ANWR may have 15 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. That would be about 10% of US output for the next 20 years, coming at a time when Prudoe Bay recovery is in decline. That is oil we would not have to import from Chavez or Ahmadinejad. The infrastructure for transporting the oil safely is already in place. Is that not worth it. As for conservation, great. But even if you cut consumption by a massive 20%, economic growth would eliminate that benefit in 10 years. Then what? Conservation is not an energy policy.
out of curiosity, what legislation does your dreamed one-sided government pass? Now, what legislation do you think your dream government would actually pass?
Nothing big.
Social security reform (read deep cuts)
Balanced federal budget
Less activist judiciary (confirm judge Alito)
Tort reform (liability caps)
Tax cuts
Energy policy passage (ANWR, continental shelf drilling)
This is not what I hoped for, but 6 months is probably the best the republicans can get for now. After all, 2006 is election year and everyone is switching into CYA mode. This will only hit the garbage can AFTER we elect a democratically controlled senate/house.
Your hopes are pinned on the likes of Howard 'White Flag' Dean being able to garner the swing vote. Hmm, swing vote and Howard Dean, not two words you often find used together. I am hopeful Dean and his ilk will alienate the electorate again and that America will grow redder. A filibuster proof Senate majority would be nice. Then we can and we can really get something done. What I find really inexplicable about the agreement is that the ANWR was dropped. Hopefully Senator Frist will reattach it to some Democrat sacred cow legislation so we can actually do something to increase our domestic oil supplies.
Yes. ccache and distcc would both be good options for this. Those are outstanding programs. In fact, I think the ebuild can readily be modified to use it for incrementaal builds. I'll have to check it out. The samba guy (Andrew Tridgell?) that developed them is amazing. He has samba, ccache, distcc, and rsync to his name. Not bad. I am surprised he has not won the FSF free software award yet.
GCC was bootsrapped and all of the programs on the machine were compiled using -O2 -march=athlon-xp. Nothing out of the ordinary. The Linux kernel builds in just a couple of minutes from scratch. I really think it is the immense complexity of OO.
I compiled that beast on my Gentoo machine two weeks ago. It took 5 hours on an Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of memory. Surely it is the longest compilation for a single package in the free software world. Don't get me wrong, the OO folks do an amazing job and it is impressively multi OS. But even the gnome-base only takes a fraction of the time to compile. Is there another source package out there that takes longer to compile?
By letting an ignorant fool of a president (and supporters) and superstitons determine our medical future is crazy. Do we really need these equivalent witch-doctor religions telling us what to do in the sciences,
The real witch doctors are those biologists who manipulate cells without really understanding them. Should society give them carte blanche to conduct their abominations? I think not.
and look how skillfully Bush & Co. moved their cherished beliefs that a single crummy cell has any rights (done over the last 6 years).
Cummy cell? Have you ever tried to make one? I am proud President Bush has resisted the Dr's Frankenstein and secular liberals who would create a race of subhumans from whom they can harvest stems cells at will just so they can see Christopher Reeve ride a polo pony again.
A slashdot style refutation: ignorant and absolute. Go back to the main page and wait for a discussion you can handle, like the next ZDnet article. Twit.
Yeah, it's a little tacky, but as long as he's making corrections and not inserting falsehoods, it's a matter for a gossip column, not tech news.
I disagree. Don't you think it is hypocritical for the leader of Wikipedia to suggest a code of conduct to others that he is not willing to abide by? His credibility is gone. I hope the bastard gets flayed alive by the criticism. I am glad slashdot has contributed to it.
A quote from Einstein frequently taken out of context by defenders of creationism/ID.
Read the disclaimer in my first post. I do not defend ID. I am a geologist by training and have observed the succession of species first hand in the sedimentary record many times over. Faith and dogma have no place in science. I think evolution is real and pervasive. My point is that the judge mostly said what he was taught to say, and that the supposed defenders of evolution aren't doing a very good job, mostly because evoltionary theory is still in a nascient state after 150 years.
You will note, however, that neither Einstein nor those mathematicians try to use god to explain their theories. Einstein was merely expressing his theory that the universe is NOT randomly chaotic and is in fact predictable once you have enough information. Mathematicians are always looking for that beautiful equastion that sometimes falls out of some horrible mess and simplifies a problem greatly.
No. Einstein rejected quantum mechanics on purely aesthetic, even spiritual grounds. No other justification than that. He didn't like Bohr's or Shroedinger's notion of the physics of the very small and spent the rest of his life seeking an alternative. He has been proven wrong, no doubt. But don't invoke Einstein if you want to remove God from the discussion. He is a bad example.
Non-computability is never the foundation of any science. ID's fundimental flaw is that it is a formalized argument from ignorance, which is a logical fallacy. Besides, the whole point of science is to explain the nature of the universe, not presuppose some answer and stop looking.
Look no further than weather prediction and the solution of Navier Stokes Equations. The equations are completely valid and deterministic. But scientist's ability to apply them in anything other than the short term is limited because of their limited ability to full specify initial conditions. Solution of most time differential equations are like that. I agree with your idea that ID folks have 'stopped looking for the answer'. So why to you disagree with my dissatisfaction of the state of the theory of biology?
Obviously ID and Creationism have plenty of mathematical funimentals to lean on... Saying that biologists have a lack of rigor is something you're going to have to back up with mountains of evidence. It's tantamount to calling them all cheats and liars. Also, saying that life is too cool for evolution made me do a double take. That's some A Class stuff there.
If you as a biologist wish to compare yourself with a creationist go ahead. You will stack up well. But you should be embarrassed to compare the state of your field with a mathematician or a physicist. I am not saying life is too cool for evolution. I am saying biologists use the notion of evolution without understanding deeply what it really is.
Before you mod me down, I agree with the idea of evolution and disagree with ID. Having said that:
(1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;
Yet Einstein implied as much when he said: "God does not play dice." Many scientists and mathematicians are guided by what they see as divine beauty. If that isn't supernatural causation, what is?
(2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and
Good point here. Non-computability (complexity) enters into many successful scientific theories and does then no harm.
(3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.
Evolutionary theory is not derived from mathematical formalism like classical dynamics, quantum mechanics, physical chemistry, or even econometrics... So it is very hard for proponents to fend off attacks. The lack of rigor, low research standards and general aversion of the biology community to mathematics beyond elementary statistics opens them up to these attacks. Biologists don't do very well in defense. The evolution of life is such an awesome phenomenon it deserves a much better theoretical foundation than currently exists.
Nevertheless, there were many ways in which Perl 5 was running into its limits, and these were both syntactic limits and semantic limits.
This is so misguided. I take this to mean that Perl6 syntax will be even more of a carnival of confusion than Perl5. Will Perl6 replace sendmail.cf as the most vile grammer yet devised? Maybe, but more likely it is so complex that it will never be released. Can you say Hurd?
I am curious. Is this the next sequential prime after the previous one? Is it possible that there are other primes between this new one and the one found before it?
I am equally curious if this is a twin prime (p + 2 also prime).
Given that the Mars Polar lander crash site has been misidentified using better imagery, the chances that this is Beagle II are low. The image shown in the article is not compelling. There is the stench of politics surrounding the result. Very nearly worked? Uh Huh.
To be honest in the current political climate it would be hard to find someone in Europe who wouldn't be considered liberal in the USA - the current US polirtics make Genghis Khan's wealth redistribution policies look positively progressive - and Mussolini would be considered practicaly a commie!
Genghis Khan was a brutal conqueror. But cities that submitted to him paid a 10% tax and accepted a rather draconian though functional legal system received functioning markets and trade without much interference. The US today under Republican leadership has a federal tax rate of 35%. If you withhold some of that 35% your will not be tortured and executed by the IRS as you would be by withholding from Genghis Khan. You will only be tortured. Lord knows what stratospheric levels it will reach if the Democrats ever return to power. Some of GK's policies indeed seem progressive.
I think the whole point of being worried about global warming is that catastrophic events are best avoided.
And how will that be? With feel good treaties that can have no predicable affect? There are 4 billion living in poverty. Producing CO2 emissions will necessarily mark their rise in standard of living.
Evolution is a slow process; it can cope with hundreds of thousands of years.
It doesn't cope with drastic changes on the order of a hundred years.
Really? There has not yet been a catastrophic event in Earth's history that life has not coped with. The KT event that killed the dinosaurs led to the massive radiation of bird and mammal species that we know today. You don't call that drastic? The Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out an even larger percentage of species, and then back they came. The kind of hyperbole you are slinging is typical of the environmental movement today. Warming is not dire enough, so they recently announce that the gulf stream is shutting down and will put Europe in a deep freeze. Which is it guys?
I can't believe the moderators posted this story. Do they really expect a gentle discussion of the issue? The moderator should be given -1 Flamebait, along with my my last post.
The Surrender Monkeys are out in force today, still eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. I for one look forward to national policy being made by Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Teddy Kennedy, not! Do you remember that the inaction of Clinton and Albright allowed world terror to come to full maturity? They are the criminals.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Gonzales
Todays equivalent of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton, bless'em.
The New York Times publishes a negative story about President Bush, the day after a historic vote on Iraq, which the Times bairly notices. This from an institution that claims to be the paper of record. It's not out of character these days, is it? God Bless the President of the United States.
A simple solution to the fraud would be to keep the transaction proceeds in escrow (Paypal) for some period and allow the buyer to opt out if not satisfied. This way shipping costs are the only risk item. Those can still be disputed if the buyer receives shoddy goods, but usually would be kept by the seller. Problematic buyers can be stigmatized with the regular rating system. Paypal would make even more money because of the increased float, just like an insurer.
What is the problem is getting them to the next level. EDUCATION. Books are expensive and you need a lot of them for even basic schooling worse they need to be translated for each country.
The guy is not a retard. He challenges the idea that a gift laptop = education. You are buying into the fallacious idea that this green toy and education are synonymous, which is foolish. These gadgeteers from MIT should stick to what they know and not mislead the developing world with their weird technological distractions. PC's (particularly those that run GNU/Linux) are already commodity items. Surely the developing world can get by with them.
Slashdot Mirror
ANWR may have 15 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. That would be about 10% of US output for the next 20 years, coming at a time when Prudoe Bay recovery is in decline. That is oil we would not have to import from Chavez or Ahmadinejad. The infrastructure for transporting the oil safely is already in place. Is that not worth it. As for conservation, great. But even if you cut consumption by a massive 20%, economic growth would eliminate that benefit in 10 years. Then what? Conservation is not an energy policy.
out of curiosity, what legislation does your dreamed one-sided government pass? Now, what legislation do you think your dream government would actually pass?
Nothing big.
Such a one-sided government would be wonderful, wouldn't it?
One can dream.
This is not what I hoped for, but 6 months is probably the best the republicans can get for now. After all, 2006 is election year and everyone is switching into CYA mode. This will only hit the garbage can AFTER we elect a democratically controlled senate/house.
Your hopes are pinned on the likes of Howard 'White Flag' Dean being able to garner the swing vote. Hmm, swing vote and Howard Dean, not two words you often find used together. I am hopeful Dean and his ilk will alienate the electorate again and that America will grow redder. A filibuster proof Senate majority would be nice. Then we can and we can really get something done. What I find really inexplicable about the agreement is that the ANWR was dropped. Hopefully Senator Frist will reattach it to some Democrat sacred cow legislation so we can actually do something to increase our domestic oil supplies.
Yes. ccache and distcc would both be good options for this. Those are outstanding programs. In fact, I think the ebuild can readily be modified to use it for incrementaal builds. I'll have to check it out. The samba guy (Andrew Tridgell?) that developed them is amazing. He has samba, ccache, distcc, and rsync to his name. Not bad. I am surprised he has not won the FSF free software award yet.
GCC was bootsrapped and all of the programs on the machine were compiled using -O2 -march=athlon-xp. Nothing out of the ordinary. The Linux kernel builds in just a couple of minutes from scratch. I really think it is the immense complexity of OO.
I compiled that beast on my Gentoo machine two weeks ago. It took 5 hours on an Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of memory. Surely it is the longest compilation for a single package in the free software world. Don't get me wrong, the OO folks do an amazing job and it is impressively multi OS. But even the gnome-base only takes a fraction of the time to compile. Is there another source package out there that takes longer to compile?
By letting an ignorant fool of a president (and supporters) and superstitons determine our medical future is crazy. Do we really need these equivalent witch-doctor religions telling us what to do in the sciences,
The real witch doctors are those biologists who manipulate cells without really understanding them. Should society give them carte blanche to conduct their abominations? I think not.
and look how skillfully Bush & Co. moved their cherished beliefs that a single crummy cell has any rights (done over the last 6 years).
Cummy cell? Have you ever tried to make one? I am proud President Bush has resisted the Dr's Frankenstein and secular liberals who would create a race of subhumans from whom they can harvest stems cells at will just so they can see Christopher Reeve ride a polo pony again.
God, that's a stupid statement even for Slashdot.
A slashdot style refutation: ignorant and absolute. Go back to the main page and wait for a discussion you can handle, like the next ZDnet article. Twit.
Yeah, it's a little tacky, but as long as he's making corrections and not inserting falsehoods, it's a matter for a gossip column, not tech news.
I disagree. Don't you think it is hypocritical for the leader of Wikipedia to suggest a code of conduct to others that he is not willing to abide by? His credibility is gone. I hope the bastard gets flayed alive by the criticism. I am glad slashdot has contributed to it.
A quote from Einstein frequently taken out of context by defenders of creationism/ID.
Read the disclaimer in my first post. I do not defend ID. I am a geologist by training and have observed the succession of species first hand in the sedimentary record many times over. Faith and dogma have no place in science. I think evolution is real and pervasive. My point is that the judge mostly said what he was taught to say, and that the supposed defenders of evolution aren't doing a very good job, mostly because evoltionary theory is still in a nascient state after 150 years.
You will note, however, that neither Einstein nor those mathematicians try to use god to explain their theories. Einstein was merely expressing his theory that the universe is NOT randomly chaotic and is in fact predictable once you have enough information. Mathematicians are always looking for that beautiful equastion that sometimes falls out of some horrible mess and simplifies a problem greatly.
No. Einstein rejected quantum mechanics on purely aesthetic, even spiritual grounds. No other justification than that. He didn't like Bohr's or Shroedinger's notion of the physics of the very small and spent the rest of his life seeking an alternative. He has been proven wrong, no doubt. But don't invoke Einstein if you want to remove God from the discussion. He is a bad example.
Non-computability is never the foundation of any science. ID's fundimental flaw is that it is a formalized argument from ignorance, which is a logical fallacy. Besides, the whole point of science is to explain the nature of the universe, not presuppose some answer and stop looking.
Look no further than weather prediction and the solution of Navier Stokes Equations. The equations are completely valid and deterministic. But scientist's ability to apply them in anything other than the short term is limited because of their limited ability to full specify initial conditions. Solution of most time differential equations are like that. I agree with your idea that ID folks have 'stopped looking for the answer'. So why to you disagree with my dissatisfaction of the state of the theory of biology?
Obviously ID and Creationism have plenty of mathematical funimentals to lean on... Saying that biologists have a lack of rigor is something you're going to have to back up with mountains of evidence. It's tantamount to calling them all cheats and liars. Also, saying that life is too cool for evolution made me do a double take. That's some A Class stuff there.
If you as a biologist wish to compare yourself with a creationist go ahead. You will stack up well. But you should be embarrassed to compare the state of your field with a mathematician or a physicist. I am not saying life is too cool for evolution. I am saying biologists use the notion of evolution without understanding deeply what it really is.
Before you mod me down, I agree with the idea of evolution and disagree with ID. Having said that:
(1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;
Yet Einstein implied as much when he said: "God does not play dice." Many scientists and mathematicians are guided by what they see as divine beauty. If that isn't supernatural causation, what is?
(2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and
Good point here. Non-computability (complexity) enters into many successful scientific theories and does then no harm.
(3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.
Evolutionary theory is not derived from mathematical formalism like classical dynamics, quantum mechanics, physical chemistry, or even econometrics... So it is very hard for proponents to fend off attacks. The lack of rigor, low research standards and general aversion of the biology community to mathematics beyond elementary statistics opens them up to these attacks. Biologists don't do very well in defense. The evolution of life is such an awesome phenomenon it deserves a much better theoretical foundation than currently exists.
Nevertheless, there were many ways in which Perl 5 was running into its limits, and these were both syntactic limits and semantic limits.
This is so misguided. I take this to mean that Perl6 syntax will be even more of a carnival of confusion than Perl5. Will Perl6 replace sendmail.cf as the most vile grammer yet devised? Maybe, but more likely it is so complex that it will never be released. Can you say Hurd?
I am curious. Is this the next sequential prime after the previous one? Is it possible that there are other primes between this new one and the one found before it?
I am equally curious if this is a twin prime (p + 2 also prime).
Given that the Mars Polar lander crash site has been misidentified using better imagery, the chances that this is Beagle II are low. The image shown in the article is not compelling. There is the stench of politics surrounding the result. Very nearly worked? Uh Huh.
To be honest in the current political climate it would be hard to find someone in Europe who wouldn't be considered liberal in the USA - the current US polirtics make Genghis Khan's wealth redistribution policies look positively progressive - and Mussolini would be considered practicaly a commie!
Genghis Khan was a brutal conqueror. But cities that submitted to him paid a 10% tax and accepted a rather draconian though functional legal system received functioning markets and trade without much interference. The US today under Republican leadership has a federal tax rate of 35%. If you withhold some of that 35% your will not be tortured and executed by the IRS as you would be by withholding from Genghis Khan. You will only be tortured. Lord knows what stratospheric levels it will reach if the Democrats ever return to power. Some of GK's policies indeed seem progressive.
I think the whole point of being worried about global warming is that catastrophic events are best avoided.
And how will that be? With feel good treaties that can have no predicable affect? There are 4 billion living in poverty. Producing CO2 emissions will necessarily mark their rise in standard of living.
Evolution is a slow process; it can cope with hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't cope with drastic changes on the order of a hundred years.
Really? There has not yet been a catastrophic event in Earth's history that life has not coped with. The KT event that killed the dinosaurs led to the massive radiation of bird and mammal species that we know today. You don't call that drastic? The Permian-Triassic extinction wiped out an even larger percentage of species, and then back they came. The kind of hyperbole you are slinging is typical of the environmental movement today. Warming is not dire enough, so they recently announce that the gulf stream is shutting down and will put Europe in a deep freeze. Which is it guys?
I can't believe the moderators posted this story. Do they really expect a gentle discussion of the issue? The moderator should be given -1 Flamebait, along with my my last post.
The poster gives himself away as a limey trying to further his pacificist agenda.
The Surrender Monkeys are out in force today, still eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq. I for one look forward to national policy being made by Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Teddy Kennedy, not! Do you remember that the inaction of Clinton and Albright allowed world terror to come to full maturity? They are the criminals.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Gonzales
Todays equivalent of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton, bless'em.
The New York Times publishes a negative story about President Bush, the day after a historic vote on Iraq, which the Times bairly notices. This from an institution that claims to be the paper of record. It's not out of character these days, is it? God Bless the President of the United States.
A simple solution to the fraud would be to keep the transaction proceeds in escrow (Paypal) for some period and allow the buyer to opt out if not satisfied. This way shipping costs are the only risk item. Those can still be disputed if the buyer receives shoddy goods, but usually would be kept by the seller. Problematic buyers can be stigmatized with the regular rating system. Paypal would make even more money because of the increased float, just like an insurer.
What is the problem is getting them to the next level. EDUCATION. Books are expensive and you need a lot of them for even basic schooling worse they need to be translated for each country.
The guy is not a retard. He challenges the idea that a gift laptop = education. You are buying into the fallacious idea that this green toy and education are synonymous, which is foolish. These gadgeteers from MIT should stick to what they know and not mislead the developing world with their weird technological distractions. PC's (particularly those that run GNU/Linux) are already commodity items. Surely the developing world can get by with them.