Shows what the right way to do it is.
on
Apollo 12 at 35
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This was the space program with NASA in peak form. Perhaps it wasn't their finest moment (maybe either 11 or 13 was), but the breadth and ambition is utterly above NASA today. This was only the second landing, yet NASA aimed for that 31 hour stay on the surface.
They were confident that their communications around the world would keep the uplink with the astronauts as Earth rotated, confident that the first landing wasn't a lucky fluke, and willing to commit to keeping the crew there long enough to do a little real science. If the focus on 11 was largely on the medical situation of the crew, by 12 we were increasingly confident that people could survive on the Moon long enough to do something useful, and the focus began to shift to building a permanent presence there and answering some of the more interesting questions of the Planetologists.
The near disasterous shortage of fuel and over-abundance of rocky ground in the final seconds of Apollo 11's landing could have made NASA rely more on cautious approaches and more intensive micro-management, but instead it led to an increased recognition of the role of the astronauts on site in making the final decisions. That in turn gave us six successes and one gloriously redeemed failure.
Winamp 5 can just be set to search for the latest version, or it can be checking for info on the music you are playing.
If it's checking for updates, try this: 1. Rightclick some blank area of the skin. 2. Click "options" on the resulting menu, then click "preferences". 3, On the "winamp preferences" window that results, go to "general preferences". Find the checkbox labeled, "Check for new versions of winamp at startup" and uncheck it. Also, the "jump to file" subsection under "general preferences" may have another box that says "check for new version when winamp starts" Just in case, you may want to see if you need to uncheck this one too.
If winamp seems to be getting information on the current file, even when you don't have the media library open, go to that same window, and where it reads "Select your internet connection type", try telling it the computer is "not connected to the internet".
Clark is takeing a standard line of approach when he says: "Just because it doesn't create a lot of body bags, doesn't mean it's not important. It's vitally important for our economies," He may even believe it literally, but he may not. It's often said as a way of avoiding having to explain some basics to the more economically clueless so that the speaker can get on with talking about their point to the clued in. Unfortunately, real progress is hard with those clueless people involved, and what's needed is often the extra effort of reminding people that death here is more than a metaphor.
A big enough economic impact is the equivalent of body bags. For example, when Enron screws up their employee pension plan enough, that's thousands of workers who will have to keep their noses to the grindstone into their seventies instead of retiring, and who will have lesser quality of medical care in their declining years. Some of these people will actually die a few months or even a few years younger than they otherwise would. Add those months and years together, and screwing up 15,000 retirement plans is a loss of life easily equal to killing 10 or so healthy newborns at birth. We can even limit this more, to 10 or so healthy newborns who are by and large guarenteed to become productive citizens and neither criminals or welfare cases.
Cyber-terrorism has that sort of potential impact, often on an even larger scale. Screw up the economy enough, and unemployment goes up. People can't keep up insurance - people can't afford regular checkups - people wear themselves out working two or three part time jobs for lower wages - people eat worse - net result, those people die younger. Add those trimmed off bits of lifetimes together to get whole average lifetimes, and we're looking at the equivalent of killing 100,000 healthy young people, but focused chiefly on the elderly.
Even spam and viruses fit this in principle. If it takes 30 seconds to delete a bunch of spam, but 100 million people have to contribute 30 seconds each, how many human lifetimes is 3 billion seconds? (It's about 95 years - by this standard, one good solid e-mail spam attack on the public at large is about as bad as one murder.). Whether it's fair to take the analogy that far or not's another question.
Very good point, but for one minor quibble. Cartoon characters aren't anthropocentric, they're anthropomorphic. Anthropoids don't get away with not falling until they pay attention to gravity.
This will happen sometime after the automobile selects all the smart squirrels, i.e. not in your or my nano-augmented lifetime, by six orders of magnetude.
I have seen art released under the GPL, if you're including a bunch of.JPG or.BMP graphics for skinnable applications, with maybe a bit of.XML thrown in. (it's debatable if this counts as "A"rt, but legally, it certainly counts as "a"rt). This happens infrequently, but there are probably a dozen skins that have been released with the GPL bundled in, on sites such as Customize.org
I actually started skinning another application in this style, then realized that its legal status would be uncertain at best. Since then, I've checked them out when I run across another one, and what's worse than the GPL itself is the original creator's posted e-mail is always one that's no longer valid or doesn't get responses.
My take on this is that if I were to release an animated.gif under the GPL, it's possible I'm also promising to keep the raw frames on file and send them to anyone asking for them. If I draw something in BMP format, and it undergoes a lossy compression, say to.JPG at 80% quality, maybe that would count, with the.BMP as 'source code'. I don't see how the GPL is intended to cover such situations, but if it somehow does, it opens up a whole new can of worms.
If this is somehow legally binding, I'm wondering what it might cover. Full images? Significant (?) parts of them? Layouts, such as for virtual buttons? I don't worry much about the 'viral' aspects of the GPL for code, but for applied art, if it actually covers it at all, 'viral' effects look to be pretty likely. I'm now hoping no lawyer gets this idea.
While there are 'big flood' legends in many cultures, they are not really ubiquitous. There are many inter-related legends whose origins have been traced to the fertile crescent civilzations, and another big cluster of them that centers around a band running between Indonesia and southern China.
In other places, big flood legends are rare, or don't play a major part in the culture's religion and myth cycles. For example, there are few 'big flood' stories in the new world cultures, and they mostly involve minor mythical figures rather than the most major gods or heros. Northern Europe and Asia are also relatively light on such myths. For example, the Norse myths have the Midgard serpent living under the sea and causing occasional seacoast floods, but Ragnarok itself involves the Fimbul Winter instead of a big flood, and the creation myths involve a glacier and a cow among other less savory versions.
The classical Greeks are a flood legend oriented culture. Not only do they have the Atlantis myth via Plato, but there is the Hydra story in Hercules' 12 labors, where the Hydra is finally slain by pinning it with a big rock.(this turns out to be a myth explaining how a river with many constantly shifting mouths stops shifting when it meanders into a mass of hard stone that keeps it flowing in one channel, allowing a city to be founded. The Roman adaptation of this myth explains how the conditions needed for the founding of Rome were achieved and makes it very clear the Hydra legend is a flood story.)
The classical Greeks also had myths of a huge flood as the climactic part of the war between the Titans and the Greek gods, and their symbol for the primal chaos at the start of all things was an ever-turbulent sea shrouded in perpetual darkness. Their single oldest deity is thus a flood god. No wonder Plato's story found many listeners.
This varies with jurisdiction. Where the term "breaking and entering" is used, it can matter, but places where it all falls under the category of "burglary" sometimes define it so entering the home or business surreptitiously is treated just the same as via force.
This also makes the use of the parent poster's metaphor dubious at best;-)
Great, an AC just responded to a challenge to clairify my post and actually did a good job. I'll never know who you were, masked rider, but my thanks to you and Tonto anyway! (Now where's my silver bullet?)
Try taking a hex editor that can examine your hard drive surface directly, and searching for common english 'four letter' words. Usually, you run across a few comment blocks that read "I forget what the **** this does, I was drunk when I coded it", and so on, and several screeds from crackers about how information wants to be free, except for their real address. For some reason, most of the Phrozen Krew types out there can't resist a little profanity in their comments.
Knoxville (and the more populated parts of 5 counties surrounding it) has Comcast for cable access, and BellSouth for ADSL to what they call business class DSL. There are those two, plus some additional small providers along the tech corridor running between Oak Ridge and Alcoa. The former rural areas and now tourist meccas of Sevierville, Gatlinburg, and Pidgeon Forge all have one or the other down the main roads, but maybe not very far off them.
50 miles away in the right direction, and high speed means you give the squirrel some meth after you tie the message to its neck. Wartburg/Morgan County or Oneida is probably lucky to get 24.4.
This isn't really about flaws in Darwin's own theory. Darwin's theory is more properly called Natural Selection. The core of modern Evolution is dual - it combines Darwin's theory and Gregor Mendel's work in genetics.
Some interpretations of Evolution go well outside of this dual core of two real theories, and either contradict some points of one, or just venture of into unscientific prediction and pseudo-science. In the past, this has led to the movements called "Social Darwinism" and "Eugenics" for examples. Right now, we seem to have allied movements such as the ones that refer to "Cosmic Evolution", "Stellar Evolution", and other such cases as falling under the same theory, and while they don't seem as mean spirited as those two, they are likely to be wrong in just the same ways. Unfortunately, even argueing over these extensions (and in favor of the core theories) has gotten some good working scientists dismissed as 'pro-creation-science nutjobs'.
One of the predictions Darwin made was that for natural Selection to work, unlimited blending (of the elements of heredity) could not be possible. Mendel's work was not known to Darwin (and vice versa), but Mendel's model for genes fit Darwin's prediction. When Crick and Watson won the Nobel for discovering that DNA carred the genetic code, it was in part because the genetic code they found confirmed Darwin's prediction - it was a code that didn't allow blending - Genes were either on or off.
(Upper level Biology students will tell you that it's not quite that simple, and some very limited cases of 'blending' occur, but Darwin was careful to specifiy that word 'unlimited' in his arguements and explain why, so it counts as a successful prediction).
A low error rate speeds up evolution (down to a certain minimum rate, at least) for several reasons. For the simplest one, a really high error rate means a new mutation frequently gets copied over by another new mutation before it passes through many generations, so the first mutation has less time to be tested. Less testing by the environment means subtly advantageous genes don't have time to benefit their 'host', only the ultra-rare big beneficial mutation. Evolution mostly proceeds by adding together many small improvments, and seldom from those 1 in a Trillion longshots.
Another reason is a really, really high error rate means species tend to just die out. Most mutations are negative, and there's no net advantage to being a leopard that gets a gene that makes your teeth a little sharper if you get 10 other mutations that cause early onset arthritus, increased chance of liver cancer, night-blindness, astigmatism, brittle hip joints, and vulnerability to common feline flu germs. Those sharp teeth still don't let you survive all that till reproductive age.
At rates somewhat below that, sexual species tend to die out selectively because too many potential pairs become incompatable and produce either no or sterile offspring, so a high error rate selects against sexual reproduction, and sexual reproduction itself speeds up evolution by giving a new advantageous gene more copies of different alternate genes to be tested with. If that advantageous gene gets paired up with some weak ones in one offspring, there is a good chance it will get paired with some others in another offspring and so have a better chance there to compete on its own merits. There are other arguemts along these lines, but they are either more complex or less testable and confirmable than these two. Anyway, a low error rate is again one of Darwin's own predictions, and is supposed to be pretty precisely calculatable and well confirmed by modern research (as it applies to DNA based life only). If we get seriously anomalous predictions applying a combination of it and other assumptions elsewhere, like looking at the evolution of the genetic codes themselves, I'd say some of those other assumptions are most probably where the error lies.
Actually, there is at least one puzzleing contradiction in current evolutionary theory, which is widely ignored by most proponents. It often falls under the rubric of necessary complexity, and so its few supporters are mostly lumped in with 'creation science', but it is a valid observational criticism.
Here's a short form, which I hope I am not simplifying too much:
1 One of the predictions of Darwin re. natural selection is that the mechanisms of heredity must have a sufficiently low copying error rate. Selection actually works faster if the error rate is lower (at least until it closely approaches zero), even though this is counter to lay expectations. (Gould and Dawkins would both agree with this point, and have written on it. This is one of the testable predictions Darwin made, and testable predictions are what makes Natural Selection a scientific theory). 2. Observational evidence strongly suggests that DNA is the last of a series of encoding schemes, and that its immediate predecessor was RNA, now used as a messenger rather than for data storage, and still used for reproductive data transfer in a few very primative organisms. Theory goes on to suggest that RNA is far from the first link in the chain, and that each mechanism of heredity preceeding it died out as a better one came along. (Again, Gould and Dawkins have both popularized this concept, and it's established text book teaching in College Biology). 3. By 1, the rate of selection getting from RNA to DNA must have been much faster than the rate of selection for the step before, and so on. Just as DNA makes less than 1/1,000th of the copying errors of RNA, so whatever came before RNA must be even sloppier, and so on, and so the rate of evolution under them must have been proceeding more and more slowly. 4. Geologists best estimate of the age of the Earth = 4.5 Billion years. Cosmologists now think the whole universe is 'only' 13.7 Billion years old (American Billions). DNA based life has been around for about 1 Billion years, as estimated by the fossil record's findings of stromatolote masses and such, but there's more margin of error in this last estimate than in either of the other two.
The Earth took about 200 million years to cool to the point the rocks were solid, DNA base life may have existed in forms that left no fossils for a time, etc, so the exact numbers may be off a little, but that's the general time frame we have to work with. 5. So DNA based life has been evolving for roughly a quarter of the age of the Earth. RNA based life, evolving thousands of times more slowly, must fit into that remaining 3 billion years, or less. Whatever came before RNA must also fit into what's left, even though it probably needed even more time than RNA to get anywhere, and so on. Since there are probably at least a dozen such steps to get back to the primative clay based crystaline replicators that we guess were the real first, and selection operated billions and billions of times more slowly in them, Evolutionary Biology now predicts that both the Geologists and the Physicists were just plain wrong, and the minimum age of the Earth is by the most charitable estimates several Octillions or Nonillions of years, or by some more average estimates, as much as 10E136 years.
The people who have discussed this are not generally respected in scientific circles. The criticism is often colored by appeals not to bring this up as it gives the 'creation science' types something they will distort into an arguement for the Universe being only 6,006 years old, and so on. Never-the-less, it's there. I'd point out that Darwin himself thought all he had done in articulating Natural Selection was to propose how speciation occurred, and not the origin of life itself - that's why he named his great work "The Origin of Species".
And when the people doing in theatre recording become individual nuclear powers, the industry will actually start listening to you. (Still, video pirates with nuclear subs... Beans of Uber-Kewlness!).
It's not illegal to lose the shareholders money, just that they can be sued for ceertain mistakes that include criminal acts and cost the shareholder.
Here's URLs to stories on three of the biggest shareholder lawsuits of late. In every one, you'll see words like fraud and malfeesance, and specific allegations such as the management being sued 'failed to disclose information legally required by the SEC' (usually in quarters immediately prior to period covered by the suit), or sold off their own shares at the stock's peak, while hiding the fact from the board. That's what gets a company sued with even some chance of success, not doing something legal such as disclosing source code as part of involvement in an open source project.
Yes. Normally, some judges do get to become involved and so judicial branck does serve as a check. In principle, another check on this is, if the government announces a lot of ongoing investigations and then doesn't actually resolve them, the justice department looks like a bunch of incompetents and gets voted out. This takes reporters who ask the tough questions "You know that ongoing investigation you mentioned 6 months ago? How's that going lately, and how much has it cost the taxpayer so far?".
I doubt this is much of a check in the current climate. 1. the press seems to have a short memory for these things. 2. so does the public.
Identifying the treaty involved is likely to narrow the other state involved down to one. The MLATs are all theoretically seperate two party treaties, except one with the UK over the Cayman islands, which includes a lot of UK subsidiaries (see below, from the state department's own website).
"MLAT Treaties in Force:
I. The United States has bilateral Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLAT) currently in force with: Anguilla*, Antigua/Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands*, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Dominica, Egypt, Estonia, Greece, Grenada, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Korea (South), Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Montserrat*, Morocco, Netherlands, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Romania, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad, Turkey, Turks and Caicos Islands*, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay.
*Treaty with the United Kingdom concerning the Cayman Islands relating to Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters. This MLAT was extended to Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands on Nov. 9, 1990, and to Montserrat on April 26, 1991."
What's interesting to me is the web site lists a lot of other treaties AND NON-TREATIES that function much like an MLAT, including some that normally only invoked for narcotics cases (but apparently don't all have to be limited that way), and some informal agreements involving SEC matters.
We hope the contest obfuscation is all intentional. Personally, if I write obfuscated C it's mostly inadvertent, and if I write obfuscated C++ it's the PHB's fault.
As you point out, the fixed head assembly would be much easier to manage, and (as I gather you're implying) physically cheaper to construct. But the actuators that move the recording substrate are going to be harder to construct. I suspect that's proportional, hence my remark. I could be wrong, of course.
The latency issue you describe is likely to be quite serious. Consider, the area of the substrate you want to read doesn't just have to come around to a spot under a head, (which should in principle be a pretty small motion if it was only governed by head spacing). The whole string of data you want to read has to pass across one or more heads fast enough to generate a readable magnetic field. The size of the oscellations therefore has to be bigger than an individual sector to give extra room for the substrate to get up to readable speed on each pass, so smaller and more closely packed heads don't automatically mean speed improvements for this design.
No, it's not Flamebait. Carried as far as you have, it's hate speech. It's also proof that you personally should never have political power, as your overwhelming contempt for the vast majority of those people you would be 'serving' shows through in every line.
You do not understand my worldview. you understand a straw-man parody of my world view, and that is all you are interested in understanding. As someone who knows at least a few of the intelligent arguements for Atheism, and a former Agnostic, you are a fanatic who gives your own cause a bad name and is too foolish to know the damage you do. Not only do I have more respect for the cause you claim to ally yourself with than you have for me or my opinions, but I have more respect for it than you yourself do, and that's really sad.
Things changed a lot after Vietnam. Since about 1980, the National Guard has generally been expected to go overseas as needed. There aren't a lot of guardsmen who can honestly say they never expected to be deployed in an active duty war anymore. The Guard and Reserves have some real reasons to complain, but that's not one of them.
Many Guard and Reserve units are now being expected to stay in combat zones for more than a standard tour of duty, and others are being rotated out anomalously - rather than returning stateside afterwards, some units are going to Korea, which is basically rotating from combat to semi-combat. In Vietnam, a combat zone tour was 6 Months. A year in Iraq and another year in Korea on the DMZ is going to cause a lot more stress on some than even Vietnam. I urge everyone, for or against the war, to remember these people are volunteers, and that most of them are already accepting that they are called on to make a greater effort than the largely draftee army in the Vietnam era, but many are dissappointed that the public at large doesn't even know that's what's being asked. Urge your government both to find ways to rotate these people out on time, and to give them the help when they return that some of them will surely need.
The idea seems to be that a vibrating sheet could move, while a grid of read/write heads could stay in place, just so something moves to generate a changing magnetic field. While that's certainly true, a spinning disc could also have mutiple heads per arm, multiple arms per disc, and so on. Getting a closely packed array of read/write heads is an equal challenge in either case, and having the surface move continually in the same direction is much easier than having it oscillate.
This would affect what shapes a drive could be manufactured in, but that's unlikely to matter enough to make the idea catch on.
I don't see where you are going with the "In God We Trust" quote. If you're saying it should also be prohibited, fine, that's your opinion, but how it bears on my words your quoting is beyond me. Are you saying that it IS OK to have statues of pagan gods so long as there are only a few real worshippers, or that it's OK to have a coin depict the French revolutionary goddess of liberty, but not to invoke my particular God, or not? Did you even realize that the standing liberty image was religiously based, coming from a State Mandated Compulsory religion no less?
(The statue on Ellis island is not that liberty, by the way, but was originally concieved of as "Commerce Enlightening the World". Some depictions of Liberty on American coins come from that, some from the French Revolutionary institution.)
Personally, I'm tired of the government invoking what's possibly intended to be my God to hide the fact that there's nothing else propping up the money.
"What if Judge Moore was really Judge Achmed"
That shouldn't make any difference, and personally wouldn't.
"and he sat up there all bearded up with a big ol' Islamic symbol behind him?"
What islamic symbol do you have in mind? Islam doesn't use symbols much. If you mean Judge Achmed has a quote from the Koran displayed somewhere, what's the actual harm in that being displayed? Do you mean I should expect judge Achmed to decide the case by automatically chopping off my hand just because he respects islam?
Judge Moore crossed the line. He didn't do that by displaying the 10 commandments but by saying he regarded it as his duty to rule by (what he thought of as) Christian principles instead of the ones he swore an oath to uphold. Note that forswearing yourself violates one of the commandments he was displaying.
Guess what, there are lots of non-religious ways to be a hypocrite, and if you are ever in court you have a good chance of facing a judge who has found one of them. He won't be displaying a plaque either.
Slashdot Mirror
This was the space program with NASA in peak form. Perhaps it wasn't their finest moment (maybe either 11 or 13 was), but the breadth and ambition is utterly above NASA today. This was only the second landing, yet NASA aimed for that 31 hour stay on the surface.
They were confident that their communications around the world would keep the uplink with the astronauts as Earth rotated, confident that the first landing wasn't a lucky fluke, and willing to commit to keeping the crew there long enough to do a little real science. If the focus on 11 was largely on the medical situation of the crew, by 12 we were increasingly confident that people could survive on the Moon long enough to do something useful, and the focus began to shift to building a permanent presence there and answering some of the more interesting questions of the Planetologists.
The near disasterous shortage of fuel and over-abundance of rocky ground in the final seconds of Apollo 11's landing could have made NASA rely more on cautious approaches and more intensive micro-management, but instead it led to an increased recognition of the role of the astronauts on site in making the final decisions. That in turn gave us six successes and one gloriously redeemed failure.
Winamp 5 can just be set to search for the latest version, or it can be checking for info on the music you are playing.
If it's checking for updates, try this:
1. Rightclick some blank area of the skin.
2. Click "options" on the resulting menu, then click "preferences".
3, On the "winamp preferences" window that results, go to "general preferences". Find the checkbox labeled, "Check for new versions of winamp at startup" and uncheck it.
Also, the "jump to file" subsection under "general preferences" may have another box that says "check for new version when winamp starts" Just in case, you may want to see if you need to uncheck this one too.
If winamp seems to be getting information on the current file, even when you don't have the media library open, go to that same window, and where it reads "Select your internet connection type", try telling it the computer is "not connected to the internet".
Clark is takeing a standard line of approach when he says:
"Just because it doesn't create a lot of body bags, doesn't mean it's not important. It's vitally important for our economies,"
He may even believe it literally, but he may not. It's often said as a way of avoiding having to explain some basics to the more economically clueless so that the speaker can get on with talking about their point to the clued in. Unfortunately, real progress is hard with those clueless people involved, and what's needed is often the extra effort of reminding people that death here is more than a metaphor.
A big enough economic impact is the equivalent of body bags. For example, when Enron screws up their employee pension plan enough, that's thousands of workers who will have to keep their noses to the grindstone into their seventies instead of retiring, and who will have lesser quality of medical care in their declining years. Some of these people will actually die a few months or even a few years younger than they otherwise would. Add those months and years together, and screwing up 15,000 retirement plans is a loss of life easily equal to killing 10 or so healthy newborns at birth. We can even limit this more, to 10 or so healthy newborns who are by and large guarenteed to become productive citizens and neither criminals or welfare cases.
Cyber-terrorism has that sort of potential impact, often on an even larger scale. Screw up the economy enough, and unemployment goes up. People can't keep up insurance - people can't afford regular checkups - people wear themselves out working two or three part time jobs for lower wages - people eat worse - net result, those people die younger. Add those trimmed off bits of lifetimes together to get whole average lifetimes, and we're looking at the equivalent of killing 100,000 healthy young people, but focused chiefly on the elderly.
Even spam and viruses fit this in principle. If it takes 30 seconds to delete a bunch of spam, but 100 million people have to contribute 30 seconds each, how many human lifetimes is 3 billion seconds? (It's about 95 years - by this standard, one good solid e-mail spam attack on the public at large is about as bad as one murder.). Whether it's fair to take the analogy that far or not's another question.
Very good point, but for one minor quibble. Cartoon characters aren't anthropocentric, they're anthropomorphic. Anthropoids don't get away with not falling until they pay attention to gravity.
This will happen sometime after the automobile selects all the smart squirrels, i.e. not in your or my nano-augmented lifetime, by six orders of magnetude.
I have seen art released under the GPL, if you're including a bunch of .JPG or .BMP graphics for skinnable applications, with maybe a bit of .XML thrown in. (it's debatable if this counts as "A"rt, but legally, it certainly counts as "a"rt). This happens infrequently, but there are probably a dozen skins that have been released with the GPL bundled in, on sites such as Customize.org
e -desc/subliminal
.gif under the GPL, it's possible I'm also promising to keep the raw frames on file and send them to anyone asking for them. If I draw something in BMP format, and it undergoes a lossy compression, say to .JPG at 80% quality, maybe that would count, with the .BMP as 'source code'. I don't see how the GPL is intended to cover such situations, but if it somehow does, it opens up a whole new can of worms.
http://www.customize.org/
Try
http://www.customize.org/list/rainlendar/0/10/dat
for 1 example.
I actually started skinning another application in this style, then realized that its legal status would be uncertain at best. Since then, I've checked them out when I run across another one, and what's worse than the GPL itself is the original creator's posted e-mail is always one that's no longer valid or doesn't get responses.
My take on this is that if I were to release an animated
If this is somehow legally binding, I'm wondering what it might cover. Full images? Significant (?) parts of them? Layouts, such as for virtual buttons? I don't worry much about the 'viral' aspects of the GPL for code, but for applied art, if it actually covers it at all, 'viral' effects look to be pretty likely. I'm now hoping no lawyer gets this idea.
While there are 'big flood' legends in many cultures, they are not really ubiquitous. There are many inter-related legends whose origins have been traced to the fertile crescent civilzations, and another big cluster of them that centers around a band running between Indonesia and southern China.
In other places, big flood legends are rare, or don't play a major part in the culture's religion and myth cycles. For example, there are few 'big flood' stories in the new world cultures, and they mostly involve minor mythical figures rather than the most major gods or heros. Northern Europe and Asia are also relatively light on such myths. For example, the Norse myths have the Midgard serpent living under the sea and causing occasional seacoast floods, but Ragnarok itself involves the Fimbul Winter instead of a big flood, and the creation myths involve a glacier and a cow among other less savory versions.
The classical Greeks are a flood legend oriented culture. Not only do they have the Atlantis myth via Plato, but there is the Hydra story in Hercules' 12 labors, where the Hydra is finally slain by pinning it with a big rock.(this turns out to be a myth explaining how a river with many constantly shifting mouths stops shifting when it meanders into a mass of hard stone that keeps it flowing in one channel, allowing a city to be founded. The Roman adaptation of this myth explains how the conditions needed for the founding of Rome were achieved and makes it very clear the Hydra legend is a flood story.)
The classical Greeks also had myths of a huge flood as the climactic part of the war between the Titans and the Greek gods, and their symbol for the primal chaos at the start of all things was an ever-turbulent sea shrouded in perpetual darkness. Their single oldest deity is thus a flood god. No wonder Plato's story found many listeners.
This varies with jurisdiction. Where the term "breaking and entering" is used, it can matter, but places where it all falls under the category of "burglary" sometimes define it so entering the home or business surreptitiously is treated just the same as via force. ;-)
This also makes the use of the parent poster's metaphor dubious at best
Great, an AC just responded to a challenge to clairify my post and actually did a good job. I'll never know who you were, masked rider, but my thanks to you and Tonto anyway! (Now where's my silver bullet?)
That's mostly verbs at the end.
Yeah, but the Germans to avoid getting confused when writing long, aglutinative sentences sometimes this rule break.
Try taking a hex editor that can examine your hard drive surface directly, and searching for common english 'four letter' words. Usually, you run across a few comment blocks that read "I forget what the **** this does, I was drunk when I coded it", and so on, and several screeds from crackers about how information wants to be free, except for their real address. For some reason, most of the Phrozen Krew types out there can't resist a little profanity in their comments.
Knoxville (and the more populated parts of 5 counties surrounding it) has Comcast for cable access, and BellSouth for ADSL to what they call business class DSL. There are those two, plus some additional small providers along the tech corridor running between Oak Ridge and Alcoa. The former rural areas and now tourist meccas of Sevierville, Gatlinburg, and Pidgeon Forge all have one or the other down the main roads, but maybe not very far off them.
50 miles away in the right direction, and high speed means you give the squirrel some meth after you tie the message to its neck. Wartburg/Morgan County or Oneida is probably lucky to get 24.4.
This isn't really about flaws in Darwin's own theory. Darwin's theory is more properly called Natural Selection. The core of modern Evolution is dual - it combines Darwin's theory and Gregor Mendel's work in genetics.
Some interpretations of Evolution go well outside of this dual core of two real theories, and either contradict some points of one, or just venture of into unscientific prediction and pseudo-science. In the past, this has led to the movements called "Social Darwinism" and "Eugenics" for examples. Right now, we seem to have allied movements such as the ones that refer to "Cosmic Evolution", "Stellar Evolution", and other such cases as falling under the same theory, and while they don't seem as mean spirited as those two, they are likely to be wrong in just the same ways. Unfortunately, even argueing over these extensions (and in favor of the core theories) has gotten some good working scientists dismissed as 'pro-creation-science nutjobs'.
One of the predictions Darwin made was that for natural Selection to work, unlimited blending (of the elements of heredity) could not be possible. Mendel's work was not known to Darwin (and vice versa), but Mendel's model for genes fit Darwin's prediction. When Crick and Watson won the Nobel for discovering that DNA carred the genetic code, it was in part because the genetic code they found confirmed Darwin's prediction - it was a code that didn't allow blending - Genes were either on or off.
(Upper level Biology students will tell you that it's not quite that simple, and some very limited cases of 'blending' occur, but Darwin was careful to specifiy that word 'unlimited' in his arguements and explain why, so it counts as a successful prediction).
A low error rate speeds up evolution (down to a certain minimum rate, at least) for several reasons. For the simplest one, a really high error rate means a new mutation frequently gets copied over by another new mutation before it passes through many generations, so the first mutation has less time to be tested. Less testing by the environment means subtly advantageous genes don't have time to benefit their 'host', only the ultra-rare big beneficial mutation. Evolution mostly proceeds by adding together many small improvments, and seldom from those 1 in a Trillion longshots.
Another reason is a really, really high error rate means species tend to just die out. Most mutations are negative, and there's no net advantage to being a leopard that gets a gene that makes your teeth a little sharper if you get 10 other mutations that cause early onset arthritus, increased chance of liver cancer, night-blindness, astigmatism, brittle hip joints, and vulnerability to common feline flu germs. Those sharp teeth still don't let you survive all that till reproductive age.
At rates somewhat below that, sexual species tend to die out selectively because too many potential pairs become incompatable and produce either no or sterile offspring, so a high error rate selects against sexual reproduction, and sexual reproduction itself speeds up evolution by giving a new advantageous gene more copies of different alternate genes to be tested with. If that advantageous gene gets paired up with some weak ones in one offspring, there is a good chance it will get paired with some others in another offspring and so have a better chance there to compete on its own merits. There are other arguemts along these lines, but they are either more complex or less testable and confirmable than these two. Anyway, a low error rate is again one of Darwin's own predictions, and is supposed to be pretty precisely calculatable and well confirmed by modern research (as it applies to DNA based life only). If we get seriously anomalous predictions applying a combination of it and other assumptions elsewhere, like looking at the evolution of the genetic codes themselves, I'd say some of those other assumptions are most probably where the error lies.
Actually, there is at least one puzzleing contradiction in current evolutionary theory, which is widely ignored by most proponents. It often falls under the rubric of necessary complexity, and so its few supporters are mostly lumped in with 'creation science', but it is a valid observational criticism.
Here's a short form, which I hope I am not simplifying too much:
1 One of the predictions of Darwin re. natural selection is that the mechanisms of heredity must have a sufficiently low copying error rate. Selection actually works faster if the error rate is lower (at least until it closely approaches zero), even though this is counter to lay expectations. (Gould and Dawkins would both agree with this point, and have written on it. This is one of the testable predictions Darwin made, and testable predictions are what makes Natural Selection a scientific theory).
2. Observational evidence strongly suggests that DNA is the last of a series of encoding schemes, and that its immediate predecessor was RNA, now used as a messenger rather than for data storage, and still used for reproductive data transfer in a few very primative organisms. Theory goes on to suggest that RNA is far from the first link in the chain, and that each mechanism of heredity preceeding it died out as a better one came along. (Again, Gould and Dawkins have both popularized this concept, and it's established text book teaching in College Biology).
3. By 1, the rate of selection getting from RNA to DNA must have been much faster than the rate of selection for the step before, and so on. Just as DNA makes less than 1/1,000th of the copying errors of RNA, so whatever came before RNA must be even sloppier, and so on, and so the rate of evolution under them must have been proceeding more and more slowly.
4. Geologists best estimate of the age of the Earth = 4.5 Billion years. Cosmologists now think the whole universe is 'only' 13.7 Billion years old (American Billions). DNA based life has been around for about 1 Billion years, as estimated by the fossil record's findings of stromatolote masses and such, but there's more margin of error in this last estimate than in either of the other two.
The Earth took about 200 million years to cool to the point the rocks were solid, DNA base life may have existed in forms that left no fossils for a time, etc, so the exact numbers may be off a little, but that's the general time frame we have to work with.
5. So DNA based life has been evolving for roughly a quarter of the age of the Earth. RNA based life, evolving thousands of times more slowly, must fit into that remaining 3 billion years, or less. Whatever came before RNA must also fit into what's left, even though it probably needed even more time than RNA to get anywhere, and so on. Since there are probably at least a dozen such steps to get back to the primative clay based crystaline replicators that we guess were the real first, and selection operated billions and billions of times more slowly in them, Evolutionary Biology now predicts that both the Geologists and the Physicists were just plain wrong, and the minimum age of the Earth is by the most charitable estimates several Octillions or Nonillions of years, or by some more average estimates, as much as 10E136 years.
The people who have discussed this are not generally respected in scientific circles. The criticism is often colored by appeals not to bring this up as it gives the 'creation science' types something they will distort into an arguement for the Universe being only 6,006 years old, and so on. Never-the-less, it's there. I'd point out that Darwin himself thought all he had done in articulating Natural Selection was to propose how speciation occurred, and not the origin of life itself - that's why he named his great work "The Origin of Species".
And when the people doing in theatre recording become individual nuclear powers, the industry will actually start listening to you.
(Still, video pirates with nuclear subs... Beans of Uber-Kewlness!).
It's not illegal to lose the shareholders money, just that they can be sued for ceertain mistakes that include criminal acts and cost the shareholder.
e nron/2873746
Here's URLs to stories on three of the biggest shareholder lawsuits of late. In every one, you'll see words like fraud and malfeesance, and specific allegations such as the management being sued 'failed to disclose information legally required by the SEC' (usually in quarters immediately prior to period covered by the suit), or sold off their own shares at the stock's peak, while hiding the fact from the board. That's what gets a company sued with even some chance of success, not doing something legal such as disclosing source code as part of involvement in an open source project.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/18941.html
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/8340.html
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/
Yes. Normally, some judges do get to become involved and so judicial branck does serve as a check. In principle, another check on this is, if the government announces a lot of ongoing investigations and then doesn't actually resolve them, the justice department looks like a bunch of incompetents and gets voted out. This takes reporters who ask the tough questions "You know that ongoing investigation you mentioned 6 months ago? How's that going lately, and how much has it cost the taxpayer so far?".
I doubt this is much of a check in the current climate. 1. the press seems to have a short memory for these things. 2. so does the public.
Identifying the treaty involved is likely to narrow the other state involved down to one. The MLATs are all theoretically seperate two party treaties, except one with the UK over the Cayman islands, which includes a lot of UK subsidiaries (see below, from the state department's own website).
"MLAT Treaties in Force:
I. The United States has bilateral Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties (MLAT) currently in force with: Anguilla*, Antigua/Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands*, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Dominica, Egypt, Estonia, Greece, Grenada, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Korea (South), Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Montserrat*, Morocco, Netherlands, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Romania, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad, Turkey, Turks and Caicos Islands*, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay.
*Treaty with the United Kingdom concerning the Cayman Islands relating to Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters. This MLAT was extended to Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands on Nov. 9, 1990, and to Montserrat on April 26, 1991."
http://travel.state.gov/law/mlat.html
What's interesting to me is the web site lists a lot of other treaties AND NON-TREATIES that function much like an MLAT, including some that normally only invoked for narcotics cases (but apparently don't all have to be limited that way), and some informal agreements involving SEC matters.
Forgive You? Certainly. Please forgive me for contributing to your anger.
We hope the contest obfuscation is all intentional. Personally, if I write obfuscated C it's mostly inadvertent, and if I write obfuscated C++ it's the PHB's fault.
As you point out, the fixed head assembly would be much easier to manage, and (as I gather you're implying) physically cheaper to construct. But the actuators that move the recording substrate are going to be harder to construct. I suspect that's proportional, hence my remark. I could be wrong, of course.
The latency issue you describe is likely to be quite serious. Consider, the area of the substrate you want to read doesn't just have to come around to a spot under a head, (which should in principle be a pretty small motion if it was only governed by head spacing). The whole string of data you want to read has to pass across one or more heads fast enough to generate a readable magnetic field. The size of the oscellations therefore has to be bigger than an individual sector to give extra room for the substrate to get up to readable speed on each pass, so smaller and more closely packed heads don't automatically mean speed improvements for this design.
No, it's not Flamebait. Carried as far as you have, it's hate speech. It's also proof that you personally should never have political power, as your overwhelming contempt for the vast majority of those people you would be 'serving' shows through in every line.
You do not understand my worldview. you understand a straw-man parody of my world view, and that is all you are interested in understanding. As someone who knows at least a few of the intelligent arguements for Atheism, and a former Agnostic, you are a fanatic who gives your own cause a bad name and is too foolish to know the damage you do. Not only do I have more respect for the cause you claim to ally yourself with than you have for me or my opinions, but I have more respect for it than you yourself do, and that's really sad.
Things changed a lot after Vietnam. Since about 1980, the National Guard has generally been expected to go overseas as needed. There aren't a lot of guardsmen who can honestly say they never expected to be deployed in an active duty war anymore. The Guard and Reserves have some real reasons to complain, but that's not one of them.
Many Guard and Reserve units are now being expected to stay in combat zones for more than a standard tour of duty, and others are being rotated out anomalously - rather than returning stateside afterwards, some units are going to Korea, which is basically rotating from combat to semi-combat. In Vietnam, a combat zone tour was 6 Months. A year in Iraq and another year in Korea on the DMZ is going to cause a lot more stress on some than even Vietnam. I urge everyone, for or against the war, to remember these people are volunteers, and that most of them are already accepting that they are called on to make a greater effort than the largely draftee army in the Vietnam era, but many are dissappointed that the public at large doesn't even know that's what's being asked. Urge your government both to find ways to rotate these people out on time, and to give them the help when they return that some of them will surely need.
The idea seems to be that a vibrating sheet could move, while a grid of read/write heads could stay in place, just so something moves to generate a changing magnetic field. While that's certainly true, a spinning disc could also have mutiple heads per arm, multiple arms per disc, and so on. Getting a closely packed array of read/write heads is an equal challenge in either case, and having the surface move continually in the same direction is much easier than having it oscillate.
This would affect what shapes a drive could be manufactured in, but that's unlikely to matter enough to make the idea catch on.
I don't see where you are going with the "In God We Trust" quote. If you're saying it should also be prohibited, fine, that's your opinion, but how it bears on my words your quoting is beyond me. Are you saying that it IS OK to have statues of pagan gods so long as there are only a few real worshippers, or that it's OK to have a coin depict the French revolutionary goddess of liberty, but not to invoke my particular God, or not? Did you even realize that the standing liberty image was religiously based, coming from a State Mandated Compulsory religion no less?
(The statue on Ellis island is not that liberty, by the way, but was originally concieved of as "Commerce Enlightening the World". Some depictions of Liberty on American coins come from that, some from the French Revolutionary institution.)
Personally, I'm tired of the government invoking what's possibly intended to be my God to hide the fact that there's nothing else propping up the money.
"What if Judge Moore was really Judge Achmed"
That shouldn't make any difference, and personally wouldn't.
"and he sat up there all bearded up with a big ol' Islamic symbol behind him?"
What islamic symbol do you have in mind? Islam doesn't use symbols much. If you mean Judge Achmed has a quote from the Koran displayed somewhere, what's the actual harm in that being displayed? Do you mean I should expect judge Achmed to decide the case by automatically chopping off my hand just because he respects islam?
Judge Moore crossed the line. He didn't do that by displaying the 10 commandments but by saying he regarded it as his duty to rule by (what he thought of as) Christian principles instead of the ones he swore an oath to uphold. Note that forswearing yourself violates one of the commandments he was displaying.
Guess what, there are lots of non-religious ways to be a hypocrite, and if you are ever in court you have a good chance of facing a judge who has found one of them. He won't be displaying a plaque either.