Rather than sparking rapid evolution, maybe the high O2 concentrations led to (or allowed) the development of hard tissue in existing complex organisms. Ocean acidification dissolves the shells of clams, corals, etc. and increased O2 levels could coincide with decreased CO2 levels (probably because the organisms creating all the O2 had to get it from somewhere).
This being Slashdot (and the link being paywalled) I have not bothered to read the linked article. Hell, I've barely bothered to read the summary.
Swift is still a very immature language, with lots of bugs in the compiler, rough support in the debugger and IDE, and the syntax isn't even set in stone yet (don't expect the syntax to settle down before Swift 2.0, probably some time in late 2015 if not 2016). There are a number of things that you still can't do in Swift (e.g. providing a callback function for APIs that expect a C function pointer), and you'll just spend a lot more time hitting your head against walls than writing working code. On top of this there are many more resources available for learning Objective-C than there are for Swift, and the pitfalls and corner cases are better understood for Objective-C than they are for Swift. As a bonus most of your instincts honed on C will carry over to Objective-C (while they are likely to lead you astray in Swift).
Swift is a really exciting language, and fun to play around with, but it's not ready for production work (yet). It will get there, but in the mean time you should stick with the established tools, which means Objective-C for iOS and Mac OS X app development.
Poor people can't use their wealth to shield themselves from the consequences of their own stupidity, so yes.
I observe this fact every weekend in a nearby wealthy neighborhood where I go to eat at good restaurants. Stupid rich people who don't know how to obey traffic signals (both drivers and pedestrians), don't know how to operate simple machines (soft serve machines shouldn't cause issues for observant adults), and who generally seem to expect everyone to make allowances for their blundering and incompetence.
Einstein's theory of relativity was theoretical at first. It was only later that scientists were able to devise experiments to test it
Actually, you have that exactly wrong: Einstein's theory of special relativity was a direct attempt to explain a specific experimental result, the negative results of the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment to verify the existence of the liminiferous aether. The Michelson-Morley results were published in 1887, and Einstein published special relativity in 1905.
What patent were you reading? There is not a single mention of conversion of vector images to raster images!
The patent describes a set of recorded data that corrects for color and "spatial" distortion of an image by an input our output device. All the claims pertain to various features of that data set, or of the process of applying the corrections to an image.
First, if fish (or other marine animals) were eating the plastic (and there is a lot of evidence that they are) then they would also be starving to death (as they can't digest the plastic, and it fills up their digestive systems). When they die, the plastic would be returned to the ocean, and we would see it in our assays. So I don't think that the plastic getting eaten is the obvious solution.
Second, as anyone who has gotten sunburned while swimming knows, water doesn't block ultraviolet light very effectively, so plastic floating near the top of the water column would be exposed to a lot of UV. Plastic breaks down pretty quickly when exposed to UV, so we may just be seeing the natural destruction of the plastic by sunlight (and, I suppose, that plastic that has been partially broken down by exposure to UV might be more easily consumed by bacteria, but that's pure speculation).
Third, maybe we aren't measuring the amount of plastic in the ocean correctly. If the plastic is being consumed, or is sinking to the ocean floor, then we might easily be missing it. Also, the plastic might well not be evenly distributed across the ocean: it may be collecting in specific places due to winds and ocean currents. If we are not collecting samples evenly over the entire ocean, then we could be missing some high concentration areas.
I doubt that this means we can all breath a sigh of relief and decide that dumping plastic in the oceans is no big deal. I also doubt that this means that plastic is a much bigger problem than we thought (how could it be a bigger problem then we thought? People have been screaming about it like it was a sign of the end-times!). It is interesting, however, and I would like to know why our measurements don't match our expectations.
my concern is that deciding to eat the invasive species is tantamount to an admission of defeat.
While I don't think that we should accept the status quo of irresponsibly introducing invasive species to our local environments, I think it's a wonderful idea to try eating our way out of the problems we've already created. For example, the Northern Snakehead is a recent and particular problem in my region (Washington D.C. Metropolitan area) and, coincidentally, is quite tasty. If we could manage to fish them to extinction it would be all for the best, and should be encouraged. Of course this may not work for many invasive species (some reproduce too rapidly to be effectively controlled by human predation, others might not be edible or palatable), so this sort of solution should be considered only as a second (or lower) tier option.
In order for it to be true, the average "microbe" would have to be incredibly smaller than the average human cell
Indeed: human skin cell = 30 um, red blood cell = 8 um, human X chromosome = 7 um, yeast cell = 3x4 um, mitochondria body = 4x0.8 um, E. coli bacterium = 4x0.6 um. (taken from this page found via a rudimentary Google search, zoom down to the micrometer range)
Human cells are pretty large, on average, and microbial cells are much smaller.
That doesn't make the cited factoid any more meaningful, but it is certainly not worthy of doubt based purely on the numbers (that is to say, there are certainly more atoms of calcium in your body than there are human cells, but does that mean that you are, in fact, a lump of chalk?).
Plenty of species have benefited from humans without becoming primary sources of food for them. Easy example: Cats and Dogs. Other examples: Squirrels, pigeons, and rats.
Yes, Iapetus was photographed by Voyager 2 in 1981 (link to NASA image with metadata listed), and I would suspect that there were earth based images taken well before that (but none that would show any detail).
Who would have expected a summary on Slashdot to be carelessly wrong about something factual and easily verified?
You could use a spindizzy, you could use volucite, or you could just have it roll on a road (though that appears to be more realistic than it might seem).
When the amount of development your OS gets suffers "compared to HP-UX" you are in astonishingly deep trouble. I have had three run-ins with HP-UX, first in 1998, next in 2004, and finally in 2010 (when my current job retired all it's existing HP servers and moved to Solaris). When I encountered HP-UX the first time, in 1998, it seemed to be at least 10 years behind the times. Very little had changed in 2004, which meant that it was falling farther and farther behind each year. In 2010 it seemed little better than it had been in 2004, and I guess that management agreed, since we finally cut the cord and moved on to something that was, at least by comparison, more up to date.
I also used OpenVMS in the early 2000s, and it was capable, but idiosyncratic (record structured files were a PITA, and the file versioning was no replacement for proper version control. I really liked logical names, however, and the global symbol table was useful). It had a head start on lots of other OS's with respect to clustering features (cluster wide file system, message queues, and distributed lock management was all built-in), but much of the userland was GNU stuff ported over on the POSIX layer. DEC seemed to have given up on the whole "innovation" thing and was just milking existing big contracts.
Experts who claim that prices will continue to rise when prices have been rising, or continue to fall when prices have been falling, are nothing but weather vanes. These are the same idiots who have denied that we were in the last half dozen bubbles; the same idiots who were excited about DOW 30,000; the same idiots who claimed that stock/housing prices could just keep going up and up FOREVER!
I tend to agree with John Gruber of Daring Fireball that all of these rumors of larger screen iPhones are just bullshit, except for one detail: a larger screen would mean a larger phone body, which would allow for a larger battery, and would give even longer battery life. Battery life is the name of the game in mobile devices, and the larger display would give Apple an opportunity to get an additional leg up on their competition. It would also be helpful to have more battery capacity if they were upgrading the iPhone to 4G, which seems to need a lot more power.
While I tend to find Gruber's arguments about maintaining the dimensions of the UI by maintaining the dimensions and resolution of the display convincing, the change in dimensions of the iPhone interface going from a 3.5" to a 4" screen doesn't seem to be much of a concern. The greater concern is that the 4" screen is too large for many people to comfortably access the full screen with their thumb while holding the phone in the same hand (though that could be alleviated by narrowing the bezel around the screen).
So, while I'd love to bet against the rumor mongers clamoring for a 4" display on the next iPhone, I think that it might actually happen. A 4G phone will need a bigger battery, and I think Apple would rather make the phone face larger, than make the phone thicker, and that make a 4" display an easy sell.
I can say, with some authority, that Linux succeeded on it's own merit, mostly because it supported a broad range of commodity hardware. It got a boost because everyone started buying 386s, which were the first competent hardware for the IBM PC. There were lots of options back in the late eighties, all vying for some kind of position, but most of them had big problems of community: Coherent, MINIX, xinu, Xenix, Apple A/UX, netBSD, OS/2, OS-9, QNX, Lynx, etc. I looked at all of them as reasonable alternatives to the laughable PC operating systems of the day (MS-DOS and Macintosh System 7). NetBSD was a reasonable competitor right up through the mid-nineties, but Linux hardware support eventually blew it out of the water. By 1995 it was clear that Linux and the open source development methodology had won handily.
Yes, licensing had something to do with all of this, but so did Linus' management style: people wanted to work on Linux, and Linus did not turn them away: he welcomed them. I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Dr. Tanenbaum, I have the greatest respect for him and his work, but other than netBSD, none of the other free and open OSs of the day were making any attempt to take the general market, MINIX included. I remember looking at MINIX and rejecting it because of it's limitation to academic use (the limitation to the 286 wasn't that much of a concern, though it probably should have been).
Contracts made with your dead father a null and void at his death. The folks dealing with him through eBay are just out of luck. If they are nice to you, maybe you should consider helping them out, but that's all you're own good will, legally they have no claims (or, maybe they do have claims, and they can take them up with the executor of your father's estate, and will have to get in line, assuming that there's any estate to claim against). The banks should respond more rapidly, but will require a death certificate. Once you have shown them the death certificate, they should be able to shut down the automated bill pays, and maybe even claw back some of the payments that went out after the date of death.
As for making this stuff easier on your own survivors: I'll second the safe deposit box idea. Just put a list of your passwords in the safe deposit box. It's a bit of a pain to keep it up to date, but not too bad. I just keep a list of passwords in my desk, and my survivors have been told about it. I only tell the folks that I can actually trust, so there's no question of anyone impersonating me (or, no question worth fretting over). Keeping that list in a safe deposit box would offer 1) better security (burglars wouldn't find it, for example), and 2) also protects the list from being destroyed in a house fire. (Man! I gotta go get a safe deposit box!)
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than sparking rapid evolution, maybe the high O2 concentrations led to (or allowed) the development of hard tissue in existing complex organisms. Ocean acidification dissolves the shells of clams, corals, etc. and increased O2 levels could coincide with decreased CO2 levels (probably because the organisms creating all the O2 had to get it from somewhere).
This being Slashdot (and the link being paywalled) I have not bothered to read the linked article. Hell, I've barely bothered to read the summary.
Seriously, no wifi, less space than a Nomad, when has Slashdot EVER gotten something about Apple wrong?
Swift is still a very immature language, with lots of bugs in the compiler, rough support in the debugger and IDE, and the syntax isn't even set in stone yet (don't expect the syntax to settle down before Swift 2.0, probably some time in late 2015 if not 2016). There are a number of things that you still can't do in Swift (e.g. providing a callback function for APIs that expect a C function pointer), and you'll just spend a lot more time hitting your head against walls than writing working code. On top of this there are many more resources available for learning Objective-C than there are for Swift, and the pitfalls and corner cases are better understood for Objective-C than they are for Swift. As a bonus most of your instincts honed on C will carry over to Objective-C (while they are likely to lead you astray in Swift).
Swift is a really exciting language, and fun to play around with, but it's not ready for production work (yet). It will get there, but in the mean time you should stick with the established tools, which means Objective-C for iOS and Mac OS X app development.
Such creativeness with the language.
Poor people can't use their wealth to shield themselves from the consequences of their own stupidity, so yes.
I observe this fact every weekend in a nearby wealthy neighborhood where I go to eat at good restaurants. Stupid rich people who don't know how to obey traffic signals (both drivers and pedestrians), don't know how to operate simple machines (soft serve machines shouldn't cause issues for observant adults), and who generally seem to expect everyone to make allowances for their blundering and incompetence.
gtall wrote:
Actually, you have that exactly wrong: Einstein's theory of special relativity was a direct attempt to explain a specific experimental result, the negative results of the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment to verify the existence of the liminiferous aether. The Michelson-Morley results were published in 1887, and Einstein published special relativity in 1905.
What patent were you reading? There is not a single mention of conversion of vector images to raster images!
The patent describes a set of recorded data that corrects for color and "spatial" distortion of an image by an input our output device. All the claims pertain to various features of that data set, or of the process of applying the corrections to an image.
Thor is now a woman. That's how the transvestitive relation works.
FTFY
First, if fish (or other marine animals) were eating the plastic (and there is a lot of evidence that they are) then they would also be starving to death (as they can't digest the plastic, and it fills up their digestive systems). When they die, the plastic would be returned to the ocean, and we would see it in our assays. So I don't think that the plastic getting eaten is the obvious solution.
Second, as anyone who has gotten sunburned while swimming knows, water doesn't block ultraviolet light very effectively, so plastic floating near the top of the water column would be exposed to a lot of UV. Plastic breaks down pretty quickly when exposed to UV, so we may just be seeing the natural destruction of the plastic by sunlight (and, I suppose, that plastic that has been partially broken down by exposure to UV might be more easily consumed by bacteria, but that's pure speculation).
Third, maybe we aren't measuring the amount of plastic in the ocean correctly. If the plastic is being consumed, or is sinking to the ocean floor, then we might easily be missing it. Also, the plastic might well not be evenly distributed across the ocean: it may be collecting in specific places due to winds and ocean currents. If we are not collecting samples evenly over the entire ocean, then we could be missing some high concentration areas.
I doubt that this means we can all breath a sigh of relief and decide that dumping plastic in the oceans is no big deal. I also doubt that this means that plastic is a much bigger problem than we thought (how could it be a bigger problem then we thought? People have been screaming about it like it was a sign of the end-times!). It is interesting, however, and I would like to know why our measurements don't match our expectations.
morethanapapercert wrote:
While I don't think that we should accept the status quo of irresponsibly introducing invasive species to our local environments, I think it's a wonderful idea to try eating our way out of the problems we've already created. For example, the Northern Snakehead is a recent and particular problem in my region (Washington D.C. Metropolitan area) and, coincidentally, is quite tasty. If we could manage to fish them to extinction it would be all for the best, and should be encouraged. Of course this may not work for many invasive species (some reproduce too rapidly to be effectively controlled by human predation, others might not be edible or palatable), so this sort of solution should be considered only as a second (or lower) tier option.
Jane Q. Public wrote:
Indeed: human skin cell = 30 um, red blood cell = 8 um, human X chromosome = 7 um, yeast cell = 3x4 um, mitochondria body = 4x0.8 um, E. coli bacterium = 4x0.6 um. (taken from this page found via a rudimentary Google search, zoom down to the micrometer range)
Human cells are pretty large, on average, and microbial cells are much smaller.
That doesn't make the cited factoid any more meaningful, but it is certainly not worthy of doubt based purely on the numbers (that is to say, there are certainly more atoms of calcium in your body than there are human cells, but does that mean that you are, in fact, a lump of chalk?).
Shakrai wrote:
Except that cats, dogs, squirrels, pigeons, and rats have all been (or are) on the menu.
The cluster was wearing Google Glass.
Yes, Iapetus was photographed by Voyager 2 in 1981 (link to NASA image with metadata listed), and I would suspect that there were earth based images taken well before that (but none that would show any detail).
Who would have expected a summary on Slashdot to be carelessly wrong about something factual and easily verified?
That last link is memorable for the line "ultra-fine water droplets so small they lack moisture."
Ah, good times.
You could use a spindizzy, you could use volucite, or you could just have it roll on a road (though that appears to be more realistic than it might seem).
100% of all servers will ship to companies whose executives have used the "cloud" buzzword to promote the company.
by John Brunner, predates cyberpunk by half a decade and features strong themes of government secrecy and surveillance.
When the amount of development your OS gets suffers "compared to HP-UX" you are in astonishingly deep trouble. I have had three run-ins with HP-UX, first in 1998, next in 2004, and finally in 2010 (when my current job retired all it's existing HP servers and moved to Solaris). When I encountered HP-UX the first time, in 1998, it seemed to be at least 10 years behind the times. Very little had changed in 2004, which meant that it was falling farther and farther behind each year. In 2010 it seemed little better than it had been in 2004, and I guess that management agreed, since we finally cut the cord and moved on to something that was, at least by comparison, more up to date.
I also used OpenVMS in the early 2000s, and it was capable, but idiosyncratic (record structured files were a PITA, and the file versioning was no replacement for proper version control. I really liked logical names, however, and the global symbol table was useful). It had a head start on lots of other OS's with respect to clustering features (cluster wide file system, message queues, and distributed lock management was all built-in), but much of the userland was GNU stuff ported over on the POSIX layer. DEC seemed to have given up on the whole "innovation" thing and was just milking existing big contracts.
itsdapead wrote:
Don't you mean Hanlon's RAZR? (or, maybe, Hanlon's ROKR?)
Experts who claim that prices will continue to rise when prices have been rising, or continue to fall when prices have been falling, are nothing but weather vanes. These are the same idiots who have denied that we were in the last half dozen bubbles; the same idiots who were excited about DOW 30,000; the same idiots who claimed that stock/housing prices could just keep going up and up FOREVER!
I tend to agree with John Gruber of Daring Fireball that all of these rumors of larger screen iPhones are just bullshit, except for one detail: a larger screen would mean a larger phone body, which would allow for a larger battery, and would give even longer battery life. Battery life is the name of the game in mobile devices, and the larger display would give Apple an opportunity to get an additional leg up on their competition. It would also be helpful to have more battery capacity if they were upgrading the iPhone to 4G, which seems to need a lot more power.
While I tend to find Gruber's arguments about maintaining the dimensions of the UI by maintaining the dimensions and resolution of the display convincing, the change in dimensions of the iPhone interface going from a 3.5" to a 4" screen doesn't seem to be much of a concern. The greater concern is that the 4" screen is too large for many people to comfortably access the full screen with their thumb while holding the phone in the same hand (though that could be alleviated by narrowing the bezel around the screen).
So, while I'd love to bet against the rumor mongers clamoring for a 4" display on the next iPhone, I think that it might actually happen. A 4G phone will need a bigger battery, and I think Apple would rather make the phone face larger, than make the phone thicker, and that make a 4" display an easy sell.
I can say, with some authority, that Linux succeeded on it's own merit, mostly because it supported a broad range of commodity hardware. It got a boost because everyone started buying 386s, which were the first competent hardware for the IBM PC. There were lots of options back in the late eighties, all vying for some kind of position, but most of them had big problems of community: Coherent, MINIX, xinu, Xenix, Apple A/UX, netBSD, OS/2, OS-9, QNX, Lynx, etc. I looked at all of them as reasonable alternatives to the laughable PC operating systems of the day (MS-DOS and Macintosh System 7). NetBSD was a reasonable competitor right up through the mid-nineties, but Linux hardware support eventually blew it out of the water. By 1995 it was clear that Linux and the open source development methodology had won handily.
Yes, licensing had something to do with all of this, but so did Linus' management style: people wanted to work on Linux, and Linus did not turn them away: he welcomed them. I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Dr. Tanenbaum, I have the greatest respect for him and his work, but other than netBSD, none of the other free and open OSs of the day were making any attempt to take the general market, MINIX included. I remember looking at MINIX and rejecting it because of it's limitation to academic use (the limitation to the 286 wasn't that much of a concern, though it probably should have been).
Contracts made with your dead father a null and void at his death. The folks dealing with him through eBay are just out of luck. If they are nice to you, maybe you should consider helping them out, but that's all you're own good will, legally they have no claims (or, maybe they do have claims, and they can take them up with the executor of your father's estate, and will have to get in line, assuming that there's any estate to claim against). The banks should respond more rapidly, but will require a death certificate. Once you have shown them the death certificate, they should be able to shut down the automated bill pays, and maybe even claw back some of the payments that went out after the date of death.
As for making this stuff easier on your own survivors: I'll second the safe deposit box idea. Just put a list of your passwords in the safe deposit box. It's a bit of a pain to keep it up to date, but not too bad. I just keep a list of passwords in my desk, and my survivors have been told about it. I only tell the folks that I can actually trust, so there's no question of anyone impersonating me (or, no question worth fretting over). Keeping that list in a safe deposit box would offer 1) better security (burglars wouldn't find it, for example), and 2) also protects the list from being destroyed in a house fire. (Man! I gotta go get a safe deposit box!)
At least the first part, before we get to barricades in the streets, tumbrils and public beheadings.