You're falling in to the same trap the fundies always do. Evolution is not the 'big bang' theory. Evolution doesn't give two shits about cosmic expansion, collapse, black holes or matter/energy interactions. It doesn't care where Earth came from, how long it had been there, or what color the sky was when the Flying Spaghetti Monster first set the amino acids rolling.
Evolution is about the trends of change among individual organisms. That's IT. There are other theories about all the other events, but they are off-topic.
*If* Intelligent Design proponents said that life evol- er, 'developed' over the billions of years that paleontology supports, then it's got possible validity. I'm not familiar enough with the ID theory since it's horsesh- er, 'scientifically untenable', but that's NOT the impression I got (it would make ID inseparably identical). The only aspect of ID I've heard is that they expect life to have developed pre-packaged and it simply popped into existence. Not RNA/DNA or bacterial level, fully-formed organisms, as they appear right now.
If a giant purple tentacle monster randomly appeared with no ancestors and previously biologically unheard-of abilities to read minds, transmute lead to gold, and reproduce through mail-order pregnancy, then ID theory will have its coup. Until then, there is NO basis for its ideas.
Meanwhile, evolution *can* be observed. Sure, it takes thousands of generations to occur, but we don't have to examine tortoises here. Not being much of a science buff anymore, I haven't heard of specific experiments being performed. Bacteria too simple to count? Fine. Yeast. Planaria. Fruit flies. Algae. There's plenty of eukaryotic single- and multi-cellular critters to perform tests on that can reproduce in less than a day. Just because it hasn't been set up in a lab doesn't mean it's guesswork, minor speciation changes like Darwin's finches are simple to observe, even if we're not watching right when the change actually happens.
And if I'm totally off-base and ID is only trying to explain the origin of the basic mechanics of life, then what's the fuss? Evolution has nothing to do with biogenesis. It's not even an alternative, it's a complementary process.
You don't seem to understand the terms you're using. You don't "download the files on P2P". Upload. And the person that downloads it is not "ripping". Download.
Lastly, the whole concept won't work because the **AA are not concerned with downloaders. Only the distributors are nailed because they're committing a worthwhile (assumed) number of infractions and they're directly responsible for the copies being made.
Read the FBI warning that comes up on the next DVD you stick in. It doesn't say it's illegal to watch, it says it's illegal to copy. Your brain does not constitute an unauthorized duplication, no matter how good your memory is.
Too much is being interpreted into this. All Whitacre is saying with this is, "Nyah, nyah, I'm still getting paid." You want to switch to VOIP? Great! Vonage is probably paying SBC a nice amount for their own facilities in town, so the telco scores on both ends, even if it's not for the same amount.
Expecting SBC to mess with traffic in any way is like thinking there's a secret plot by road construction workers to secretly build tollbooths. No.
The vast majority of e-mail flying around is spam. If it weren't for that, the ISP's infrastructure could handle a significantly smaller demand. Fewer servers running and under less power, AC, datacenter floorspace, etc.
How green is it to have a power bill measured in thousands of dollars per month?
My all-star moment was running v5 or so of Partition Magic on a drive that I was going to mirror, but needed to shrink the partition first. Got to about 2% completion on the resize and realized it was taking forever, then figured I wanted to do something else first before letting it sit for a few hours.
Cancel. Wait patiently. Barf.
Rather than halting nicely like I TOLD it to, PM decided it was going to write its logfile. Into the FAT. On top of all the valid filenames.
Luckily a friend had recently rifled through my hard drive and copied a lot of stuff, so 6 months later I got 90% of it back when I went to visit him.
As mentioned, the first application will probably be fast food; all the better. Give it a chance to get established and refine the processing. After a couple years of tweaking, s-meat could very easily be better than the old fashioned kind.
I wonder... If someone seeds one of these with human tissue, would cannibalism become the trendy new rebellious thing to do?
I think it's like the sodium-in-water "experiment". You know perfectly well what's going to happen, but it's still surprising to watch it in action.
That fact that it's trotted out as 'news' is disgusting. What'd be more interesting is a test to see what types of auto-infection hit fastest. So if you leave a system with a blank admin password, shared c:\ drive, a default win2k IIS install, an unpatched sql server, and no Blaster/Sasser prevention, what hits it first? How long does it take before you've got one of *each* exploit running, or is that possible before the system implodes?
Nothing so simple. Nvidia/ATI are generally right in pace with each other, never gaining an overall advantage. They do work a little differently, such as Nvidia chipsets performing better for Doom3, but ATI is better in HL2. Prices are about comparable too, sometimes one or the other is more expensive, it just requires some research whenever you're ready to buy. One preference that pushes me toward Nvidia a little is that they make it easier to get into the micro-management card settings to tune things, on ATI you get a few sliders but not always a specific on/off/quantity control for everything.
Hmm... that might actually work. Pain in the ass to construct, keymap and learn, but you never know. I think the biggest problem would be fitting in on a deskspace, but with both hands zipping along a keystring you might get decent speed once you learn where they are and have textured landmark keys to learn by. Maybe the letters in one row and a number/punctuation pad separate.
Guaranteed to be RSI-proof too, all that sideways motion doesn't leave time for your hands to fall into a harmful position.
But see, that's the same thing that everyone advocating Dvorak says, but never mention WHY it's definitively better. But what does it mean? Ok, so commonly-used keys are next to each other. So what? Oh, your fingers travel less distance when typing. Annnd...?
Maybe it's *bad* for your hands to type in Dvorak even if it's faster. Ease of use and proper posture are not the same thing. So maybe it's better for your hands to get the extra exercise QWERTY offers?
Correct. But that's not insignificant! Even if his body heat is the only additional input, think about the offset he's getting. The tubing coils on the back of the fan don't have much surface area, and they're not covering all possible intake directions (air coming into the fan around the sides rather than the back). This is not an efficient radiator, so most of the cooling potential is going directly out the window.
No, we're just doubting the claims that it actually cools the room. Sure, maybe when he's standing next to a bucket of ice water admiring his contraption it's slightly cooler, but if he steps away it'll be warmer. The fan is just silly and doesn't even add anything except pushing the cooled air back toward the warmer rooms.
Here's a better thought: He should forget the garbage can and the tubing. Point the fan directly at himself, and sit on the couch half-naked with his feet in a dishpan full of ice water. FAR more efficient.
He gave a thumbs down to "Blade Runner" and a thumbs up to "Weird Science."
Ugh... Good for him, I agree!
I can't stand the "hardcore sci-fi" stroke given to Blade Runner. It sucked. Maybe I'm just influenced by the supposedly inferior director's cut (the only version I found). Or maybe its problem is being the forebear of sci-fi and anime that reworked its themes with more focus. But I hated it. Heavy-handed symbolism, pathetically predictable twists, and a big dramatic dilemma that lost all its significance because I didn't even *care*.
Weird Science I caught on cable when I was 10. Not stellar, but it was watchable.
IP traces are flat-out impossible. Even ignoring NAT/VPN screwiness, and dynamic IP headaches, nothing short of a similar federal mandate will get ISPs to clean up IP registry info for their blocks. Throw in (sometimes foreign) companies using their own portable IP blocks and it's hopeless before you even hit the technical hurdles.
This ruling is bullshit, plain and simple, because it's expecting VOIP providers to do too much babysitting. Sure, they can update hardware/software to force users to enter address information each time they connect. 120 days? Rush job, but doable. The problem is that callers don't get stuck with any responsibility at all. If callers can't be expected to TELL the 911 dispatcher an address, what happens when someone rushes through their phone login and chooses the wrong connection info? I'd bet on the VOIP providers getting spanked for that one too.
The stationary gun in a limited range with nice safe boundaries may not be a safety concern.
But you'd be better off shooting dogs in their runs at an animal shelter, since any of the benefits that might be realized by going hunting are kind of wasted in a caged environment.
Unfortunately, from everything I've read, it *is* the only way. Moving them is impractical because it doesn't solve the problem. Birth control is far too difficult to get into the population without catching the same individuals over and over.
Personally, I love the guys and going out to semi-wilderness areas to hang out with them is a lot of fun. But I know that the only way to really do some good to them is to kill a tremendous number, and that's kind of tough to get around.
Little known addendum: most CD drives have them too. If you get to where the laser lens is held, it's usually wrapped in a coil and stabilized between two tiny magnets.
So far as I know, we haven't actually seen one species change into another, merely a species adapting to it's environment.
There you go, you've answered your own question. Evolution doesn't mean there's a sudden dramatic change. It also doesn't mean there has to be an A -> B -> C transition, unless there's some reason group A dies out, you end up with A and B AND C.
This is almost as common an argument among creationists as mixing origins of the universe and biogenesis in with something that's only a biological procession explaining increasing complexity over an insanely large number of generations.
The eye argument is pretty weak itself, as mentioned in the FA. What isn't mentioned is that Planaria have rudimentary eyes too, even if they can only detect light and not really 'see', so without having the fully complex eye there's still a starting point. Give that a couple trillion generations to try different combinations, and you'll get something that can see better, and may or may not be compatible with a basic flatworm.
Nope, I use Avant too, none of this crazy hotkey voodoo to get pages to display properly. Seems to run a bit slowly when it has to deal with a proxy but overall it's great.
So you have free like Moz, nice UI like Opera, and consistent page display like IE. And if for some godawful reason you *want* to turn on flash, activex, javascript, sounds, etc, all you have to do is flip a switch.
Easy. Misspell a high-profile website. The quickest route to finding some testbed spyware isn't to search for the latest warez sites (though that gets you more *thoroughly* infected), it's to oops, visit gooogle.com, or cnnn.com, or yaho.com, etc, etc. Because these domains exist purely to catch some unwitting sucker, they ALWAYS drop on some kind of search-assistant shit.
But you didn't inclue your contact info so they can send you more C&D letters for the bonfire! Sadly, it may be too late for any more fun at iDownload's expense until the current crop of threats is resolved. They've gotten so much MORE bad press out of all this they've just shot themselves in the foot with an ICBM... If they survive the landing, they'll still be sorry.
What might be more fun is to start listing out whose ads are shown, to chain their names to the debacle. Too bad I'm on a work system now, might be fun to get infected and see who's this desperate for product placement, and then start giving them more than they ever hoped for.
I don't think that was GP's point. The fact is, registrars don't give two shits about you, your business, or your domain name, they just don't want to be accused of making changes with no checks at all.
Not like there's any recourse if they DO screw you, but even back in InterNic days fake letterhead was the way to get transfers done.
Anyone that relies on these horrible old mechanisms for ownership control can get yanked this easily. Password or PGP protection is the only smart way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're falling in to the same trap the fundies always do.
Evolution is not the 'big bang' theory. Evolution doesn't give two shits about cosmic expansion, collapse, black holes or matter/energy interactions. It doesn't care where Earth came from, how long it had been there, or what color the sky was when the Flying Spaghetti Monster first set the amino acids rolling.
Evolution is about the trends of change among individual organisms. That's IT. There are other theories about all the other events, but they are off-topic.
*If* Intelligent Design proponents said that life evol- er, 'developed' over the billions of years that paleontology supports, then it's got possible validity. I'm not familiar enough with the ID theory since it's horsesh- er, 'scientifically untenable', but that's NOT the impression I got (it would make ID inseparably identical). The only aspect of ID I've heard is that they expect life to have developed pre-packaged and it simply popped into existence. Not RNA/DNA or bacterial level, fully-formed organisms, as they appear right now.
If a giant purple tentacle monster randomly appeared with no ancestors and previously biologically unheard-of abilities to read minds, transmute lead to gold, and reproduce through mail-order pregnancy, then ID theory will have its coup. Until then, there is NO basis for its ideas.
Meanwhile, evolution *can* be observed. Sure, it takes thousands of generations to occur, but we don't have to examine tortoises here. Not being much of a science buff anymore, I haven't heard of specific experiments being performed. Bacteria too simple to count? Fine. Yeast. Planaria. Fruit flies. Algae. There's plenty of eukaryotic single- and multi-cellular critters to perform tests on that can reproduce in less than a day. Just because it hasn't been set up in a lab doesn't mean it's guesswork, minor speciation changes like Darwin's finches are simple to observe, even if we're not watching right when the change actually happens.
And if I'm totally off-base and ID is only trying to explain the origin of the basic mechanics of life, then what's the fuss? Evolution has nothing to do with biogenesis. It's not even an alternative, it's a complementary process.
Aw, don't be silly. The award is for 'scientific acheivement'.
Not inventions. Duh.
You don't seem to understand the terms you're using. You don't "download the files on P2P". Upload. And the person that downloads it is not "ripping". Download.
Lastly, the whole concept won't work because the **AA are not concerned with downloaders. Only the distributors are nailed because they're committing a worthwhile (assumed) number of infractions and they're directly responsible for the copies being made.
Read the FBI warning that comes up on the next DVD you stick in. It doesn't say it's illegal to watch, it says it's illegal to copy. Your brain does not constitute an unauthorized duplication, no matter how good your memory is.
Too much is being interpreted into this. All Whitacre is saying with this is, "Nyah, nyah, I'm still getting paid." You want to switch to VOIP? Great! Vonage is probably paying SBC a nice amount for their own facilities in town, so the telco scores on both ends, even if it's not for the same amount.
Expecting SBC to mess with traffic in any way is like thinking there's a secret plot by road construction workers to secretly build tollbooths. No.
Think of it this way:
The vast majority of e-mail flying around is spam. If it weren't for that, the ISP's infrastructure could handle a significantly smaller demand. Fewer servers running and under less power, AC, datacenter floorspace, etc.
How green is it to have a power bill measured in thousands of dollars per month?
My all-star moment was running v5 or so of Partition Magic on a drive that I was going to mirror, but needed to shrink the partition first. Got to about 2% completion on the resize and realized it was taking forever, then figured I wanted to do something else first before letting it sit for a few hours.
Cancel. Wait patiently. Barf.
Rather than halting nicely like I TOLD it to, PM decided it was going to write its logfile. Into the FAT. On top of all the valid filenames.
Luckily a friend had recently rifled through my hard drive and copied a lot of stuff, so 6 months later I got 90% of it back when I went to visit him.
Heck, I wouldn't mind at all. Mean jokes about stroke victims aside, this basically *is* eating vegetables.
Weird non-cellulose, non-photosynthetic, high-maintenance ones.
As mentioned, the first application will probably be fast food; all the better. Give it a chance to get established and refine the processing. After a couple years of tweaking, s-meat could very easily be better than the old fashioned kind.
I wonder... If someone seeds one of these with human tissue, would cannibalism become the trendy new rebellious thing to do?
Pfft. Shows what science YOU know. Vacuums make plenty of noise! S'why cats are scared to death of them.
I think it's like the sodium-in-water "experiment". You know perfectly well what's going to happen, but it's still surprising to watch it in action.
That fact that it's trotted out as 'news' is disgusting. What'd be more interesting is a test to see what types of auto-infection hit fastest. So if you leave a system with a blank admin password, shared c:\ drive, a default win2k IIS install, an unpatched sql server, and no Blaster/Sasser prevention, what hits it first? How long does it take before you've got one of *each* exploit running, or is that possible before the system implodes?
Nothing so simple. Nvidia/ATI are generally right in pace with each other, never gaining an overall advantage. They do work a little differently, such as Nvidia chipsets performing better for Doom3, but ATI is better in HL2. Prices are about comparable too, sometimes one or the other is more expensive, it just requires some research whenever you're ready to buy.
One preference that pushes me toward Nvidia a little is that they make it easier to get into the micro-management card settings to tune things, on ATI you get a few sliders but not always a specific on/off/quantity control for everything.
Hmm... that might actually work. Pain in the ass to construct, keymap and learn, but you never know. I think the biggest problem would be fitting in on a deskspace, but with both hands zipping along a keystring you might get decent speed once you learn where they are and have textured landmark keys to learn by. Maybe the letters in one row and a number/punctuation pad separate.
Guaranteed to be RSI-proof too, all that sideways motion doesn't leave time for your hands to fall into a harmful position.
But see, that's the same thing that everyone advocating Dvorak says, but never mention WHY it's definitively better. But what does it mean? Ok, so commonly-used keys are next to each other. So what? Oh, your fingers travel less distance when typing. Annnd...?
Maybe it's *bad* for your hands to type in Dvorak even if it's faster. Ease of use and proper posture are not the same thing. So maybe it's better for your hands to get the extra exercise QWERTY offers?
Correct. But that's not insignificant! Even if his body heat is the only additional input, think about the offset he's getting. The tubing coils on the back of the fan don't have much surface area, and they're not covering all possible intake directions (air coming into the fan around the sides rather than the back). This is not an efficient radiator, so most of the cooling potential is going directly out the window.
No, we're just doubting the claims that it actually cools the room. Sure, maybe when he's standing next to a bucket of ice water admiring his contraption it's slightly cooler, but if he steps away it'll be warmer. The fan is just silly and doesn't even add anything except pushing the cooled air back toward the warmer rooms.
Here's a better thought: He should forget the garbage can and the tubing. Point the fan directly at himself, and sit on the couch half-naked with his feet in a dishpan full of ice water. FAR more efficient.
He gave a thumbs down to "Blade Runner" and a thumbs up to "Weird Science."
Ugh... Good for him, I agree!
I can't stand the "hardcore sci-fi" stroke given to Blade Runner. It sucked. Maybe I'm just influenced by the supposedly inferior director's cut (the only version I found). Or maybe its problem is being the forebear of sci-fi and anime that reworked its themes with more focus. But I hated it. Heavy-handed symbolism, pathetically predictable twists, and a big dramatic dilemma that lost all its significance because I didn't even *care*.
Weird Science I caught on cable when I was 10. Not stellar, but it was watchable.
IP traces are flat-out impossible. Even ignoring NAT/VPN screwiness, and dynamic IP headaches, nothing short of a similar federal mandate will get ISPs to clean up IP registry info for their blocks. Throw in (sometimes foreign) companies using their own portable IP blocks and it's hopeless before you even hit the technical hurdles.
This ruling is bullshit, plain and simple, because it's expecting VOIP providers to do too much babysitting. Sure, they can update hardware/software to force users to enter address information each time they connect. 120 days? Rush job, but doable. The problem is that callers don't get stuck with any responsibility at all. If callers can't be expected to TELL the 911 dispatcher an address, what happens when someone rushes through their phone login and chooses the wrong connection info? I'd bet on the VOIP providers getting spanked for that one too.
The stationary gun in a limited range with nice safe boundaries may not be a safety concern.
But you'd be better off shooting dogs in their runs at an animal shelter, since any of the benefits that might be realized by going hunting are kind of wasted in a caged environment.
Unfortunately, from everything I've read, it *is* the only way. Moving them is impractical because it doesn't solve the problem. Birth control is far too difficult to get into the population without catching the same individuals over and over.
Personally, I love the guys and going out to semi-wilderness areas to hang out with them is a lot of fun. But I know that the only way to really do some good to them is to kill a tremendous number, and that's kind of tough to get around.
Little known addendum: most CD drives have them too. If you get to where the laser lens is held, it's usually wrapped in a coil and stabilized between two tiny magnets.
Well, it's really simple, see?
So far as I know, we haven't actually seen one species change into another, merely a species adapting to it's environment.
There you go, you've answered your own question. Evolution doesn't mean there's a sudden dramatic change. It also doesn't mean there has to be an A -> B -> C transition, unless there's some reason group A dies out, you end up with A and B AND C.
This is almost as common an argument among creationists as mixing origins of the universe and biogenesis in with something that's only a biological procession explaining increasing complexity over an insanely large number of generations.
The eye argument is pretty weak itself, as mentioned in the FA. What isn't mentioned is that Planaria have rudimentary eyes too, even if they can only detect light and not really 'see', so without having the fully complex eye there's still a starting point. Give that a couple trillion generations to try different combinations, and you'll get something that can see better, and may or may not be compatible with a basic flatworm.
Nope, I use Avant too, none of this crazy hotkey voodoo to get pages to display properly. Seems to run a bit slowly when it has to deal with a proxy but overall it's great.
So you have free like Moz, nice UI like Opera, and consistent page display like IE. And if for some godawful reason you *want* to turn on flash, activex, javascript, sounds, etc, all you have to do is flip a switch.
Easy. Misspell a high-profile website. The quickest route to finding some testbed spyware isn't to search for the latest warez sites (though that gets you more *thoroughly* infected), it's to oops, visit gooogle.com, or cnnn.com, or yaho.com, etc, etc. Because these domains exist purely to catch some unwitting sucker, they ALWAYS drop on some kind of search-assistant shit.
But you didn't inclue your contact info so they can send you more C&D letters for the bonfire! Sadly, it may be too late for any more fun at iDownload's expense until the current crop of threats is resolved. They've gotten so much MORE bad press out of all this they've just shot themselves in the foot with an ICBM... If they survive the landing, they'll still be sorry.
What might be more fun is to start listing out whose ads are shown, to chain their names to the debacle. Too bad I'm on a work system now, might be fun to get infected and see who's this desperate for product placement, and then start giving them more than they ever hoped for.
I don't think that was GP's point. The fact is, registrars don't give two shits about you, your business, or your domain name, they just don't want to be accused of making changes with no checks at all.
Not like there's any recourse if they DO screw you, but even back in InterNic days fake letterhead was the way to get transfers done.
Anyone that relies on these horrible old mechanisms for ownership control can get yanked this easily. Password or PGP protection is the only smart way to do it.