"Burbs" is English, you idiot. It's actually now a slightly old-fashioned colloquial/affectionate shortening of "suburbs" and is usually spelled with contraction apostrophe, e.g. "'burbs". This of course doesn't make the poster "cool", actually the opposite, it puts the poster in probably around my more "uncool" age group or older (28+). The fact that you don't know the word means tells me you're probably a teenager, and/or your English is actually weak: not only is "burbs" in the English dictionary, but you would almost certainly know the word if you did much reading.
A friend of mine actually met his current wife (across continents) via irc. The relationship was mostly irc for months, eventually he moved, they got married, and they now have a child too, last I checked they were still happy together. How evil is that... not.
Could you tell us specifically which scientists believe any of the particular current hypotheses that attempt to explain dark matter? AFAIK scientists make hypotheses. They don't make up something and then say "I believe this", the make up something and say "maybe this is an explanation, maybe not, let's try come up with some tests to determine if it is". Can you please point out the "scientists" which have gone straight from hypothesis to true belief without the necessary step of some sort of experimental proof, or did you just make it up, or are you just confused about what "science" is because your understanding of it is derived from mainstream media articles?
Physicists don't "believe in" dark matter, some of them merely hypothesize dark matter as a possible explanation for apparent gaps in our current models, and then set about trying to test their models to see if they might be true or untrue. Actually the term is a little misleading because "dark matter" is actually a generic "variable" term for the known existence of some or other gap in our current models, and different scientists propose different explanations for this known gap, one of which is this "invisible" mass. This isn't a case of "current theory" which "scientists believe", that is utter claptrap and a total misunderstanding of what science is and how it works. There are actually several differing hypotheses from different scientists, not one "current theory".
I get tired of people who think scientists just go on faith and simply "believe" this or that idea. I blame it partly on poor science reporting in mainstream media, where they always try spice things up by pitting hypotheses from different scientists against one another in a pseudo "battle" - "scientist A believes X, scientist B believes Y - watch them battle it out". Mainstream media love to report that scientists "believe" this or "believed" that. Scientists hypothesise.
There will always be scientists who become extremely convinced that their own hypotheses must be correct, for whatever reasons, but that is no longer strictly "science" (whether a scientist happens to be right or wrong), and these cases are failings of individual human scientists not failings of science itself.
Is it possible that WIMPs (or whatever dark matter is) is so weakly interacting that it literally cannot be detected on a microscopic scale? I.e. that the mass effectively doesn't even interact at all, and that the effects of the existence of large amounts of this stuff might only ever be evident by their large-scale interactions (e.g. gravity affect on galaxies)?
Ha, I was thinking the same thing the other day, that an invisible person would need to be blind. If not, you would probably be able to see some weird sort of "floating shadows" where the person's eyes are, at least if you were standing behind them. Hmm.. actually, you'd probably see a shape the size of their eyeballs, because the entire usually opaque part of the eyeball would have to continue blocking photons, otherwise the person's retina would be flooded by light coming through the side of their eyeballs (instead of just the aperture/lens as per normal sight).
"Beginner" question: the evidence in favour of the notion of the existence of Dark Matter (via WIMPs or otherwise): does it suggest if the additional mass is distributed more or less evenly throughout the Universe, or does it specifically suggest that the dark matter is not distributed evenly throughout the Universe but rather that there would be "patches" of higher densities in certain places?
... raises even more doubts over the reliability of Microsoft software in critical systems
Don't try tell me anyone ever really thought that Microsoft software would be reliable in critical systems. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last thirty years. And for the last few years there have been regular reports of crippling widespreads viruses/worms in mainstream media. Nobody can claim to ever have thought that MS systems were reliable and secure against downtime-causing attacks... no, people buy Microsoft anyway in spite of knowing this. So this doesn't raise any new "doubts" to anyone in the world.
Hardware memory protection was available from the 80386, released publicly in 1985, and to developers (e.g. MS) in 1983. A form of hardware memory protection was also available on the 286 already earlier than that.
Actually it's very well-known that Google's rankings for a site are largely based on the keywords that other webmasters use to link to that site. What isn't known is the precise formulas, of course, for how they calculate the rankings precisely, but one can see the effect working very clearly even without knowing the exact numbers. But if Google ranks a site as number 5 for the keyword "SCO", it is because many webmasters use "SCO" in the HREF text when linking to that site. Google does not use humans to sit and rank pages, it's all automated, except when they manually block sites for abusive practices. So one does know how AND why google thinks it should be number 5 - very simply because only four other sites on the Internet have been linked to more often with "SCO" in the HREF text. This is known and not secret.
Indeed, the way Google works allows for something called "google-bombing", where if enough people (such as e.g. bloggers who know each other) link to a certain site using certain keywords, then that site can become the top result for a keyword (or keywords) even if the site has no content at all relating to that keyword. And interestingly enough a recent example of this was again related to SCO... a few months ago, if you typed "bastards" into google, the top result was the main page of www.thescogroup.com:)... yet one can be fairly certain that SCO's web page did not contain information about 'bastards' or could have been construed as a reliable source of information about bastards. (Now it seems it's not even in the top 100 results though.)
You're assuming that their civilisation would be like modern Western civilisation. Why would they necessarily be doing mining on such a scale as to need explosives? Would they even need that many minerals? I mean, we generally don't, only minimally so for industrial uses, and who is to say that dinosaurs would have cared about jewelry? You can have farming, villages, housing and trade without minerals, and with only a minimum of metals (yes you can, study history). African civilisations have been forging metal tools for thousands of years without explosives. Study human history a bit, there have thousands of different types of civilisations and civilisation infrastructures, and we've only recently used explosives for mining. Look at the evidence left behind by most vanished human civilisations - it's pitiful, normally amounting to a few remains of buildings and some pottery, and not much else, if there is anything at all - and these are all less than 10,000 years old - only 0.01 percent of 65,000,000 years.
Perhaps you should have done a bit more thinking. Fossilised bones have a much better chance of lasting than brick or mud houses, and even fossilised bones are incredibly rare. The majority of human villages that have existed have not even left evidence a few thousand years later, let alone 65 million years.
Hmm... Windows, Sharepoint, Exchange CALs, Office Pro, < $5 / month, assuming typical upgrade cycle of about three years, that's about $180 (every three years, with more or less permanent upgrade lock-in) per user for the 'full set' of software. Can that be right? You do know that most companies have to pay much more than that.
Of course, you have also forgotten the cost of AV software, and employee downtime for the time spent e.g. cleaning worms, installing service packs and updates etc.
Hmm... Windows, Sharepoint, Exchange CALs, Office Pro, Of course, you have also forgotten the cost of AV software, and employee downtime for the time spent e.g. cleaning worms, installing service packs and updates etc.
Support costs (IT department, infrastructure, people, time for fixing Windows problems, all can be reduced), no additional costs for anti-virus software or for an Office Suite, increased security, no virus problems, easier to support on a large scale, less downtime to fix e.g. virus problems. (Downtime in a large corp is HUGE money wasted, because you have expensive employees sitting on their asses unable to work while the IT guy cleans installs the latest service packs or cleans the latest worm or Outlook virus.)
Sorry, but there is JUST NO WAY that the Microsoft solution works out cheaper than this for a large corporate environment. And how can you forget to add the cost of MS Office? It doesn't come for free to big companies, you know, even though you might have copied an illegal version from your buddy, your employer pays a lot of money for such things.
If it's heading straight for Earth, you have to deflect it enough to get past the full radius of Earth. If it's heading away from Earth on the previous cycle, you only need to deflect it by a *tiny* amount, and that tiny amount will result in it passing a huge distance from Earth on the next time round. This is simply because the distance travelled after deflection is applied is so much greater, i.e. a 0.1 degree deflection applied to the full length of an entire orbital cycle (sin(0.1) * DISTANCE) (that value needs to be larger than EARTHRADIUS, so the larger DISTANCE is the better). If it's already headed straight for earth, you have perhaps only a tiny fraction of DISTANCE.
Also if you do it on the previous cycle and mess up, you still have more chances. If you do it when it's headed straight for Earth already, you only get one chance to do it right.
Another factor is if you accidentally cause the asteroid to break up, a huge part of it may still hit Earth if it's headed for Earth. That risk is reduced or removed if it's heading away from Earth.
Your post got me to thinking - if the dinosaurs had been sentient
Aren't you mixing the concepts of "sentient" and "intelligent" a bit? It seems quite plausible (and perhaps even reasonable to assume) that many less intelligent Earth animals than us (e.g. dogs or pigs or elephants) are sentient, but they don't have the intelligence required for creating complex industrialised civilisations.
Hmm.. if we assume they had built cities or perhaps even small villages, how much evidence of those structures would remain today? Probably nothing if they had reached about the same level of technological advancement that humans were in the year 1900. Even big things like pyramids will probably be long gone (unless buried?). Now we have things like plastics and huge landfills, yet even most modern plastics degrade in "only" tens of millions of years. If humans vanished off the face of the Earth today, I think our buildings and other structures will be long gone in 60 million years, even a long-developed area such as London will probably have been reclaimed by trees, plants, grass etc. However, we will definitely have permanently altered virtually all of the planet's ecosystems, that will be evident. And certain spots where there are high densities of pollutants (e.g. plastics or chemical pollutants) will probably still have higher densities of those things, leaving evidence of their locations. The crumbled rubble of huge cities like London or New York will, if buried over time, probably leave some sort of permanent layer of sediment with "interesting" chemical make-up.
So that's a weird thought, if dinosaurs had reached 1900-levels of technology, and lived in cities and villages and had a global trade system, there might actually be virtually no evidence of it now. Or maybe I'm wrong, haven't thought about it much.
I think the point was that by having a few standardized hardware configurations, Apple can make sure that the hardware and accompanying drivers are stable.
It's true you can run any software you like on an Apple system, but that's userland software. The problem with buggy drivers is that they run in ring 0 and can crash the OS, hard. Applications run using a +/- 30-year old concept called "memory protection" to ensure that a buggy application can only crash *itself*, but not the OS. Thus if the drivers are high quality and have had time to stabilise/mature (to weed out the bugs), then the OS itself will be reliable.
A lot of the cheaper hardware components (e.g. network cards, sound cards, motherboards etc) available that Windows must run on are less reliable inherently (statistically more prone to failure, or can't handle heavy loads etc), and also more likely to have buggy drivers. Buggy drivers can make Windows crash.
Apple hardware may be general-purpose hardware, but that doesn't mean Mac OS X CAN RUN on ANY "general-purpose hardware", which is precisely the reason that Macs can be more stable, because Apple can make sure that the limited range of hardware components OS X can run on are stable and good quality.
(In my opinion, people who think that PCs are cheaper than Macs are really fooling themselves, one of the reasons being this factor, because sooner or later you're going to pay the difference in schlep/hassle/downtime etc while fixing problems you have with cheap PCs, not to mention all the virus and security problems on Windows and the time taken to attend to those.)
It also turns the "US as example of freedom to the rest of the world" concept on it's head. I mean, what, you're going to teach other countries about freedom of speech via acts of censorship? Yeah, a real shining beacon of freedom of speech there. Way to be a role model to the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
"Burbs" is English, you idiot. It's actually now a slightly old-fashioned colloquial/affectionate shortening of "suburbs" and is usually spelled with contraction apostrophe, e.g. "'burbs". This of course doesn't make the poster "cool", actually the opposite, it puts the poster in probably around my more "uncool" age group or older (28+). The fact that you don't know the word means tells me you're probably a teenager, and/or your English is actually weak: not only is "burbs" in the English dictionary, but you would almost certainly know the word if you did much reading.
A friend of mine actually met his current wife (across continents) via irc. The relationship was mostly irc for months, eventually he moved, they got married, and they now have a child too, last I checked they were still happy together. How evil is that ... not.
Doesn't "fast" usually refer to time taken for development and/or to market?
In other words, "faith" in the Christian sense is believing something without any evidence.
Could you tell us specifically which scientists believe any of the particular current hypotheses that attempt to explain dark matter? AFAIK scientists make hypotheses. They don't make up something and then say "I believe this", the make up something and say "maybe this is an explanation, maybe not, let's try come up with some tests to determine if it is". Can you please point out the "scientists" which have gone straight from hypothesis to true belief without the necessary step of some sort of experimental proof, or did you just make it up, or are you just confused about what "science" is because your understanding of it is derived from mainstream media articles?
Physicists don't "believe in" dark matter, some of them merely hypothesize dark matter as a possible explanation for apparent gaps in our current models, and then set about trying to test their models to see if they might be true or untrue. Actually the term is a little misleading because "dark matter" is actually a generic "variable" term for the known existence of some or other gap in our current models, and different scientists propose different explanations for this known gap, one of which is this "invisible" mass. This isn't a case of "current theory" which "scientists believe", that is utter claptrap and a total misunderstanding of what science is and how it works. There are actually several differing hypotheses from different scientists, not one "current theory".
I get tired of people who think scientists just go on faith and simply "believe" this or that idea. I blame it partly on poor science reporting in mainstream media, where they always try spice things up by pitting hypotheses from different scientists against one another in a pseudo "battle" - "scientist A believes X, scientist B believes Y - watch them battle it out". Mainstream media love to report that scientists "believe" this or "believed" that. Scientists hypothesise.
There will always be scientists who become extremely convinced that their own hypotheses must be correct, for whatever reasons, but that is no longer strictly "science" (whether a scientist happens to be right or wrong), and these cases are failings of individual human scientists not failings of science itself.
Is it possible that WIMPs (or whatever dark matter is) is so weakly interacting that it literally cannot be detected on a microscopic scale? I.e. that the mass effectively doesn't even interact at all, and that the effects of the existence of large amounts of this stuff might only ever be evident by their large-scale interactions (e.g. gravity affect on galaxies)?
Ha, I was thinking the same thing the other day, that an invisible person would need to be blind. If not, you would probably be able to see some weird sort of "floating shadows" where the person's eyes are, at least if you were standing behind them. Hmm .. actually, you'd probably see a shape the size of their eyeballs, because the entire usually opaque part of the eyeball would have to continue blocking photons, otherwise the person's retina would be flooded by light coming through the side of their eyeballs (instead of just the aperture/lens as per normal sight).
"Beginner" question: the evidence in favour of the notion of the existence of Dark Matter (via WIMPs or otherwise): does it suggest if the additional mass is distributed more or less evenly throughout the Universe, or does it specifically suggest that the dark matter is not distributed evenly throughout the Universe but rather that there would be "patches" of higher densities in certain places?
Ah, thanks :). I just remember noticing that they were the top result for just the keyword "bastards" at some point.
Don't try tell me anyone ever really thought that Microsoft software would be reliable in critical systems. You'd have to have been living under a rock for the last thirty years. And for the last few years there have been regular reports of crippling widespreads viruses/worms in mainstream media. Nobody can claim to ever have thought that MS systems were reliable and secure against downtime-causing attacks ... no, people buy Microsoft anyway in spite of knowing this. So this doesn't raise any new "doubts" to anyone in the world.
Interesting, a genuine high-volume spammer posting on slashdot ..
Hardware memory protection was available from the 80386, released publicly in 1985, and to developers (e.g. MS) in 1983. A form of hardware memory protection was also available on the 286 already earlier than that.
Actually it's very well-known that Google's rankings for a site are largely based on the keywords that other webmasters use to link to that site. What isn't known is the precise formulas, of course, for how they calculate the rankings precisely, but one can see the effect working very clearly even without knowing the exact numbers. But if Google ranks a site as number 5 for the keyword "SCO", it is because many webmasters use "SCO" in the HREF text when linking to that site. Google does not use humans to sit and rank pages, it's all automated, except when they manually block sites for abusive practices. So one does know how AND why google thinks it should be number 5 - very simply because only four other sites on the Internet have been linked to more often with "SCO" in the HREF text. This is known and not secret.
Indeed, the way Google works allows for something called "google-bombing", where if enough people (such as e.g. bloggers who know each other) link to a certain site using certain keywords, then that site can become the top result for a keyword (or keywords) even if the site has no content at all relating to that keyword. And interestingly enough a recent example of this was again related to SCO ... a few months ago, if you typed "bastards" into google, the top result was the main page of www.thescogroup.com :) ... yet one can be fairly certain that SCO's web page did not contain information about 'bastards' or could have been construed as a reliable source of information about bastards. (Now it seems it's not even in the top 100 results though.)
You're assuming that their civilisation would be like modern Western civilisation. Why would they necessarily be doing mining on such a scale as to need explosives? Would they even need that many minerals? I mean, we generally don't, only minimally so for industrial uses, and who is to say that dinosaurs would have cared about jewelry? You can have farming, villages, housing and trade without minerals, and with only a minimum of metals (yes you can, study history). African civilisations have been forging metal tools for thousands of years without explosives. Study human history a bit, there have thousands of different types of civilisations and civilisation infrastructures, and we've only recently used explosives for mining. Look at the evidence left behind by most vanished human civilisations - it's pitiful, normally amounting to a few remains of buildings and some pottery, and not much else, if there is anything at all - and these are all less than 10,000 years old - only 0.01 percent of 65,000,000 years.
Perhaps you should have done a bit more thinking. Fossilised bones have a much better chance of lasting than brick or mud houses, and even fossilised bones are incredibly rare. The majority of human villages that have existed have not even left evidence a few thousand years later, let alone 65 million years.
(Whoops, < + HTML formatted messed that up)
Hmm ... Windows, Sharepoint, Exchange CALs, Office Pro, < $5 / month, assuming typical upgrade cycle of about three years, that's about $180 (every three years, with more or less permanent upgrade lock-in) per user for the 'full set' of software. Can that be right? You do know that most companies have to pay much more than that.
Of course, you have also forgotten the cost of AV software, and employee downtime for the time spent e.g. cleaning worms, installing service packs and updates etc.
Hmm ... Windows, Sharepoint, Exchange CALs, Office Pro, Of course, you have also forgotten the cost of AV software, and employee downtime for the time spent e.g. cleaning worms, installing service packs and updates etc.
Support costs (IT department, infrastructure, people, time for fixing Windows problems, all can be reduced), no additional costs for anti-virus software or for an Office Suite, increased security, no virus problems, easier to support on a large scale, less downtime to fix e.g. virus problems. (Downtime in a large corp is HUGE money wasted, because you have expensive employees sitting on their asses unable to work while the IT guy cleans installs the latest service packs or cleans the latest worm or Outlook virus.)
Sorry, but there is JUST NO WAY that the Microsoft solution works out cheaper than this for a large corporate environment. And how can you forget to add the cost of MS Office? It doesn't come for free to big companies, you know, even though you might have copied an illegal version from your buddy, your employer pays a lot of money for such things.
If it's heading straight for Earth, you have to deflect it enough to get past the full radius of Earth. If it's heading away from Earth on the previous cycle, you only need to deflect it by a *tiny* amount, and that tiny amount will result in it passing a huge distance from Earth on the next time round. This is simply because the distance travelled after deflection is applied is so much greater, i.e. a 0.1 degree deflection applied to the full length of an entire orbital cycle (sin(0.1) * DISTANCE) (that value needs to be larger than EARTHRADIUS, so the larger DISTANCE is the better). If it's already headed straight for earth, you have perhaps only a tiny fraction of DISTANCE.
Also if you do it on the previous cycle and mess up, you still have more chances. If you do it when it's headed straight for Earth already, you only get one chance to do it right.
Another factor is if you accidentally cause the asteroid to break up, a huge part of it may still hit Earth if it's headed for Earth. That risk is reduced or removed if it's heading away from Earth.
Your post got me to thinking - if the dinosaurs had been sentient
Aren't you mixing the concepts of "sentient" and "intelligent" a bit? It seems quite plausible (and perhaps even reasonable to assume) that many less intelligent Earth animals than us (e.g. dogs or pigs or elephants) are sentient, but they don't have the intelligence required for creating complex industrialised civilisations.
Hmm .. if we assume they had built cities or perhaps even small villages, how much evidence of those structures would remain today? Probably nothing if they had reached about the same level of technological advancement that humans were in the year 1900. Even big things like pyramids will probably be long gone (unless buried?). Now we have things like plastics and huge landfills, yet even most modern plastics degrade in "only" tens of millions of years. If humans vanished off the face of the Earth today, I think our buildings and other structures will be long gone in 60 million years, even a long-developed area such as London will probably have been reclaimed by trees, plants, grass etc. However, we will definitely have permanently altered virtually all of the planet's ecosystems, that will be evident. And certain spots where there are high densities of pollutants (e.g. plastics or chemical pollutants) will probably still have higher densities of those things, leaving evidence of their locations. The crumbled rubble of huge cities like London or New York will, if buried over time, probably leave some sort of permanent layer of sediment with "interesting" chemical make-up.
So that's a weird thought, if dinosaurs had reached 1900-levels of technology, and lived in cities and villages and had a global trade system, there might actually be virtually no evidence of it now. Or maybe I'm wrong, haven't thought about it much.
I think the point was that by having a few standardized hardware configurations, Apple can make sure that the hardware and accompanying drivers are stable.
It's true you can run any software you like on an Apple system, but that's userland software. The problem with buggy drivers is that they run in ring 0 and can crash the OS, hard. Applications run using a +/- 30-year old concept called "memory protection" to ensure that a buggy application can only crash *itself*, but not the OS. Thus if the drivers are high quality and have had time to stabilise/mature (to weed out the bugs), then the OS itself will be reliable.
A lot of the cheaper hardware components (e.g. network cards, sound cards, motherboards etc) available that Windows must run on are less reliable inherently (statistically more prone to failure, or can't handle heavy loads etc), and also more likely to have buggy drivers. Buggy drivers can make Windows crash.
Apple hardware may be general-purpose hardware, but that doesn't mean Mac OS X CAN RUN on ANY "general-purpose hardware", which is precisely the reason that Macs can be more stable, because Apple can make sure that the limited range of hardware components OS X can run on are stable and good quality.
(In my opinion, people who think that PCs are cheaper than Macs are really fooling themselves, one of the reasons being this factor, because sooner or later you're going to pay the difference in schlep/hassle/downtime etc while fixing problems you have with cheap PCs, not to mention all the virus and security problems on Windows and the time taken to attend to those.)
It also turns the "US as example of freedom to the rest of the world" concept on it's head. I mean, what, you're going to teach other countries about freedom of speech via acts of censorship? Yeah, a real shining beacon of freedom of speech there. Way to be a role model to the rest of the world.
Hmm .. note to knee-jerk-style moderators, parent isn't off-topic. Please actually read messages before you moderate them.