My academic exposure to "special creation" versus "darwinism" goes back to the early sixties. The most significant aspect of my experience was that I never saw anyone persuaded one way or the other by discussion of either in a classroom -- and back in those days, it was perfectly acceptable to discuss God in a science class.
People who believed in special creation stuck with it and people who believed otherwise stuck with it regardless of the evidence or arguments presented by the other side. Why would anyone on either side have the least fear of having the other side presented?
If you truly believe (as I do) that the observable universe came into existence some 13 to 15 billion years ago and, as a consequence, the earth came into existence roughly 4.5 BYA followed by the natural evolution of life you should also be confident enough to listen to the contrary without fear that it will, in any way, corrupt or overtake the "truth."
By the way: I also happen to believe that God initiated the whole thing and got it exactly right the first time, thereby needing no subsequent tweeking or fiddling to move things along. And if I hadn't told you that, you would have no way of distinguishing me from an orthodox, secular, believer in science.
Completely untrue. There was no ban or "block" on clinical trials of any stem cell therapies. In fact dozens of stem cell therapies became available during the Bush years.
Name the therapy that was held up until "now." Of course you can't because it doesn't exist. The clinical trial that was announced in February (of this year) was for a therapy that had been developed over the previous six years using private money.
As the FDA emphasized in the announcement, clinical trials were approved as soon as the researchers demonstrated that they were ready to begin.
George Bush did not impose a ban on stem cell research (of any kind) in the United States. There has never been a ban on stem cell research -- including hESC research in the United States.
In 1998 -- three years before Bush took office -- the Clinton administration prohibited federal funding of hESC research citing the Dickey Amendment as the reason.
In 2001 President Bush lifted the absolute ban on federal funding and implemented a set of rules for the money could be spent, including restrictions on how the stem cells could be obtained.
Please, just stick to the facts on this contentious issue and perhaps we might get to the truth.
I pissed away my teens and early 20s (left school at 16 without finishing 10th grade) and got a job in computer operations in my mid 20s, after trying my hand in the music and photo industries. It was easy then (1975) because so few people were trained or had any aptitude for it.
My employer eventually insisted that I get a high school equivalency and take some programming courses at a community college. I excelled at that and moved on to programming. By 1980 the big money was in COBOL -- yes, COBOL -- programming so I got a diploma from a trade school and moved up to the big bucks.
Over the years I learned IBM PC operations and programming, SQL (bet you didn't think there were SQL programmers in the mid 1980s) online programming (CICS), SGML (Standard Graphic Markup Language) and some networking.
By 1990 I was the "old man" on the floor so nobody trusted me with the cutting edge CASE tool code generators. Eventually I got stuck learning HTML and TCP/IP which none of the hotshots around me wanted to be bothered with.
So there I was, over 40 and useful for nothing more than tinkering with that new internet/world wide web stuff that wasn't going to last while all the young studs around me got to work with the future: Lotus Notes and FoxPro.
You don't want to read the story of my life so I'll cut to the chase. I just turned 58. Late last year I enrolled in a bachelor's degree program. Since I have accumulated some college credit over the years it won't take me forever to graduate. I should have a bachelor's degree by the time I'm ready for early retirement in 2013.
I'm hoping the sheepskin will give my career one last boost to keep me going for another eight or 10 years after that but, really, I did it for myself, not my boss. BTW, I'm just about to take my PMP certification exam. I found that training to be the most useful of my career, despite the fact that I've been a project manager for 20 years.
The first computer I ever worked on (as a data entry operator in the mid '70s) was an IBM S/360 mainframe with 64KB of "main" (physical) memory.
The first computer that I was a primary operator on, a S/360-135 plug-compatible 2Pi, had 768KB when it was delivered and was eventually bumped to 1.25MB shortly before I moved on to programming.
The computer upon which I wrote my first professional (COBOL) program was an IBM 3033 with a (for then) eye-popping 4MB of physical memory.
The first computer I ever owned was an RCA COSMAC with 4KB of memory.
The first DIY computer I ever assembled completely from parts (about 15 years ago) had 4MB of interleaved DRAM and a 256KB SRAM cache and was considered somewhat amazing by everyone who saw how fast it ran OS/2. I eventually boosted it up to 16MB
Now you get 8MB of on die cache with your four cores... And I still can't get a decent flying car.
Who knew there were plants that could withstand 10,000 degrees, let alone vaporize material! Do these plants grow in ordinary soil or are they limited to highly specialized environments? I'm guessing you wouldn't want to keep one in a pot around the house. You'd never know when the furniture would just go missing!
Left up to the parents to decide appropriate punishment? In what liberal democracy is defamation considered a family issue?
As others have noted: That girl should consider herself lucky that the principal was willing to handle this in the way it was handled. If I were in that principal's place, I would have seen to it that the girl felt the full weight of civil law and carried the stigma of her action for the rest of her life.
BTW, if Roe v Wade is ever overturned (as it should be) the outcome will have little actual impact on abortion. Abortion in the U.S. was legal before Roe v Wade and it will remain legal after Roe v Wade. All that will happen is that you will have 50 states and DC legislating the narrow legal protection of "compelling interest" into practice.
Almost 25 years ago I was working as a programmer/analyst at Aetna Life & Casualty in Hartford CT. The company brought in Gates and Jobs for a one day seminar/meet-and-greet to help decide how seriously we should take the personal/desktop computer revolution. AL&C was at the time, of course, heavily into mainframe computing and barely looking at workgroup computing (System/38) let along personal computing.
The two gentlemen were cordial, but not particularly friendly toward each other and clearly had different visions of the future of corporate computing. Now here's the punchline: The big debate between the two was over the viability of COBOL. Jobs passionately prevailed on AL&C to drop the use of COBOL altogether (money quote: "Aetna is just about the only place left in the world that still uses COBOL, everyone else has migrated to C") while Gates was just as passionately (albeit not as charismatically) espousing the virtue of moving COBOL off of mainframes and on to the desktop.
Not a word from either of them about GUI or operating systems. Jobs was all about "new programming paradigms" and Gates was all about "the craft of programming" and how the broad range of Microsoft programming languages on PCs would accomodate that model. Gates was even promoting the idea that each programmer would have a wide range of programming languages at hand, using each one as appropriate for the task at hand like tools on a workbench. Of course, at the time, Microsoft's bread and butter was programming languages.
The number one cause of interceptor failure in past tests has been the Range Safety Officer scrubbing the test because some condition was outside of nominal range. Don't take my word for it: Look it up.
Hitting a ballistic missile with a guided missile is old news. Integrating a continental scope system and testing it with an infintesimal risk of damage outside of the test range is a challenge.
Stem cell research began in 1998 with the successful propogation of the first lines. That meant that Bill Clinton could have funded research in FY1999, FY2000 and FY2001. George Bush's first budget was FY2002 which commenced on October 1, 2001 and ended September 30, 2002.
Have to agree: USB no problem in Linux. If you're using KDE anyway, try using the desktop Hard Disk device. Handles my Sandisk Titanium very smoothly. The only time it takes a while to unmount is when I've moved alot of stuff to the device and it has to commit those changes.
Gis said: "basic infrastructure!.. yes, a 100 missiles that dont work is always better than 1 or 2 that dont work."
Missiles are ordinance, not infrastructure. Prehaps you should throttle your condescention until you can get your terminology straight.
Gis said: "Looks like an american has ignored basic ingenuity."
First of all, your typical ICBM has an impact velocity of only around mach 10 or 3.4KPS... lots of room for improvement there without getting tricky."
ICBMs don't "impact" they air-burst. Again, you need to get your basic facts straight.
Gis said: "And, didn't it occur to you that one way or another the missle or even the individual warheads could be boosted on their descent phase? Do you somehow think that the force of G is the only force that can be applied?... if i can think of that simple solution off the top of my head then I'm sure the real edumacated types have a lot more ideas."
It would certainly be possible to accelerate the vehicle in the descent phase and even the terminal phase, but their are compelling reasons not to. First, motor and fuel would add substantial mass to the re-entry vehicle, which would have a substantial affect on the size and mass of the booster, launcher and the fly-off profile. Second, it wouldn't actually help much since it is unlikely that the warhead could be accelerated enough to make a difference, given constraints of weight and burn-time. Third, a burning rocket motor would kinda give away the location of the warhead; wouldn't it?
Gis said: "Why do you think the USA is working on scramjet propulsion for their next generation of cruise missles?"
Actually, the first military use of the scramjet is planned for near-space, hypersonic reconnassaince aircraft to replace the current generation of low earth-orbit sattellites. The next generation of cruise missiles, which is already in the trial and pre-production stage, are primarily distinguished by stealth, greater range and greater accuracy. Their are plans for so-called "super-cruise" missiles which will travel at supersonic speeds, but the goal of that enhancement is to reduce flight time, not to increase impact velocity. So-called "bunker busting" ordinance is in development (and deployment of early designs) but that doesn't require hypersonic velocity -- again, it's just physics.
Gis said: "... faster impact velocities attained with a smaller weapon that don't have to carry a big tank of oxidizer, that can fly under any ABM system anyone else may be building since they tore up the anti ABM treaty."
I just don't understand your obsession with "impact velocities." Is it baby seal clubbing season in Canada again? Why would anyone (other than the brain-dead USA) do something as stupid as build an ABM system which, you insist, couldn't possibly work? In addition to being fact challenged, I think you have a bit of a problem with consistency as well.
The rest your post is plain old America-bashing, which simply doesn't warrant a response.
Quick, Gis, grab your club! Somewhere in Canada a baby seal is getting away!
The system currently being tested is a re-entry phase interceptor, not a boost-phase interceptor.
The Air Force is looking at airborne chemical lasers for boost-phase interception.
The APS study explicitly states: "The Airborne Laser currently in development has the potential to intercept liquid-propellant ICBMs..." and notes that none of the boost phase proposals are more than "possible element[s] of a National Missile Defense system."
I can't find any record of a boost-phase, ballistic interceptor, anti-ICBM program. Can you point to a program or project that is attempting this? Are you confusing the joint U.S./Israel Arrow system with an anti-ICBM system? The Arrow system is strictly for short to medium range interception.
phalse phace said "I don't see how this system will ever work unless our attacker warns us in advance of the missile's launch time, its location, flight trajectory,....etc. What a waste of taxpayer money. People should be outraged."
Why would it be impossible? It's just physics. There were three "insurmountable" problems in the 1960s when work began on missile defense: 1) Resolving power of RADAR; 2) Computation power of tracking equipment; and 3) Dynamic control of interceptor vehicles.
The RADAR problem was solved in the late 1970s with the introduction of pulsed F-band, phased-array and other advances. Current RADAR systems are more than adequate to the task and can even distinguish some decoys from actual warheads.
The dynamic control problem was solved in the late 1980s with pulse thrusters that have been repeatedly demonstrated successfully.
The last issue was computational power. Well, we all know what's happened on that front in the last decade or so.
In the first Gulf war, Patriot missile systems had a "hit-rate" of about 40% and a "kill-rate" of about 20% against ballistic missile targets. In 2003, upgraded Patriots had a "hit-rate" of virtually 100% and a "kill-rate" of over 90%. The biggest problem with the system was that it was failing to distinguish friend from foe properly and was shooting down everything that came into range. That proved to be a software problem that was fixed relatively quickly without otherwise compromising the performance of the system.
Defense against ballistic and high-speed guided threats is not all that difficult. Even Canadian warships have demonstrated the ability to shoot down high speed drone targets. Vulcan guns mounted on U.S. and allied surface combatants have been demonstrated to be very effective even countering 5inch (125mm) shells traveling at Mach 2.
All we're talking about now is scaling up and integrating existing technology. It's almost irrational to suggest that such a system could not be effective against threats from North Korea, India, China or even France within a few years.
Obviously, Russia is a differant matter because of sheer scale, but the system was never envisioned to thwart a full-scale preemptive strike from Russia or its predecessor (USSR).
Slashdot Mirror
Smells like MS is laying the foundation for a whole new tangle of patents.
Short answer: No. To expand on that: No, being loyal does not pay as a developer.
I'm 60 years old and... what was the question again? Damn! I'm pretty sure I had a great reply.
Maybe they can call the cloud piece OS CCCLXX.
This is why I am so against time travel.
My academic exposure to "special creation" versus "darwinism" goes back to the early sixties. The most significant aspect of my experience was that I never saw anyone persuaded one way or the other by discussion of either in a classroom -- and back in those days, it was perfectly acceptable to discuss God in a science class. People who believed in special creation stuck with it and people who believed otherwise stuck with it regardless of the evidence or arguments presented by the other side. Why would anyone on either side have the least fear of having the other side presented? If you truly believe (as I do) that the observable universe came into existence some 13 to 15 billion years ago and, as a consequence, the earth came into existence roughly 4.5 BYA followed by the natural evolution of life you should also be confident enough to listen to the contrary without fear that it will, in any way, corrupt or overtake the "truth." By the way: I also happen to believe that God initiated the whole thing and got it exactly right the first time, thereby needing no subsequent tweeking or fiddling to move things along. And if I hadn't told you that, you would have no way of distinguishing me from an orthodox, secular, believer in science.
Completely untrue. There was no ban or "block" on clinical trials of any stem cell therapies. In fact dozens of stem cell therapies became available during the Bush years.
Name the therapy that was held up until "now." Of course you can't because it doesn't exist. The clinical trial that was announced in February (of this year) was for a therapy that had been developed over the previous six years using private money.
As the FDA emphasized in the announcement, clinical trials were approved as soon as the researchers demonstrated that they were ready to begin.
Can you provide one example of an institution that was banned from receiving federal funding for performing stem cell research?
George Bush did not impose a ban on stem cell research (of any kind) in the United States. There has never been a ban on stem cell research -- including hESC research in the United States.
In 1998 -- three years before Bush took office -- the Clinton administration prohibited federal funding of hESC research citing the Dickey Amendment as the reason.
In 2001 President Bush lifted the absolute ban on federal funding and implemented a set of rules for the money could be spent, including restrictions on how the stem cells could be obtained.
Please, just stick to the facts on this contentious issue and perhaps we might get to the truth.
I pissed away my teens and early 20s (left school at 16 without finishing 10th grade) and got a job in computer operations in my mid 20s, after trying my hand in the music and photo industries. It was easy then (1975) because so few people were trained or had any aptitude for it.
My employer eventually insisted that I get a high school equivalency and take some programming courses at a community college. I excelled at that and moved on to programming. By 1980 the big money was in COBOL -- yes, COBOL -- programming so I got a diploma from a trade school and moved up to the big bucks.
Over the years I learned IBM PC operations and programming, SQL (bet you didn't think there were SQL programmers in the mid 1980s) online programming (CICS), SGML (Standard Graphic Markup Language) and some networking.
By 1990 I was the "old man" on the floor so nobody trusted me with the cutting edge CASE tool code generators. Eventually I got stuck learning HTML and TCP/IP which none of the hotshots around me wanted to be bothered with.
So there I was, over 40 and useful for nothing more than tinkering with that new internet/world wide web stuff that wasn't going to last while all the young studs around me got to work with the future: Lotus Notes and FoxPro.
You don't want to read the story of my life so I'll cut to the chase. I just turned 58. Late last year I enrolled in a bachelor's degree program. Since I have accumulated some college credit over the years it won't take me forever to graduate. I should have a bachelor's degree by the time I'm ready for early retirement in 2013.
I'm hoping the sheepskin will give my career one last boost to keep me going for another eight or 10 years after that but, really, I did it for myself, not my boss. BTW, I'm just about to take my PMP certification exam. I found that training to be the most useful of my career, despite the fact that I've been a project manager for 20 years.
Turks don't follow the Bible so they are free to have temples as old as they want.
The first computer I ever worked on (as a data entry operator in the mid '70s) was an IBM S/360 mainframe with 64KB of "main" (physical) memory.
The first computer that I was a primary operator on, a S/360-135 plug-compatible 2Pi, had 768KB when it was delivered and was eventually bumped to 1.25MB shortly before I moved on to programming.
The computer upon which I wrote my first professional (COBOL) program was an IBM 3033 with a (for then) eye-popping 4MB of physical memory.
The first computer I ever owned was an RCA COSMAC with 4KB of memory.
The first DIY computer I ever assembled completely from parts (about 15 years ago) had 4MB of interleaved DRAM and a 256KB SRAM cache and was considered somewhat amazing by everyone who saw how fast it ran OS/2. I eventually boosted it up to 16MB
Now you get 8MB of on die cache with your four cores... And I still can't get a decent flying car.
Wow! And I thought Venus Fly-traps were amazing.
Who knew there were plants that could withstand 10,000 degrees, let alone vaporize material! Do these plants grow in ordinary soil or are they limited to highly specialized environments? I'm guessing you wouldn't want to keep one in a pot around the house. You'd never know when the furniture would just go missing!
Left up to the parents to decide appropriate punishment? In what liberal democracy is defamation considered a family issue?
As others have noted: That girl should consider herself lucky that the principal was willing to handle this in the way it was handled. If I were in that principal's place, I would have seen to it that the girl felt the full weight of civil law and carried the stigma of her action for the rest of her life.
BTW, if Roe v Wade is ever overturned (as it should be) the outcome will have little actual impact on abortion. Abortion in the U.S. was legal before Roe v Wade and it will remain legal after Roe v Wade. All that will happen is that you will have 50 states and DC legislating the narrow legal protection of "compelling interest" into practice.
The triple constraint is Time/Cost/Scope. Any one of them alone means little in formal project management.
like the Cliffs Notes for the PMBOK?
The bad news is: the PMBOK IS the Cliff Notes version of project management.Why is this article tagged "jews?" Is KDE4 now kosher?
Almost 25 years ago I was working as a programmer/analyst at Aetna Life & Casualty in Hartford CT. The company brought in Gates and Jobs for a one day seminar/meet-and-greet to help decide how seriously we should take the personal/desktop computer revolution. AL&C was at the time, of course, heavily into mainframe computing and barely looking at workgroup computing (System/38) let along personal computing.
The two gentlemen were cordial, but not particularly friendly toward each other and clearly had different visions of the future of corporate computing. Now here's the punchline: The big debate between the two was over the viability of COBOL. Jobs passionately prevailed on AL&C to drop the use of COBOL altogether (money quote: "Aetna is just about the only place left in the world that still uses COBOL, everyone else has migrated to C") while Gates was just as passionately (albeit not as charismatically) espousing the virtue of moving COBOL off of mainframes and on to the desktop.
Not a word from either of them about GUI or operating systems. Jobs was all about "new programming paradigms" and Gates was all about "the craft of programming" and how the broad range of Microsoft programming languages on PCs would accomodate that model. Gates was even promoting the idea that each programmer would have a wide range of programming languages at hand, using each one as appropriate for the task at hand like tools on a workbench. Of course, at the time, Microsoft's bread and butter was programming languages.
My, how times have changed!
The number one cause of interceptor failure in past tests has been the Range Safety Officer scrubbing the test because some condition was outside of nominal range. Don't take my word for it: Look it up.
Hitting a ballistic missile with a guided missile is old news. Integrating a continental scope system and testing it with an infintesimal risk of damage outside of the test range is a challenge.
I was so excited when I saw this, I almost dropped my bowl of Bachelor Chow.
Stem cell research began in 1998 with the successful propogation of the first lines. That meant that Bill Clinton could have funded research in FY1999, FY2000 and FY2001. George Bush's first budget was FY2002 which commenced on October 1, 2001 and ended September 30, 2002.
Have to agree: USB no problem in Linux. If you're using KDE anyway, try using the desktop Hard Disk device. Handles my Sandisk Titanium very smoothly. The only time it takes a while to unmount is when I've moved alot of stuff to the device and it has to commit those changes.
Gis said: "basic infrastructure! .. yes, a 100 missiles that dont work is always better than 1 or 2 that dont work."
... lots of room for improvement there without getting tricky."
... if i can think of that simple solution off the top of my head then I'm sure the real edumacated types have a lot more ideas."
Missiles are ordinance, not infrastructure. Prehaps you should throttle your condescention until you can get your terminology straight.
Gis said: "Looks like an american has ignored basic ingenuity."
First of all, your typical ICBM has an impact velocity of only around mach 10 or 3.4KPS
ICBMs don't "impact" they air-burst. Again, you need to get your basic facts straight.
Gis said: "And, didn't it occur to you that one way or another the missle or even the individual warheads could be boosted on their descent phase? Do you somehow think that the force of G is the only force that can be applied?
It would certainly be possible to accelerate the vehicle in the descent phase and even the terminal phase, but their are compelling reasons not to. First, motor and fuel would add substantial mass to the re-entry vehicle, which would have a substantial affect on the size and mass of the booster, launcher and the fly-off profile. Second, it wouldn't actually help much since it is unlikely that the warhead could be accelerated enough to make a difference, given constraints of weight and burn-time. Third, a burning rocket motor would kinda give away the location of the warhead; wouldn't it?
Gis said: "Why do you think the USA is working on scramjet propulsion for their next generation of cruise missles?"
Actually, the first military use of the scramjet is planned for near-space, hypersonic reconnassaince aircraft to replace the current generation of low earth-orbit sattellites. The next generation of cruise missiles, which is already in the trial and pre-production stage, are primarily distinguished by stealth, greater range and greater accuracy. Their are plans for so-called "super-cruise" missiles which will travel at supersonic speeds, but the goal of that enhancement is to reduce flight time, not to increase impact velocity. So-called "bunker busting" ordinance is in development (and deployment of early designs) but that doesn't require hypersonic velocity -- again, it's just physics.
Gis said: "... faster impact velocities attained with a smaller weapon that don't have to carry a big tank of oxidizer, that can fly under any ABM system anyone else may be building since they tore up the anti ABM treaty."
I just don't understand your obsession with "impact velocities." Is it baby seal clubbing season in Canada again? Why would anyone (other than the brain-dead USA) do something as stupid as build an ABM system which, you insist, couldn't possibly work? In addition to being fact challenged, I think you have a bit of a problem with consistency as well.
The rest your post is plain old America-bashing, which simply doesn't warrant a response.
Quick, Gis, grab your club! Somewhere in Canada a baby seal is getting away!
The system currently being tested is a re-entry phase interceptor, not a boost-phase interceptor.
The Air Force is looking at airborne chemical lasers for boost-phase interception.
The APS study explicitly states: "The Airborne Laser currently in development has the potential to intercept liquid-propellant ICBMs..." and notes that none of the boost phase proposals are more than "possible element[s] of a National Missile Defense system."
I can't find any record of a boost-phase, ballistic interceptor, anti-ICBM program. Can you point to a program or project that is attempting this? Are you confusing the joint U.S./Israel Arrow system with an anti-ICBM system? The Arrow system is strictly for short to medium range interception.
phalse phace said "I don't see how this system will ever work unless our attacker warns us in advance of the missile's launch time, its location, flight trajectory,....etc. What a waste of taxpayer money. People should be outraged."
Why would it be impossible? It's just physics. There were three "insurmountable" problems in the 1960s when work began on missile defense: 1) Resolving power of RADAR; 2) Computation power of tracking equipment; and 3) Dynamic control of interceptor vehicles.
The RADAR problem was solved in the late 1970s with the introduction of pulsed F-band, phased-array and other advances. Current RADAR systems are more than adequate to the task and can even distinguish some decoys from actual warheads.
The dynamic control problem was solved in the late 1980s with pulse thrusters that have been repeatedly demonstrated successfully.
The last issue was computational power. Well, we all know what's happened on that front in the last decade or so.
In the first Gulf war, Patriot missile systems had a "hit-rate" of about 40% and a "kill-rate" of about 20% against ballistic missile targets. In 2003, upgraded Patriots had a "hit-rate" of virtually 100% and a "kill-rate" of over 90%. The biggest problem with the system was that it was failing to distinguish friend from foe properly and was shooting down everything that came into range. That proved to be a software problem that was fixed relatively quickly without otherwise compromising the performance of the system.
Defense against ballistic and high-speed guided threats is not all that difficult. Even Canadian warships have demonstrated the ability to shoot down high speed drone targets. Vulcan guns mounted on U.S. and allied surface combatants have been demonstrated to be very effective even countering 5inch (125mm) shells traveling at Mach 2.
All we're talking about now is scaling up and integrating existing technology. It's almost irrational to suggest that such a system could not be effective against threats from North Korea, India, China or even France within a few years.
Obviously, Russia is a differant matter because of sheer scale, but the system was never envisioned to thwart a full-scale preemptive strike from Russia or its predecessor (USSR).