
A Linux desktop logged in as standard user is safe from the numpties and is still usable. The dangers of screensavers wouldn't even apply here; even if a user managed to run some malware script it would most probably be confined to the users home dir, the core system would remain immune.
There are a couple of important points here though:
1. Your average home user does _not_ have a dedicated sysadmin. When they want to install a package they (generally) need to become root to do it - that means that the numpties are equally capable of installing screensavers^Wmalware under Linux as they are under Windows. The thing the privilege separation gets you is that you can't _accidentally_ install something as root (e.g. via an exploit in your browser / mail client / whatever).
2. Even without root, a user still usually has plenty of permissions to do some evil things. They can't do some particularly bad things like SYN floods but they can still send out millions of emails and compromise other hosts.
3. Is the protection of the "core system" actually that important when you have a single user machine and so all the important data is owned by that user? The only thing this really gets you is the knowledge that your system binaries are probably safe (so you can trust that ps, netstat, etc are giving you accurate results rather than hiding the malware that is running).
There may be some merit in mounting all the filesystems the normal user can write to as "noexec" so that malware can't just install itself and run as the normal user. But this may place too much of a limit on usability and most distros certainly don't do this by default today.
You don't NEED to have a powerplant nearby. Sure, it helps, but with a good grid you can transport electicity great distances. It just costs more.
You are indeed correct, you don't need a powerplant nearby. However, transporting electricity great distances means you need to generate more electricity in the first place to offset the losses, and I am yet to be convinced that there are anywhere near enough "perfect places" to generate 100% of our energy requirements (especially once you take NIMBYs into account, and the political problems associated with relying on other nations for your power).
Because no matter how difficult it is to surmount, an asteroid is a defeatable obstacle. If people try hard enough, they have a chance to survive.
It isn't defeatable if you didn't see it coming... which is my point, a SIGINT is pretty much the same as being hit by a bloody great asteroid you didn't see.
why should people even try to progress if at any moment the entire universe can be annihiliated?
I don't see how this is different to being hit by an unexpected asteroid - we could all be wiped out at any time without warning.
Besides, how do we know there isn't going to be another big bang or something that completely destroys the universe? We don't - all we know is that the universe appears to have been around for a very long time, so the chances are it'll be around for a long time to come since these universe-ending events don't appear to be especially frequent.
To add to that, nuclear power effectively releases ZERO waste with the exception of heat
Well, that's the theory, but in practice you have to take account of the fact that you do have to handle, reprocess and store the spent fuel and low level waste and you will always get the occasional accident that releases radioactive material into the environment. But even after taking this sort of thing into account, nuclear power is probably still way less harmful (from the toxic pollution point of view) than burning fossil fuels.
For some reason people seem to have got it into their heads that radioactive material is the worst possible thing, but there are some pretty nasty chemicals which are just as bad, if not worse (notably a lot of them released directly into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels).
You're right. But comparing those impacts with the nuclear power it lasts not as long as nuclear radiation.
I think you are underestimating the amount of damage that, for example, flooding many square kilometres of land in order to build a hydroelectric plant would do.
I should also point out a problem with your terminology - radiation itself does not last a long time. Certain (particularly low-level) radioactive material remains radioactive for a long time. This can be mitigated to a large extent through reprocessing of the fuel.
While a nuclear power plant has very little direct emissions (and none nuclear emissions), the resulting nuclear trash is a big problem.
What is needed is more investment into reprocessing (and more investment would hopefully make it safer). I still believe that a barrel of vitrified nuclear waste is less dangerous than chucking millions of tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrides, nitrides, cyanides, heavy metals, radioactive uranium, thorium and radium directly into the atmosphere (which is exactly what you end up doing when you burn fossil fuels). Sure, radioactive materials are pretty bad for you, but so are the toxic chemicals which we pump into the atmosphere all the time.
The reason why "nuclear trash" is perceived to be a bigger problem than the waste generated by burning fossil fuels is that we actually handle it and store it instead of just letting it go into the environment like many other highly toxic materials. The nuclear accidents that have happened in modern times have probably been far less damaging to the environment than our other (non-nuclear) activities.
Now, this certainly depends on the definition of serious.. And the world you're living in. Poor eyesight is not serious.
But that's kind of my point - it isn't serious, but it does require medical resources. So if we allow diseases to remain within the gene pool, the amount of medical resources we will need will continue to increase.
How terrible is your eyesight, and how exactly?
-5.50 diopters in each eye, with an astigmatism of 0.75 in one and 1.25 in the other. In the grand scheme of things, there are plenty of people with worse eyesight, but it is bad enough that I would have real problems if I didn't have corrective lenses.
Sight going bad with old age can also be beneficial in evolution. Old people dying off and making space for the young ones and their "radical" ideas of development.
That supports my point - the old people are no longer dying off as quickly because we keep them alive (whether that be though corrective lenses for their eyesight or full time care for more serious illnesses).
While I see no reason to believe mutation rate would have gone up (well, until recently)
It isn't just mutation - more people are able to breed, even though they are suffering from a disease and this will increase the amount of genetic diversity.
I think it's really evolution and we're really better in the modern world than people 5000 years ago would have been. Of course the difference isn't probably very big.
I doubt there is much genetic evolution visible to the naked eye over a period of 5000 years. The ways that we are "better" which immediately spring to mind are down to environmental factors, for example, we live longer - this is probably down to medicine and the availability of food due to farming. We have technology - this is down to improved education and building on the knowledge of previous generations. This last point seems to be an exponential function - as we become more technologically advanced, the technology helps us advance faster. For example, over the very recent history, the invention of communication technologies such as the telephone and the internet has massively expanded our ability to educate and cooperate with our peers. There is much less "reinventing the wheel" these days purely because we have better communications and so we know about previous "wheels" - the time we would have spent reinventing it can be put to much better use inventing brand new stuff, possibly based on the existing "wheel".
Death as it is is only one of the factors driving evolution, choice of partners is another.
Absolutely - death is by no means the only factor in driving evolution, but it is an important one in preventing the propagation of serious diseases to the following generations.
As a relatively trivial example, my eyesight is terrible - it was terrible by the time I reached my teens (and I assume this is genetic since most of the rest of my family also have pretty bad eyesight). Back when we were hunter/gatherers I would have likely starved to death since I wouldn't be able to find food, but through the wonders of contact lenses I am free to procreate and pass on this genetic deficiency to the following generation.
There actually was news rather recently that evolution has accelerated in the last 5000 years. That's because our surroundings have changed so fast during that time.
My reading of that report was that our genetic makeup is changing faster, not that we are necessarily becoming "better" (which is what I would consider to be evolution).
An interesting point is that our society tends to measure success by our career achievements, but it is the career people who are foregoing having children. The people who are breeding like rabbits are the people staying at home and living off government handouts. (Yes, I know this comment isn't politically correct, but I'm afraid some times the facts just don't fit with political correctness).
Nuclear energy is not "by far the cleanest energy source", like that one poster claimed.
I don't think it is this simple - this isn't a simple comparison of "technology A produces radioactive material, technology B does not so technology B is better". The technologies are environmentally damaging in vastly different ways, I don't think you can simply say one is better than the other. Which is why I'm rather tired of people saying that we must use renewables instead of nuclear - one is not clearly better than the other from the perspective of environmental damage. However, nuclear _is_ a very clean source of energy - very little reaction mass is used, and the whole reaction is well contained so that we can properly handle the waste rather than just pumping it up into the atmosphere. I don't believe it is viable to supply *all* our energy from renewable sources, and nuclear power seems a pretty good method of generating the rest.
I think on of the biggest problems with the environmental movement (or at least their PR) is that they seem more than happy to pursue perfect solutions at the expense of good solutions.
I agree entirely. Although the other problem seems to be that they take a solution that might be more or less perfect, given perfect conditions/location and push it so hard they end up putting it in conditions/locations where it either doesn't work or causes a lot of damage. I'm all for installing in "renewable" power generation systems where appropriate, but I also recognise that they are often not appropriate and that fission is a pretty good solution (with appropriate handling and reprocessing facilities for the spent fuel).
Also, whilst I can forgive the general public for overreacting based on misinformation (e.g. the "nuclear is bad" attitude caused by its association with nuclear weapons, Chernobyl, etc.), it seems that the big environmental groups who attract the media's attention are often just as badly informed. For example, Greenpeace is opposed to ITER and other fusion research, stating that it is dangerous, a waste of money and that it should be spent on renewables instead. So they seem to not want research into a technology that could producer cleaner (although not completely clean) energy. Yes, we may never get useful power out of fusion reactors, but we won't know until we try - I for one am hopeful.
There are many cleaner ways to generate electricity than nuclear. Hydro, geothermal, tidal and wave, wind and solar energy are all cleaner.
Depends how you define "clean" - hydro power is usually environmentally quite damaging. Tidal power can also be quite damaging if done inappropriately (I'll point at the proposed Severn Tidal Barrage as an example of how do do a lot of damage to the environment through harnessing the tides). Thermal solar based systems are probably pretty clean, but photovoltaic systems use quite a lot of rather nasty chemicals in their manufacture which must be handled carefully (kind of like fission products in fact...)
These religious freeks tend to claim Evolution as the mechanism for life as we know it and a common ancestor is a proven fact. They seem to think that we have empirical evidence showing life mutating from start to finish.
Whilst we don't have the whole start-to-finish set of evidence, we do have quite a lot of data points. I'm not going to claim that long-term evolution has been proved, but I would say that there is a _lot_ of evidence pointing to the theory being, for the most part, correct.
We have, however, proved short-term evolution to the extent that it is seen in the lab on a regular basis when dealing with bacteria and virii.
They seem to think evolution in this manor stopped because this is the most perfect time for life.
I'm not a geneticist, but logically I would have to conclude that evolution (to the improvement of the gene pool) has probably slowed due to the advancement of medicine. We are now saving the lives of people who have serious diseases and allowing them to breed, so a lot of the natural selection forces have been removed.
I would guess that this is leading to greater genetic diversity by the very fact that these diseases are not being bred out of the gene pool. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing - genetic diversity is often good for the survival of the species as a whole since it allows the species to cope better with rapid environmental changes, but it does mean that our medical facilities may become more and more stretched as diseases, which would otherwise prevent procreation, propagate to further generations.
Why would it have any less meaning if the universe were a simulation? If anything, the meaning of life might be to entertain the person running the simulation, thus it could be construed as having more meaning.
because at any second someone could hit Ctrl-C and kill us all instantly, erasing our entire life's work
So kind of like an asteroid that could wipe out our whole planet - this is a real threat, how is it different to someone hitting Ctrl+C?
Lets focus our space program on useful tasks such as orbital solar energy collection and leave the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life to the hobbiests.
How do you know what will be useful in the future? Many useful technologies we take for granted to day are the products of research into things that were not obviously going to be useful at the time. If you limit all your research to only things which are immediately useful you are seriously limiting the speed of advancement.
For the most part, commercial organisations don't spend money on blue-sky projects and hobbiests don't have the money to spend - this means it's either down to governments to fund the research or we can forget about such advancements altogether.
Do you really need the latest generation of hardware to serve web pages?
No. But you might find it is more economic to do so. If you can consolidate 4U of servers into 1U (for example), then it may be cheaper to do so rather than continue to rent the 4U of space (and it'll save power and generate less heat too).
Now think businesses, 50+ computers. Advantages of SaaS software: no need for installations, no conflicting installations, easier to use on remote locations, centralized data which can only be seen through the application (if desired), no versioning problems,
And when your network breaks you have 50+ employees being paid to sit and do nothing.
I'm convinced that it is better to have as little dependency on the network and servers as possible so that people can continue doing work when the servers inevitably become unreachable.
As an example - I tend to use Subversion for my revision control system. I check out my code (requires the network) and from that point on my work is done on the local drive until I need to commit my changes. One of my previous employers insisted on using Clearcase dynamic views instead - this requires constant access to the revision control system. If the server goes down you can do *nothing*. Worse - Clearcase requires access to a licence server, which in the employer's wisdom was on another site. So when the internet connection goes down, despite you have all your source code and everything locally, you can't actually do a lot since Clearcase will point-blank refuse to work if it can't see the licence servers. There were several occasions when about 20 developers were just sitting there for half a day at a time unable to do anything because either the server or the internet connection was down. I'd estimate they lost maybe 100 man-days over a 2 year period through this kind of stupidity alone (and that's not counting the amount of time wasted battling such a terminally broken and slow revision control system anyway).
teachers should know more than the students in the area they are teaching in.
This is quite wrong. In any subject where students get a lot of hands on experience (especially a subject in rapid development, like computing) you should expect the student to have a greater knowledge than the teacher in some parts of the subject. This is completely natural - the students get more time to play with the "cool new stuff" than the teachers, so you should expect them to be more knowledgeable about the "cool new stuff". However, the teacher is probably still far more familiar with the "boring old stuff", which is probably still extremely relevant. i.e. the student has an extremely good knowledge in a single very specific area, whereas the teacher has a reasonable knowledge in a much broader area.
As an example, the student may know $new_programming_language. The teacher does not know this language - she knows a few older languages. However, the teacher also has a good knowledge of many algorithms. Even though the teacher doesn't know the new language, the algorithms that she can teach the student about can, for the most part, be applied directly to the new language, and many other languages that the student may choose to learn in the future.
If every kid comes out of school creative and motivated to do great things, where are we going to get people to do all the shit jobs that no one wants to do?
Prison?
No, we can't do that - it would be against the murderer's human rights to put him to work in a shitty job...
how come the spacecraft for manned missions to Mars and space stations like the ISS don't have designs that provide artificial gravity from spin?
From what I have read the problem is the disorientation that is caused when moving in a spinning environment. You need to keep the rotation at under about 2 RPM to prevent the Coriolis forces from causing dizziness and nausea as people move their heads around. In order to achieve the low angular velocity you need a large diameter (around 450m to produce 1g at 2 RPM). You also need a large diameter to reduce the gradient of the "artificial gravity" (so your head doesn't experience much less "gravity" than your feet). One proposed solution is to tether two space craft together, rather than building an extremely large craft - this would, of course, cause all sorts of problems when you want to apply propulsion to the craft though.
I'm left wondering what the advantage is of FireWire3200 over 10Gbps Ethernet (possibly using something like ISCSI for hard drive access). I know that 10GigE is pretty pricey, but I imagine the same will apply to FireWire3200.
It's very wrong to claim that ALL sources of beta radiation lack the ability to significantly penetrate the air--it's all a matter of power level.
Where did I claim that? If you read my post you will see that I said "at the kind of electron energies you're talking about for a CRT" which places the upper limit firmly around the 35KeV level for a large TV set (less for smaller tubes).
The electrons striking the grill are energetic enough to create some x-rays.
Yes, but who's disputing the creation of X-rays? You stated that a CRT will be "beaming beta radiation" "directly into your eyes", which is downright untrue - the beta radiation (energetic electrons) aren't going to be going anywhere near your eyes.
My entire point, which you've utterly failed to grasp, is that just because something is spewing radiation, doesn't make it significantly dangerous.
No, I haven't failed to grasp your point at all. However, you are using misinformation to support your point. Spreading this kind of misinformation, no matter what your intentions, is not a Good Thing - people with an understanding of this stuff should be trying to _educate_ people rather than try to alleviate their fears by misrepresenting the facts.
One step at the time - and if Microsoft can document fully their OOXML format, it's still a win for OpenOffice and the rest of the office suites out there - compatibility with Microsoft Office will be easier to obtain.
I'm unconvinced - from what I've seen of the OOXML "spec", I am not sure maintaining compatibility by following it would be any easier than the current reverse engineering done on the existing formats. So the only change I think we're going to see if OOXML gets approved as a standard is that the third party software writers will _look_ worse since they will lose the "well it isn't documented so we're doing the best we can" excuse.
You hit it on the head. When people view the average distro's "out-of-the-box" hardware support, it's vastly superior to the mainstream competition.
This used to be the case, but other distros seem to have caught up. For me, Fedora has usually Just Worked for some time now, whereas I keep hearing Ubuntu users having real problems getting Ubuntu to work on similar hardware (Intel GPU and Intel sound).
It seems that if you want to use hardware that requires non-Free drivers, such as nVidia GPUs, Ubuntu has the edge (since many distos such as Fedora will never bundle non-Free code). But these days Ubuntu really doesn't seem to be leading the pack anymore if you're using hardware that's fully supported by Free drivers.
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Why bother when you can use gmail or any one of a number of excellent webmail clients.
6 very important reasons spring to mind:
1. WebMail is *really* slow compared to PINE
2. FireFox with a webmail system in it takes up many times the screen space
3. I don't especially want to trust a third party with my private data
4. I don't want my mail to be inaccessible when some 3rd party web mail server goes tits-up
5. If I run my own MTA I can do some useful automated stuff with things like procmail
6. I happen to like the interface
I'm sure I could think of plenty of other reasons if pushed. Asking "why bother?" on the assumption that everyone's requirements must be identical to yours is pretty arrogant...
If that were true, where are all the Linux server exploits being actively being used it the wild.
Linux server exploits _are_ being actively used in the wild. If you don't keep your server patched up then you stand a pretty good chance of being rootkitted. However, Linux distros tend to be pretty hot on security updates, meaning that a fully up to date system has very few known security holes. I suspect there are also more "idiot" server admins in charge of Windows servers than Linux servers (that is not to say that Windows admins are idiots, I just suspect there is a higher proportion of clued up admins in the Linux world).
However, the server world is very different from the desktop world - in the server world you can be relatively trustful that the admin won't go and install some random shiny new screensaver, etc. whereas on the desktop most people are not (and do not have access to) qualified admins.
A Linux desktop logged in as standard user is safe from the numpties and is still usable. The dangers of screensavers wouldn't even apply here; even if a user managed to run some malware script it would most probably be confined to the users home dir, the core system would remain immune.
There are a couple of important points here though:
1. Your average home user does _not_ have a dedicated sysadmin. When they want to install a package they (generally) need to become root to do it - that means that the numpties are equally capable of installing screensavers^Wmalware under Linux as they are under Windows. The thing the privilege separation gets you is that you can't _accidentally_ install something as root (e.g. via an exploit in your browser / mail client / whatever).
2. Even without root, a user still usually has plenty of permissions to do some evil things. They can't do some particularly bad things like SYN floods but they can still send out millions of emails and compromise other hosts.
3. Is the protection of the "core system" actually that important when you have a single user machine and so all the important data is owned by that user? The only thing this really gets you is the knowledge that your system binaries are probably safe (so you can trust that ps, netstat, etc are giving you accurate results rather than hiding the malware that is running).
There may be some merit in mounting all the filesystems the normal user can write to as "noexec" so that malware can't just install itself and run as the normal user. But this may place too much of a limit on usability and most distros certainly don't do this by default today.
You don't NEED to have a powerplant nearby. Sure, it helps, but with a good grid you can transport electicity great distances. It just costs more.
You are indeed correct, you don't need a powerplant nearby. However, transporting electricity great distances means you need to generate more electricity in the first place to offset the losses, and I am yet to be convinced that there are anywhere near enough "perfect places" to generate 100% of our energy requirements (especially once you take NIMBYs into account, and the political problems associated with relying on other nations for your power).
Because no matter how difficult it is to surmount, an asteroid is a defeatable obstacle. If people try hard enough, they have a chance to survive.
It isn't defeatable if you didn't see it coming... which is my point, a SIGINT is pretty much the same as being hit by a bloody great asteroid you didn't see.
why should people even try to progress if at any moment the entire universe can be annihiliated?
I don't see how this is different to being hit by an unexpected asteroid - we could all be wiped out at any time without warning.
Besides, how do we know there isn't going to be another big bang or something that completely destroys the universe? We don't - all we know is that the universe appears to have been around for a very long time, so the chances are it'll be around for a long time to come since these universe-ending events don't appear to be especially frequent.
To add to that, nuclear power effectively releases ZERO waste with the exception of heat
Well, that's the theory, but in practice you have to take account of the fact that you do have to handle, reprocess and store the spent fuel and low level waste and you will always get the occasional accident that releases radioactive material into the environment. But even after taking this sort of thing into account, nuclear power is probably still way less harmful (from the toxic pollution point of view) than burning fossil fuels.
For some reason people seem to have got it into their heads that radioactive material is the worst possible thing, but there are some pretty nasty chemicals which are just as bad, if not worse (notably a lot of them released directly into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels).
You're right. But comparing those impacts with the nuclear power it lasts not as long as nuclear radiation.
I think you are underestimating the amount of damage that, for example, flooding many square kilometres of land in order to build a hydroelectric plant would do.
I should also point out a problem with your terminology - radiation itself does not last a long time. Certain (particularly low-level) radioactive material remains radioactive for a long time. This can be mitigated to a large extent through reprocessing of the fuel.
While a nuclear power plant has very little direct emissions (and none nuclear emissions), the resulting nuclear trash is a big problem.
What is needed is more investment into reprocessing (and more investment would hopefully make it safer). I still believe that a barrel of vitrified nuclear waste is less dangerous than chucking millions of tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrides, nitrides, cyanides, heavy metals, radioactive uranium, thorium and radium directly into the atmosphere (which is exactly what you end up doing when you burn fossil fuels). Sure, radioactive materials are pretty bad for you, but so are the toxic chemicals which we pump into the atmosphere all the time.
The reason why "nuclear trash" is perceived to be a bigger problem than the waste generated by burning fossil fuels is that we actually handle it and store it instead of just letting it go into the environment like many other highly toxic materials. The nuclear accidents that have happened in modern times have probably been far less damaging to the environment than our other (non-nuclear) activities.
Now, this certainly depends on the definition of serious.. And the world you're living in. Poor eyesight is not serious.
But that's kind of my point - it isn't serious, but it does require medical resources. So if we allow diseases to remain within the gene pool, the amount of medical resources we will need will continue to increase.
How terrible is your eyesight, and how exactly?
-5.50 diopters in each eye, with an astigmatism of 0.75 in one and 1.25 in the other. In the grand scheme of things, there are plenty of people with worse eyesight, but it is bad enough that I would have real problems if I didn't have corrective lenses.
Sight going bad with old age can also be beneficial in evolution. Old people dying off and making space for the young ones and their "radical" ideas of development.
That supports my point - the old people are no longer dying off as quickly because we keep them alive (whether that be though corrective lenses for their eyesight or full time care for more serious illnesses).
While I see no reason to believe mutation rate would have gone up (well, until recently)
It isn't just mutation - more people are able to breed, even though they are suffering from a disease and this will increase the amount of genetic diversity.
I think it's really evolution and we're really better in the modern world than people 5000 years ago would have been. Of course the difference isn't probably very big.
I doubt there is much genetic evolution visible to the naked eye over a period of 5000 years. The ways that we are "better" which immediately spring to mind are down to environmental factors, for example, we live longer - this is probably down to medicine and the availability of food due to farming. We have technology - this is down to improved education and building on the knowledge of previous generations. This last point seems to be an exponential function - as we become more technologically advanced, the technology helps us advance faster. For example, over the very recent history, the invention of communication technologies such as the telephone and the internet has massively expanded our ability to educate and cooperate with our peers. There is much less "reinventing the wheel" these days purely because we have better communications and so we know about previous "wheels" - the time we would have spent reinventing it can be put to much better use inventing brand new stuff, possibly based on the existing "wheel".
Death as it is is only one of the factors driving evolution, choice of partners is another.
Absolutely - death is by no means the only factor in driving evolution, but it is an important one in preventing the propagation of serious diseases to the following generations.
As a relatively trivial example, my eyesight is terrible - it was terrible by the time I reached my teens (and I assume this is genetic since most of the rest of my family also have pretty bad eyesight). Back when we were hunter/gatherers I would have likely starved to death since I wouldn't be able to find food, but through the wonders of contact lenses I am free to procreate and pass on this genetic deficiency to the following generation.
There actually was news rather recently that evolution has accelerated in the last 5000 years. That's because our surroundings have changed so fast during that time.
My reading of that report was that our genetic makeup is changing faster, not that we are necessarily becoming "better" (which is what I would consider to be evolution).
An interesting point is that our society tends to measure success by our career achievements, but it is the career people who are foregoing having children. The people who are breeding like rabbits are the people staying at home and living off government handouts. (Yes, I know this comment isn't politically correct, but I'm afraid some times the facts just don't fit with political correctness).
Nuclear energy is not "by far the cleanest energy source", like that one poster claimed.
I don't think it is this simple - this isn't a simple comparison of "technology A produces radioactive material, technology B does not so technology B is better". The technologies are environmentally damaging in vastly different ways, I don't think you can simply say one is better than the other. Which is why I'm rather tired of people saying that we must use renewables instead of nuclear - one is not clearly better than the other from the perspective of environmental damage. However, nuclear _is_ a very clean source of energy - very little reaction mass is used, and the whole reaction is well contained so that we can properly handle the waste rather than just pumping it up into the atmosphere. I don't believe it is viable to supply *all* our energy from renewable sources, and nuclear power seems a pretty good method of generating the rest.
I think on of the biggest problems with the environmental movement (or at least their PR) is that they seem more than happy to pursue perfect solutions at the expense of good solutions.
I agree entirely. Although the other problem seems to be that they take a solution that might be more or less perfect, given perfect conditions/location and push it so hard they end up putting it in conditions/locations where it either doesn't work or causes a lot of damage. I'm all for installing in "renewable" power generation systems where appropriate, but I also recognise that they are often not appropriate and that fission is a pretty good solution (with appropriate handling and reprocessing facilities for the spent fuel).
Also, whilst I can forgive the general public for overreacting based on misinformation (e.g. the "nuclear is bad" attitude caused by its association with nuclear weapons, Chernobyl, etc.), it seems that the big environmental groups who attract the media's attention are often just as badly informed. For example, Greenpeace is opposed to ITER and other fusion research, stating that it is dangerous, a waste of money and that it should be spent on renewables instead. So they seem to not want research into a technology that could producer cleaner (although not completely clean) energy. Yes, we may never get useful power out of fusion reactors, but we won't know until we try - I for one am hopeful.
There are many cleaner ways to generate electricity than nuclear. Hydro, geothermal, tidal and wave, wind and solar energy are all cleaner.
Depends how you define "clean" - hydro power is usually environmentally quite damaging. Tidal power can also be quite damaging if done inappropriately (I'll point at the proposed Severn Tidal Barrage as an example of how do do a lot of damage to the environment through harnessing the tides). Thermal solar based systems are probably pretty clean, but photovoltaic systems use quite a lot of rather nasty chemicals in their manufacture which must be handled carefully (kind of like fission products in fact...)
These religious freeks tend to claim Evolution as the mechanism for life as we know it and a common ancestor is a proven fact. They seem to think that we have empirical evidence showing life mutating from start to finish.
Whilst we don't have the whole start-to-finish set of evidence, we do have quite a lot of data points. I'm not going to claim that long-term evolution has been proved, but I would say that there is a _lot_ of evidence pointing to the theory being, for the most part, correct.
We have, however, proved short-term evolution to the extent that it is seen in the lab on a regular basis when dealing with bacteria and virii.
They seem to think evolution in this manor stopped because this is the most perfect time for life.
I'm not a geneticist, but logically I would have to conclude that evolution (to the improvement of the gene pool) has probably slowed due to the advancement of medicine. We are now saving the lives of people who have serious diseases and allowing them to breed, so a lot of the natural selection forces have been removed.
I would guess that this is leading to greater genetic diversity by the very fact that these diseases are not being bred out of the gene pool. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing - genetic diversity is often good for the survival of the species as a whole since it allows the species to cope better with rapid environmental changes, but it does mean that our medical facilities may become more and more stretched as diseases, which would otherwise prevent procreation, propagate to further generations.
Imagine if the universe was just someone's screensaver.
So we're all dead when she returns with a mug of coffee?
Because life has no meaning
Why would it have any less meaning if the universe were a simulation? If anything, the meaning of life might be to entertain the person running the simulation, thus it could be construed as having more meaning.
because at any second someone could hit Ctrl-C and kill us all instantly, erasing our entire life's work
So kind of like an asteroid that could wipe out our whole planet - this is a real threat, how is it different to someone hitting Ctrl+C?
Lets focus our space program on useful tasks such as orbital solar energy collection and leave the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life to the hobbiests.
How do you know what will be useful in the future? Many useful technologies we take for granted to day are the products of research into things that were not obviously going to be useful at the time. If you limit all your research to only things which are immediately useful you are seriously limiting the speed of advancement.
For the most part, commercial organisations don't spend money on blue-sky projects and hobbiests don't have the money to spend - this means it's either down to governments to fund the research or we can forget about such advancements altogether.
Do you really need the latest generation of hardware to serve web pages?
No. But you might find it is more economic to do so. If you can consolidate 4U of servers into 1U (for example), then it may be cheaper to do so rather than continue to rent the 4U of space (and it'll save power and generate less heat too).
Now think businesses, 50+ computers. Advantages of SaaS software: no need for installations, no conflicting installations, easier to use on remote locations, centralized data which can only be seen through the application (if desired), no versioning problems,
And when your network breaks you have 50+ employees being paid to sit and do nothing.
I'm convinced that it is better to have as little dependency on the network and servers as possible so that people can continue doing work when the servers inevitably become unreachable.
As an example - I tend to use Subversion for my revision control system. I check out my code (requires the network) and from that point on my work is done on the local drive until I need to commit my changes. One of my previous employers insisted on using Clearcase dynamic views instead - this requires constant access to the revision control system. If the server goes down you can do *nothing*. Worse - Clearcase requires access to a licence server, which in the employer's wisdom was on another site. So when the internet connection goes down, despite you have all your source code and everything locally, you can't actually do a lot since Clearcase will point-blank refuse to work if it can't see the licence servers. There were several occasions when about 20 developers were just sitting there for half a day at a time unable to do anything because either the server or the internet connection was down. I'd estimate they lost maybe 100 man-days over a 2 year period through this kind of stupidity alone (and that's not counting the amount of time wasted battling such a terminally broken and slow revision control system anyway).
teachers should know more than the students in the area they are teaching in.
This is quite wrong. In any subject where students get a lot of hands on experience (especially a subject in rapid development, like computing) you should expect the student to have a greater knowledge than the teacher in some parts of the subject. This is completely natural - the students get more time to play with the "cool new stuff" than the teachers, so you should expect them to be more knowledgeable about the "cool new stuff". However, the teacher is probably still far more familiar with the "boring old stuff", which is probably still extremely relevant. i.e. the student has an extremely good knowledge in a single very specific area, whereas the teacher has a reasonable knowledge in a much broader area.
As an example, the student may know $new_programming_language. The teacher does not know this language - she knows a few older languages. However, the teacher also has a good knowledge of many algorithms. Even though the teacher doesn't know the new language, the algorithms that she can teach the student about can, for the most part, be applied directly to the new language, and many other languages that the student may choose to learn in the future.
If every kid comes out of school creative and motivated to do great things, where are we going to get people to do all the shit jobs that no one wants to do?
Prison?
No, we can't do that - it would be against the murderer's human rights to put him to work in a shitty job...
how come the spacecraft for manned missions to Mars and space stations like the ISS don't have designs that provide artificial gravity from spin?
From what I have read the problem is the disorientation that is caused when moving in a spinning environment. You need to keep the rotation at under about 2 RPM to prevent the Coriolis forces from causing dizziness and nausea as people move their heads around. In order to achieve the low angular velocity you need a large diameter (around 450m to produce 1g at 2 RPM). You also need a large diameter to reduce the gradient of the "artificial gravity" (so your head doesn't experience much less "gravity" than your feet). One proposed solution is to tether two space craft together, rather than building an extremely large craft - this would, of course, cause all sorts of problems when you want to apply propulsion to the craft though.
The Wikipedia article on this is quite informative.
I'm left wondering what the advantage is of FireWire3200 over 10Gbps Ethernet (possibly using something like ISCSI for hard drive access). I know that 10GigE is pretty pricey, but I imagine the same will apply to FireWire3200.
It's very wrong to claim that ALL sources of beta radiation lack the ability to significantly penetrate the air--it's all a matter of power level.
Where did I claim that? If you read my post you will see that I said "at the kind of electron energies you're talking about for a CRT" which places the upper limit firmly around the 35KeV level for a large TV set (less for smaller tubes).
The electrons striking the grill are energetic enough to create some x-rays.
Yes, but who's disputing the creation of X-rays? You stated that a CRT will be "beaming beta radiation" "directly into your eyes", which is downright untrue - the beta radiation (energetic electrons) aren't going to be going anywhere near your eyes.
My entire point, which you've utterly failed to grasp, is that just because something is spewing radiation, doesn't make it significantly dangerous.
No, I haven't failed to grasp your point at all. However, you are using misinformation to support your point. Spreading this kind of misinformation, no matter what your intentions, is not a Good Thing - people with an understanding of this stuff should be trying to _educate_ people rather than try to alleviate their fears by misrepresenting the facts.
One step at the time - and if Microsoft can document fully their OOXML format, it's still a win for OpenOffice and the rest of the office suites out there - compatibility with Microsoft Office will be easier to obtain.
I'm unconvinced - from what I've seen of the OOXML "spec", I am not sure maintaining compatibility by following it would be any easier than the current reverse engineering done on the existing formats. So the only change I think we're going to see if OOXML gets approved as a standard is that the third party software writers will _look_ worse since they will lose the "well it isn't documented so we're doing the best we can" excuse.
You hit it on the head. When people view the average distro's "out-of-the-box" hardware support, it's vastly superior to the mainstream competition.
This used to be the case, but other distros seem to have caught up. For me, Fedora has usually Just Worked for some time now, whereas I keep hearing Ubuntu users having real problems getting Ubuntu to work on similar hardware (Intel GPU and Intel sound).
It seems that if you want to use hardware that requires non-Free drivers, such as nVidia GPUs, Ubuntu has the edge (since many distos such as Fedora will never bundle non-Free code). But these days Ubuntu really doesn't seem to be leading the pack anymore if you're using hardware that's fully supported by Free drivers.