The commander of the other Battlestar, the Pegasus, is Admiral Cain, who is played by Michelle Forbes. She's done a bunch of other TV roles; you can look them up in IMDB if you're interested. The one I remember her most for <showing_my_age>is the Bajoran Ensign Ro Laren in Star Trek: The Next Generation.</showing_my_age> I don't think she played "Number One" in B5--I remember that woman as being blonde.
Of course, in the original BSG, Admiral Cain was played by Lloyd Bridges.
You just don't get it:-) To most "Greens," people are the problem. Paul Erlich typifies that attitude when he says something like, "I don't know that the planet can support two billion people, especially if they live like Americans." What an evil person. So many "Greens" want almost all people to live on the farm, till their 40 acres with hand plows and MAYBE oxen, eat only what they personally grow or breed, and kill half their children through disease and starvation. Just so long as the "Greens" can continue to live in their marble towers and dictate to the "rest of us" what is acceptable and what is not. After all, that's the "natural" state of humans (c.f. Africa). Lousy POS.
Zero-g exists in orbit? Then what's holding the moon in orbit? A long invisible string? Oh, yeah, that little force called GRAVITY. I believe the term you are looking for is "weightlessness." That would be a more correct word, IMO.
BTW, the Earth's gravitational force 250 miles up is between 80% and 90% what it is on the surface. Then, there's the gravitational effect of the Moon, the Sun, and the other planets. That last one is pretty darn negligible so near the Earth, but not ZERO.
Of course, the only exoplanets we could have detected by this point would be massive planets with either very small orbits or highly eccentric orbits when they were at perihelion. I'm not sure of the percentage of star systems that have been searched have actually been found to have planets at all. If the percentage is low, then we can begin to conclude that planet formation with a massive planet is not very probable. If, on the other hand, the percentage is high, then we can begin to conclude that most planetary systems are not like our solar system. In either case, the ne factor looks like it will be pretty small.
Also, we have to realize that even though the Sun has been called an "average" star, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "median" star. There are not very many stars that are like the Sun, and stars that are much smaller than the Sun must have any habitable planets orbiting awefully close to them. That close orbit may cause other problems, such as having too much infrared light compared to the visible light, or having any terrestial planets have days that are too long, or some other conditions that are hostile to complex life. Stars that are much larger than the Sun will generally not last long enough to provide a stable energy source long enough for complex life to evolve.
My guess is that ne and especially fi are quite small. In our system, we have ne being 11% (maybe 22%). Just judging by the time fi applies to this planet (150,000 years versus 4.5 billion years) we're looking at about 1/30,000. The assumption that intelligence is inevitable just doesn't hold water with me, either, as life does not need intelligence to survive, e.g. bacteria and insects.
Also, because most of the stars in the galaxy are in the core, where the radiation effects are so much greater that the only likely life is extremophilic, the number of stars with habitable planets (ne) is probably quite a bit smaller than you suspect.
Finally, heavy elements, like oxygen, carbon, silicon, iron, etc., are not exactly common. As I'm sure you know, they are only formed in other stars, and the only way they get back out to interstellar space is through supernovae or maybe planetary nebulas.
Dream your Star Trek dreams. The greatest probability is that we are alone, in terms of intelligent life, in this galaxy.
No, it has not been "proven." The Theory of Gravity has not been "proven." The Theory of Relativity has not been "proven." No scientific theory is "proven." It has simply been verified with enough data to a point where most scientists are willing to lend temporary assent. If you want proof, do math, not science.
If we accept that we don't really know the nature of God, we can then no longer say certain qualities are good or evil. Good is that which God approves of and evil is that which God disapproves of. It's all arbitrary. Xtians can rationalize the Problem of Evil by saying He is not all loving, at least in the way we in modern industrialized societies would call "all loving."
Also, the vast majority of the societies that existed at the time the Bible was written were quite different from the industrialized societies of today. They were more collective and less individualistic. Anything that went against the society was severely punished, usually death or banishment, which would lead to death. To try to apply modern notions of human behavior, kindness, and love to those societies doesn't seem very reasonable to me.
The stuff about a worldwide flood, and having enough "kinds" on a boat to be able to produce the number of species we currently see today, seems more like one of the myths the ancient Greeks used to explain lightning, the seasons, and other natural phenomena.
Jack Chick is a fairly well-known fundie, who has been creating these pamphlets for at least a couple of decades now. They're usually about how doing things outside of his particular church / worldview will send you to Hell, the eternal torment variety, not the oblivion one. His lawyer(s) are pretty aggressive when it comes to defending his copyrights to these strips.
Well, to be completely anal about this (this is slashdot, after all), cells and hydrogen are not theories. Cell theory describes how various eucaryote (sp?) life forms function on this planet, and hydrogen is simply an element with an atomic number of 1. A theory in science is not a "wild-assed guess." It is an explanation for the mechanism behind some natural phenomenom, backed up by large enough body of evidence that allows most scientists to grant it temporary assent. Part of that assent implies that it provides predictions for other phenomena that are later verified.
An hypothesis may eventually become a theory, once enough evidence supporting that hypothesis has been accumulated, but theories never become laws. The law of gravity is the F=G*m1*m1*m2*m2/(d*d) equation that you see in first semester physics class. The theory of gravity describes why the law is they way it is.
So now I guess Aunt Tillie better know how to create a CD-R or CD-RW (assuming she even knew to read the manual). My guess is that a lot of people are going to be pretty pissed off when they get it home and doesn't work for any movies that come out after the player was manufactured.
You say the people who "got sloppy" got the problem correct right away. I think a better description would be they put in some tolerance for errors. I would assume you bothered to check your program against the maximum input (to check for time factors).
You also forgot to mention that the three or four team members get to SHARE one computer. So, it's not only important to be able to solve problems quickly, it's also about managing the limited resources at your disposal.
I am forced to support GPL software through taxes and tuition fees. I am forced to work in a draconian work environment (lots of overtime with little chance of redeeming my stock options) because of the GPL. So yes, I am bitter about it.
Well, I just checked the FSF's pages, and couldn't find any reference to how much, if any, tax money they get. Of course, that doesn't mean they don't get any, only that I couldn't find what, if anything, they say about it. They did say that most of their funds come from selling copies of things that everyone is free to copy. I also remember Richard Stallman (RMS) getting a MacArthur genius award, or something like that, which would provide quite a bit of money to use as he pleases. A wild-ass-guess on my part would be that he would put a significant part of it into the FSF.
I'm also not aware of any tuition fees that go to the FSF, or to Free Software, in general. Perhaps if you could provide me an actual example of a University requiring its students to provide their code (besides class projects) to the FSF, there might be an argument. Not much of an argument, as far as I'm concerned, but an argument.
As far as your work environment is concerned, I'm sorry that you don't appear to be happy about it, apparently because of the compensation, or lack thereof. I also get the sense that you would have a lot of your attitudes in common with Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, but I could be wrong. If the job is so unrewarding for you, why do you stay? My life got a LOT better when I decided that making gobs of money was just not a priority for me. Perhaps in your next job the fine print in the contract will be something more to your liking. Good Luck in finding happiness!:-)
Sure--if you distribute or sell the binaries, you have to release all the source, for no more than the cost of transmission. As far as I know, that is the primary point of the GNU GPL. I don't think you'll have much luck putting the FSF out of business, because as a 501(c) organization, there may be tax benefits to helping them out. Chances are, you don't have that designation. Also, for those of us (not all geeks, by the way) who agree with the aims of the FSF for non-financial reasons, we will gladly give them money or equipment or programming time each year, even if we don't get any new software in return. It's kind of like donating to a political movement, or a church, or a charity, and in some cases that can have rewards not measured in dollar signs.
As long as no one is FORCED to support GPL software, either through taxes or a draconian work environment (if you want to keep your non-FSF-related job you have to donate your work to the FSF), I really don't see the problem anyone would have.
Apparently, we have another instance of not knowing the difference between Free Software and proprietary software. There's nothing in the GNU GPL preventing anyone from charging as much as they want for software. I know the FSF charges money for its distributions.
If you want to sell (or give away) your program executables, but don't want to release your "trade secrets/intellectual property," don't use GNU GPL code. I don't or know of anyone that forces anyone else to use GNU GPL code on things they intend to distribute.
Slashdot Mirror
The commander of the other Battlestar, the Pegasus, is Admiral Cain, who is played by Michelle Forbes. She's done a bunch of other TV roles; you can look them up in IMDB if you're interested. The one I remember her most for <showing_my_age>is the Bajoran Ensign Ro Laren in Star Trek: The Next Generation.</showing_my_age> I don't think she played "Number One" in B5--I remember that woman as being blonde.
Of course, in the original BSG, Admiral Cain was played by Lloyd Bridges.
You just don't get it :-) To most "Greens," people are the problem. Paul Erlich typifies that attitude when he says something like, "I don't know that the planet can support two billion people, especially if they live like Americans." What an evil person. So many "Greens" want almost all people to live on the farm, till their 40 acres with hand plows and MAYBE oxen, eat only what they personally grow or breed, and kill half their children through disease and starvation. Just so long as the "Greens" can continue to live in their marble towers and dictate to the "rest of us" what is acceptable and what is not. After all, that's the "natural" state of humans (c.f. Africa). Lousy POS.
Zero-g exists in orbit? Then what's holding the moon in orbit? A long invisible string? Oh, yeah, that little force called GRAVITY. I believe the term you are looking for is "weightlessness." That would be a more correct word, IMO.
BTW, the Earth's gravitational force 250 miles up is between 80% and 90% what it is on the surface. Then, there's the gravitational effect of the Moon, the Sun, and the other planets. That last one is pretty darn negligible so near the Earth, but not ZERO.
Of course, the only exoplanets we could have detected by this point would be massive planets with either very small orbits or highly eccentric orbits when they were at perihelion. I'm not sure of the percentage of star systems that have been searched have actually been found to have planets at all. If the percentage is low, then we can begin to conclude that planet formation with a massive planet is not very probable. If, on the other hand, the percentage is high, then we can begin to conclude that most planetary systems are not like our solar system. In either case, the ne factor looks like it will be pretty small.
Also, we have to realize that even though the Sun has been called an "average" star, it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a "median" star. There are not very many stars that are like the Sun, and stars that are much smaller than the Sun must have any habitable planets orbiting awefully close to them. That close orbit may cause other problems, such as having too much infrared light compared to the visible light, or having any terrestial planets have days that are too long, or some other conditions that are hostile to complex life. Stars that are much larger than the Sun will generally not last long enough to provide a stable energy source long enough for complex life to evolve.
My guess is that ne and especially fi are quite small. In our system, we have ne being 11% (maybe 22%). Just judging by the time fi applies to this planet (150,000 years versus 4.5 billion years) we're looking at about 1/30,000. The assumption that intelligence is inevitable just doesn't hold water with me, either, as life does not need intelligence to survive, e.g. bacteria and insects.
Also, because most of the stars in the galaxy are in the core, where the radiation effects are so much greater that the only likely life is extremophilic, the number of stars with habitable planets (ne) is probably quite a bit smaller than you suspect.
Finally, heavy elements, like oxygen, carbon, silicon, iron, etc., are not exactly common. As I'm sure you know, they are only formed in other stars, and the only way they get back out to interstellar space is through supernovae or maybe planetary nebulas.
Dream your Star Trek dreams. The greatest probability is that we are alone, in terms of intelligent life, in this galaxy.
And I run commented 6502 listings when chasing after my target.
Actually, evolution has been poven...
:-)
No, it has not been "proven." The Theory of Gravity has not been "proven." The Theory of Relativity has not been "proven." No scientific theory is "proven." It has simply been verified with enough data to a point where most scientists are willing to lend temporary assent. If you want proof, do math, not science.
Evolution is true. It happens. It's a fact....
At least you got that part right.
Shawn S.
If we accept that we don't really know the nature of God, we can then no longer say certain qualities are good or evil. Good is that which God approves of and evil is that which God disapproves of. It's all arbitrary. Xtians can rationalize the Problem of Evil by saying He is not all loving, at least in the way we in modern industrialized societies would call "all loving."
Also, the vast majority of the societies that existed at the time the Bible was written were quite different from the industrialized societies of today. They were more collective and less individualistic. Anything that went against the society was severely punished, usually death or banishment, which would lead to death. To try to apply modern notions of human behavior, kindness, and love to those societies doesn't seem very reasonable to me.
The stuff about a worldwide flood, and having enough "kinds" on a boat to be able to produce the number of species we currently see today, seems more like one of the myths the ancient Greeks used to explain lightning, the seasons, and other natural phenomena.
Shawn S.
Jack Chick is a fairly well-known fundie, who has been creating these pamphlets for at least a couple of decades now. They're usually about how doing things outside of his particular church / worldview will send you to Hell, the eternal torment variety, not the oblivion one. His lawyer(s) are pretty aggressive when it comes to defending his copyrights to these strips.
Ooooopss....that law of gravity should be
F=G*m1*m2/(d*d).
My bad.
Well, to be completely anal about this (this is slashdot, after all), cells and hydrogen are not theories. Cell theory describes how various eucaryote (sp?) life forms function on this planet, and hydrogen is simply an element with an atomic number of 1. A theory in science is not a "wild-assed guess." It is an explanation for the mechanism behind some natural phenomenom, backed up by large enough body of evidence that allows most scientists to grant it temporary assent. Part of that assent implies that it provides predictions for other phenomena that are later verified.
An hypothesis may eventually become a theory, once enough evidence supporting that hypothesis has been accumulated, but theories never become laws. The law of gravity is the F=G*m1*m1*m2*m2/(d*d) equation that you see in first semester physics class. The theory of gravity describes why the law is they way it is.
So now I guess Aunt Tillie better know how to create a CD-R or CD-RW (assuming she even knew to read the manual). My guess is that a lot of people are going to be pretty pissed off when they get it home and doesn't work for any movies that come out after the player was manufactured.
Oh, and Gogl didn't RTFA.
You say the people who "got sloppy" got the problem correct right away. I think a better description would be they put in some tolerance for errors. I would assume you bothered to check your program against the maximum input (to check for time factors).
You also forgot to mention that the three or four team members get to SHARE one computer. So, it's not only important to be able to solve problems quickly, it's also about managing the limited resources at your disposal.
I am forced to support GPL software through taxes and tuition fees. I am forced to work in a draconian work environment (lots of overtime with little chance of redeeming my stock options) because of the GPL. So yes, I am bitter about it.
Well, I just checked the FSF's pages, and couldn't find any reference to how much, if any, tax money they get. Of course, that doesn't mean they don't get any, only that I couldn't find what, if anything, they say about it. They did say that most of their funds come from selling copies of things that everyone is free to copy. I also remember Richard Stallman (RMS) getting a MacArthur genius award, or something like that, which would provide quite a bit of money to use as he pleases. A wild-ass-guess on my part would be that he would put a significant part of it into the FSF.
I'm also not aware of any tuition fees that go to the FSF, or to Free Software, in general. Perhaps if you could provide me an actual example of a University requiring its students to provide their code (besides class projects) to the FSF, there might be an argument. Not much of an argument, as far as I'm concerned, but an argument.
As far as your work environment is concerned, I'm sorry that you don't appear to be happy about it, apparently because of the compensation, or lack thereof. I also get the sense that you would have a lot of your attitudes in common with Darl McBride, CEO of SCO, but I could be wrong. If the job is so unrewarding for you, why do you stay? My life got a LOT better when I decided that making gobs of money was just not a priority for me. Perhaps in your next job the fine print in the contract will be something more to your liking. Good Luck in finding happiness! :-)
Sure--if you distribute or sell the binaries, you have to release all the source, for no more than the cost of transmission. As far as I know, that is the primary point of the GNU GPL. I don't think you'll have much luck putting the FSF out of business, because as a 501(c) organization, there may be tax benefits to helping them out. Chances are, you don't have that designation. Also, for those of us (not all geeks, by the way) who agree with the aims of the FSF for non-financial reasons, we will gladly give them money or equipment or programming time each year, even if we don't get any new software in return. It's kind of like donating to a political movement, or a church, or a charity, and in some cases that can have rewards not measured in dollar signs.
As long as no one is FORCED to support GPL software, either through taxes or a draconian work environment (if you want to keep your non-FSF-related job you have to donate your work to the FSF), I really don't see the problem anyone would have.
Apparently, we have another instance of not knowing the difference between Free Software and proprietary software. There's nothing in the GNU GPL preventing anyone from charging as much as they want for software. I know the FSF charges money for its distributions.
If you want to sell (or give away) your program executables, but don't want to release your "trade secrets/intellectual property," don't use GNU GPL code. I don't or know of anyone that forces anyone else to use GNU GPL code on things they intend to distribute.
---- it's == it is && its == it owns