The difference is that the Trojan War happened only a few hundred years before Homer's time -- a short enough span for some memory of the city to be preserved. According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed by Athens some 6,500 years before his own day.
See, a lack of evidence leads _reasonable_ people to extreme skepticism. It is not an open invitation to invent a crackpot theory and then plug your ears while shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."
Moreover, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you want to take Plato at his word you don't just get to point to a previously-undiscovered set of ruins somewhere in the Med and say "Atlantis!" You need to prove
a) that it was inhabited 8,000 years ago b) that Athens was inhabited 8,000 years ago c) That an apocalyptic war was fought between the two
because these are all parts of Plato's story.
You also don't get to say "the Egyptians told Solon/Plato/whoever" because archaeology proves that at the alleged time of this apocalyptic war the Egyptians (if you can call the Faiyum A culture "Egyptian" for any reason other than that the happened to leave near the Nile river delta) were still a Neolithic people with no system of writing.
Moreover, since all available evidence tells us that b) is not only not true but impossible, you're putting the cart before the horse trying to prove a) or c). If someone tells me, in earnest, that the CIA has been instructing him to kill the Pope by way of a radio embedded in his brain, nothing short of a CT scan showing me the radio and a bug detector showing signal origin at Langley is going to convince me that he's not insane. I don't start speculating on why the CIA would want the pope dead.
I realize that this type of reasoning from evidence rather than speculation is not the usual fare at the UFOlogy seminars and astrology club meetings you drag your knuckles to every night, but do pay attention, you might learn something.
Yeah, and _they_ had records going back to 8,000 BCE that the aliens gave them. Unfortunately the data was all on NASA 1" tape, so the Egyptians couldn't read it until Plato cheerfully loaned them an Ampex machine...
Atlantis was a story Plato made up in the course of a philosophical discussion. It goes no further back in the literary record unless you want to twist a couple mentions of "Atlas' island" in the earlier corpus like balloon animals.
Herb is kind of above reproach. Having grown up in Wisconsin and actually met the man once, I can say comfortably that he isn't some kind of fundraising whore; he's a principled legislator who will probably get swept out in the next tide of teabagging. So I would be very careful in ascribing any kind of sinister motive to his investigation, or in drawing any conclusions about what the committee's findings will be.
Yes yes, I know we all hate Microsoft, but on the face of it this was a very shrewd business decision. Nokia was getting killed by the fact that people now want their phones to do such exotic things as email and Web browsing. They had no real internal direction in terms of software development, as evidenced by the schizophrenia of Symbian and Maemo, and the fact that they were trying to do it all in-house wasn't helping things any.
Meanwhile, Microsoft comes along with a ready-made solution to Nokia's woes in the form of a pretty complete mobile platform and a $1 billion payout to help with the transition. To Nokia's idiot board of directors this probably looked like a no-brainer. Meanwhile Microsoft gets amazing value in the form of a very, very large company now pushing out its software products worldwide. This isn't going to put WP7 ahead of Android or iOS, not by a long shot, but it will do wonders in terms of shoring up their position.
On the flip side of things, consider Motorola. At one point they were kind of in the same boat as Nokia, having missed the first wave of the smartphone epidemic, and went from being the company that had it all with the once-super cool RAZR to an also-ran. They got behind Android in a very complete and enthusiastic way and the results have really paid off for them. I'd venture to say that they make some of the best Android phones out there, and they're taking a great stab at the tablet market. And no one had to pay them $1 billion to do it!
In short, this is great news for MS, bad news for Nokia fans. I always thought the path to Palm's demise was paved by Windows Mobile ending up on Treo smartphones. They just couldn't be bothered to invest in an innovate mobile OS of their own until webOS, and that was obviously a day late and a dollar short...
We need to come down hard on miscreants like this. Sure, right now he's stealing passwords from the school office and changing grades, but soon that won't be enough for him, and before long he'll be wardialing military contractors with his IMSAI 8080 and acoustocoupler modem.
You mean he forgot that his institution probably had a weighted grading scheme where honors and other high-level classes were scaled to a 5.0 GPA whereas regular classes were scaled to a 4.0 GPA? No, he seems to have had that pretty well down.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you iPad fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an iPad (a 1GHz A4 w/32 Gigs of flash) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on.Mac to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Motorola Xoom running Android, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPad, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Angry Birds will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various iOS devices, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an iOS device that has run faster than its Windows Phone counterpart, despite iOS' faster chip architecture. My brown Zune runs faster than this iPad at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the iPad is a superior machine.
Apple addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an iPad over other faster, cheaper, more stable tablets.
When asked for comment, outgoing CEO Steve Jobs replied, "I would cut off the more disreputable parts of the body, and use the space for playing fields."
"Prior manipulations and plans" which were covered up in an almost laughably poor way, involved single drug companies and usually just a peppering of bureaucrats within those companies, and concerned "blockbuster drugs" covered by a litany of patents. Vaccines are manufactured by every major drug firm, have a proven track record of success in preventing illness extending back to the 18th century, have mostly long since disappeared from patent territory, and are prescribed by more or less every pediatrician with an MD.
Parents of children with autism want someone to blame. I can't really say I'm surprised considering how insanely difficult it is to raise an autistic person, and how they're constantly bombarded by dirty looks from other people and badly-concealed hints that the child would be better-behaved if they had better parenting. In short, up until recently our culture blamed them for their children. So they jump on any opportunity to displace that moral burden.
I hope that someday we discover there's some supplement or medicine (like folic acid for neural tube defects) that will prevent autism. Until then, don't blame the parents and don't blame the doctors and don't blame the suppliers of useful medicines.
Everyone knows how conspiracy theories work. All the wingnuts will just claim this is a political chop job designed to cover up Big Brother/Big Pharma's Big Evil plan. The BBC could play video next week of Wakefield snorting coke and doing an underage hooker, all the while shouting that he had falsified his results, and it wouldn't matter. At some point they'd probably decide that Wakefield was a deep-cover government plant intended to discredit the movement.
The marginalization of long-term data storage can only be a good thing -- the big advertising and other firms get the analytical data that actually matters to their bottom line, and to the extent that the average joe's privacy is being invaded at the very least the fruits of that invasion will become increasingly accessible.
See, you have three checkout lines to choose from. You can't see the register from where you are, but at two of the three lines the cashier is a goat...
Much as I enjoyed Tron: Legacy, young Flynn/Clu was just wrong enough to seriously creep me out. I think it was because some parts of his face didn't move right when he talked and smiled (cheeks and eyes).
Encryption is only as strong as the idiots who implement it. The Soviets learned that the hard way during the early part of the Cold War, when they accidentally reused random one-time pad encryptors. That led to the NSA's VENONA project, and we decrypted a pretty good amount of Soviet diplomatic and spy traffic before they were tipped off.
Yeah, but Goddard's work never went anywhere until German scientists working under the Nazis recognized its military potential, and then Uncle Sam figured out these rocket thingies might be a cool thing and spent a bundle on them. Of course Goddard died before he could see what his rockets could really do because private interests with money refused to support him in the 30s, but hey, you can't make a soulless capitalist dystopia without crushing a few souls, or something.
Try to name one private rocket manufacturer not beholden to Uncle Sam between 1950 and 1990 and you'll see what I mean.
Sorry, the Republicans only fight government intrusion if it lacks the magic words "national security" and your annual income is above $250,000.
In this instance what they can do for you is a visit from Ann Coulter, who will shriek "why do you hate America SO MUCH" loud and shrill enough to shatter all the glass in your house.
That's actually a really good point. I expect there's some solid reasoning as to why it should be singlethreaded if so many environments run things that way. The only two I'm intensely familiar with are Cocoa and UIKit, which are pretty similar.
Is the logic there just your basic "DON'T FSCK UP THE FRAMEBUFFER" stuff, or is something else at work? I know that the guts of screen drawing were much nastier back in the days when you had to sync your VRAM writes with the HBlank and VBlank periods on CRTs.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that the Trojan War happened only a few hundred years before Homer's time -- a short enough span for some memory of the city to be preserved. According to Plato, Atlantis was destroyed by Athens some 6,500 years before his own day.
See, a lack of evidence leads _reasonable_ people to extreme skepticism. It is not an open invitation to invent a crackpot theory and then plug your ears while shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU."
Moreover, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you want to take Plato at his word you don't just get to point to a previously-undiscovered set of ruins somewhere in the Med and say "Atlantis!" You need to prove
a) that it was inhabited 8,000 years ago
b) that Athens was inhabited 8,000 years ago
c) That an apocalyptic war was fought between the two
because these are all parts of Plato's story.
You also don't get to say "the Egyptians told Solon/Plato/whoever" because archaeology proves that at the alleged time of this apocalyptic war the Egyptians (if you can call the Faiyum A culture "Egyptian" for any reason other than that the happened to leave near the Nile river delta) were still a Neolithic people with no system of writing.
Moreover, since all available evidence tells us that b) is not only not true but impossible, you're putting the cart before the horse trying to prove a) or c). If someone tells me, in earnest, that the CIA has been instructing him to kill the Pope by way of a radio embedded in his brain, nothing short of a CT scan showing me the radio and a bug detector showing signal origin at Langley is going to convince me that he's not insane. I don't start speculating on why the CIA would want the pope dead.
I realize that this type of reasoning from evidence rather than speculation is not the usual fare at the UFOlogy seminars and astrology club meetings you drag your knuckles to every night, but do pay attention, you might learn something.
[quote]there's no way to tell at which times[/quote]
[quote]we don't and won't ever know[/quote]
[quote]Likewise there is no way to tell[/quote]
Thanks so much for agreeing with me!
Yeah, and _they_ had records going back to 8,000 BCE that the aliens gave them. Unfortunately the data was all on NASA 1" tape, so the Egyptians couldn't read it until Plato cheerfully loaned them an Ampex machine...
This from a soon-Ph.D in Classics.
Atlantis was a story Plato made up in the course of a philosophical discussion. It goes no further back in the literary record unless you want to twist a couple mentions of "Atlas' island" in the earlier corpus like balloon animals.
Herb is kind of above reproach. Having grown up in Wisconsin and actually met the man once, I can say comfortably that he isn't some kind of fundraising whore; he's a principled legislator who will probably get swept out in the next tide of teabagging. So I would be very careful in ascribing any kind of sinister motive to his investigation, or in drawing any conclusions about what the committee's findings will be.
Erp. This was me, got logged out of /. for some reason.
Yes yes, I know we all hate Microsoft, but on the face of it this was a very shrewd business decision. Nokia was getting killed by the fact that people now want their phones to do such exotic things as email and Web browsing. They had no real internal direction in terms of software development, as evidenced by the schizophrenia of Symbian and Maemo, and the fact that they were trying to do it all in-house wasn't helping things any.
Meanwhile, Microsoft comes along with a ready-made solution to Nokia's woes in the form of a pretty complete mobile platform and a $1 billion payout to help with the transition. To Nokia's idiot board of directors this probably looked like a no-brainer. Meanwhile Microsoft gets amazing value in the form of a very, very large company now pushing out its software products worldwide. This isn't going to put WP7 ahead of Android or iOS, not by a long shot, but it will do wonders in terms of shoring up their position.
On the flip side of things, consider Motorola. At one point they were kind of in the same boat as Nokia, having missed the first wave of the smartphone epidemic, and went from being the company that had it all with the once-super cool RAZR to an also-ran. They got behind Android in a very complete and enthusiastic way and the results have really paid off for them. I'd venture to say that they make some of the best Android phones out there, and they're taking a great stab at the tablet market. And no one had to pay them $1 billion to do it!
In short, this is great news for MS, bad news for Nokia fans. I always thought the path to Palm's demise was paved by Windows Mobile ending up on Treo smartphones. They just couldn't be bothered to invest in an innovate mobile OS of their own until webOS, and that was obviously a day late and a dollar short...
We need to come down hard on miscreants like this. Sure, right now he's stealing passwords from the school office and changing grades, but soon that won't be enough for him, and before long he'll be wardialing military contractors with his IMSAI 8080 and acoustocoupler modem.
You mean he forgot that his institution probably had a weighted grading scheme where honors and other high-level classes were scaled to a 5.0 GPA whereas regular classes were scaled to a 4.0 GPA? No, he seems to have had that pretty well down.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you iPad fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an iPad (a 1GHz A4 w/32 Gigs of flash) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on .Mac to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Motorola Xoom running Android, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPad, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Angry Birds will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Safari is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various iOS devices, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen an iOS device that has run faster than its Windows Phone counterpart, despite iOS' faster chip architecture. My brown Zune runs faster than this iPad at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the iPad is a superior machine.
Apple addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use an iPad over other faster, cheaper, more stable tablets.
No, "has overtaken" is the _present_ perfect of "overtake." The _past_ perfect (or pluperfect) is "had overtaken."
Jesus, I had to know these things to get through 2nd grade. Just what are they teaching in schools nowadays?
Only if you want DC-area bathrooms to be flooded with, er, wide-stanced Republican congressmen.
When asked for comment, outgoing CEO Steve Jobs replied, "I would cut off the more disreputable parts of the body, and use the space for playing fields."
"Prior manipulations and plans" which were covered up in an almost laughably poor way, involved single drug companies and usually just a peppering of bureaucrats within those companies, and concerned "blockbuster drugs" covered by a litany of patents. Vaccines are manufactured by every major drug firm, have a proven track record of success in preventing illness extending back to the 18th century, have mostly long since disappeared from patent territory, and are prescribed by more or less every pediatrician with an MD.
Parents of children with autism want someone to blame. I can't really say I'm surprised considering how insanely difficult it is to raise an autistic person, and how they're constantly bombarded by dirty looks from other people and badly-concealed hints that the child would be better-behaved if they had better parenting. In short, up until recently our culture blamed them for their children. So they jump on any opportunity to displace that moral burden.
I hope that someday we discover there's some supplement or medicine (like folic acid for neural tube defects) that will prevent autism. Until then, don't blame the parents and don't blame the doctors and don't blame the suppliers of useful medicines.
Everyone knows how conspiracy theories work. All the wingnuts will just claim this is a political chop job designed to cover up Big Brother/Big Pharma's Big Evil plan. The BBC could play video next week of Wakefield snorting coke and doing an underage hooker, all the while shouting that he had falsified his results, and it wouldn't matter. At some point they'd probably decide that Wakefield was a deep-cover government plant intended to discredit the movement.
The marginalization of long-term data storage can only be a good thing -- the big advertising and other firms get the analytical data that actually matters to their bottom line, and to the extent that the average joe's privacy is being invaded at the very least the fruits of that invasion will become increasingly accessible.
Pretty soon the world will be just like Firefly!
Mal: Petty?
Inara: I didn't mean petty.
Mal: What did you mean?
Inara: Suo xie?
Mal: That's Chinese for petty.
See, you have three checkout lines to choose from. You can't see the register from where you are, but at two of the three lines the cashier is a goat...
Much as I enjoyed Tron: Legacy, young Flynn/Clu was just wrong enough to seriously creep me out. I think it was because some parts of his face didn't move right when he talked and smiled (cheeks and eyes).
Encryption is only as strong as the idiots who implement it. The Soviets learned that the hard way during the early part of the Cold War, when they accidentally reused random one-time pad encryptors. That led to the NSA's VENONA project, and we decrypted a pretty good amount of Soviet diplomatic and spy traffic before they were tipped off.
Yeah, but Goddard's work never went anywhere until German scientists working under the Nazis recognized its military potential, and then Uncle Sam figured out these rocket thingies might be a cool thing and spent a bundle on them. Of course Goddard died before he could see what his rockets could really do because private interests with money refused to support him in the 30s, but hey, you can't make a soulless capitalist dystopia without crushing a few souls, or something.
Try to name one private rocket manufacturer not beholden to Uncle Sam between 1950 and 1990 and you'll see what I mean.
Sorry, the Republicans only fight government intrusion if it lacks the magic words "national security" and your annual income is above $250,000.
In this instance what they can do for you is a visit from Ann Coulter, who will shriek "why do you hate America SO MUCH" loud and shrill enough to shatter all the glass in your house.
Wait, they tried to pronounce it "sexy?" Because nothing says "sexy" to me like the sweet, sweet curves of the Mac IIcx.
That's actually a really good point. I expect there's some solid reasoning as to why it should be singlethreaded if so many environments run things that way. The only two I'm intensely familiar with are Cocoa and UIKit, which are pretty similar.
Is the logic there just your basic "DON'T FSCK UP THE FRAMEBUFFER" stuff, or is something else at work? I know that the guts of screen drawing were much nastier back in the days when you had to sync your VRAM writes with the HBlank and VBlank periods on CRTs.