The problem is to determine whether any of these bodies did in fact carry life, and then to find out where life began if it did not originate on Earth.
This gives the impression that the author thinks the original rocks from Mars, some billions of years old, are still sitting around somewhere waiting to be examined. HELLO! They've long since weathered into clay, been pressed into shale, and been hung as blackboards and roof tiles - in the Cretaceous! And a time or two since then.
There's only one thing that could give a solid (though not irrefutable) indication that Earth life originated on Mars: we go to Mars and we find a number of varieties of life, only one or two of which biochemically match the major categories found on Earth. Articles like the Wired piece are a waste of bits. --
I guess that's why 250,000 lesbians are massing at the Canadian border, preparing to invade Michigan. And when they do, all the University students who have been brainwashed by subversive "liberals" in the faculty will unwittingly aid in the insurgency, and before you know it, women all over America will be wearing comfortable shoes. Horrors!
Maybe a horror for you, but you just described every foot-fetishists wet-dream. This is exactly WHY this agenda must be stopped, because if women in American start wearing something other than those "thin-soled, pointy-toed, high-heeled girl shoes" (thanks Grace, Cheryl and Connie) and the foot-fetishists pass out in orgasmic delight from watching them all change.... what's next?
(What do you bet this post would be blocked by the net filters?) --
The situtation in Holland, Michigan where the town may vote for censorship on the equipment they pay for, is totally supported under the constitution.
IANAL, but I believe the truth is the exact opposite. Government cannot pick and choose between the people who use taxpayer-funded facilities on the basis of their views. This is why religious clubs have to be allowed to use school facilities after-hours on the same basis as non-religious clubs, and the American NAZI Party has the right to use the streets of Skokie to peddle their odious point of view. Private parties can tell people to buzz off on the basis of their views, their looks or the way they part their hair, but government has no such right.
The taxpayers paid for the Holland library, and if someone wants to get a copy of the Kama Sutra by inter-library loan or look up a picture of a naked ass (aren't they all naked? since when do donkeys wear clothes?), government has no right to discriminate against their tastes. --
Some days I just can't resist a good non-sequitur.
True, genuine freedom of speech, as intended by the Fathers of our Nation, has nothing to do with spending tax dollars to distribute pornographic socialist/feminist propaganda.
But puritanical theocratic crypto-fascist nationalist propaganda is just fine with you, eh?
It also has nothing to do with public funding for organizations bent on destroying the religious underpinnings of our nation.
Our government specifically had them written out. "Congress shall make no law" is crystal clear.
These things are acts of war against the people of the United States, and it is certainly within the obligations of our government (as outlined in the Constitution) to defend against them.
Someone getting his jollies looking at a picture of which Mister AC does not approve is committing an act of war against the people of the United States! You heard it here first, folks! It's time to round up everyone who reads Playboy and stick them in POW camps!
We have met the enemy, and they is us. -- Pogo
These enemies are dedicated to collectivist forms of political and economic tyrrany....
Hmmm, where to begin with this? I think the definition will do:
Main Entry: tyranny Pronunciation: 'tir-&-nE Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural-nies Etymology: Middle English tyrannie, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin tyrannia, from Latin tyrannus tyrant Date: 14th century 1: oppressive power tyranny over the mind of man -- Thomas Jefferson>; especially: oppressive power exerted by government tyranny of a police state> 2 a: a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler; especially: one characteristic of an ancient Greek city-state b: the office, authority, and administration of a tyrant 3: a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force tyranny of the clock -- Dixon Wecter> 4: a tyrannical act
He can't get the definition right, he can't even spell the word right... I don't think I can beat that today! --
Microsoft's applications business doesn't want to build apps for competing operating systems, so Linux doesn't get any. That's not to say that most Linux users would want to run MS Office even if it were available, but at least the choice would be there.
There's another angle on this too. If the OS company was forced to open its API specs, the next version of WINE would be able to run the Windows-native Office. Either way, portability would be assured and the OS becomes less and less relevant.
Of course, Microsoft could just do what IBM did after they lost the fight to bundle the software with the mainframes: start charging a lot for the (non-OS) software. --
I think the difference is that geeks tend to be shy and/or introverted. They also tend to live in their heads quite a bit, or at the very least, prefer the company of someone with two brain cells to rub together. These traits limit the field of potential candidates by quite a bit.
Isn't that ever the truth! (If I wasn't so picky I'd probably still be attached, maybe married.) --
But there are no open-source censor-proxys are there? How can you demand politions use somthing that dosn't exsist?
Here are a few ideas off the top of my head:
The government could buy a censor-ware company or its product and open-source it.
The government could hold a competition, say with the American Library Association as the judging body, and award a prize for the best filter (which is then open-sourced).
The government could fund an open-source development effort.
There are a ton of issues around those things, though. Can you imagine what the ruckus would be if someone cracked the library computers and messed with people's smart cards? Better add Counterpane Systems to the list of judges. And the ACLU, and the American Psychological Association, and.... --
I wish someone would write "A Hackers Guide to Beating Substance Abuse." I could use that.
AA: It's not just for non-hackers anymore. (Unfortunately for you, most of the things which could replace your ethanol/nicotine that would make you feel as good also tend to make you skinnier. I'm thinking of activities like running that get your endorphins flowing.)
Seriously, it might also be alcohol that's driving your weight down. It tends to drive mine up, but I've got more of a German metabolism. --
(On the other hand, I could probably break you in half.;-)
One of the things that will drive your metabolism up is nicotine. Have you tried quitting the cigs for a while and seeing what it does to your weight? --
I noticed that you turned your attention to education after you left the top post at Fermilab. As I'm sure you're aware, American students consistently test near the bottom in math and science among industrialized countries and even nations like South Korea. Do you think that America can continue to be a leader in these fields if the schools (especially public schools) do so poorly in giving children the basis from which to go on to undertake the complex and difficult jobs?
On a related note, do you think that the influence of religion on science education is currently positive or negative?
Finally, do you think that our society can make intelligent judgements about such subjects as gentically engineered foods, pesticides, appropriate use of antibiotics, global warming and preserving the ozone layer if the voters do not have any grasp of the science behind the issues? --
If anything, the foremost question in our minds (when dealing with really big issues) should be one we have not yet answered. It may even be one that we have no idea how to answer... yet. It was looking for ways to find answers that built Fermilab.
If the foremost question in your mind is "What should I have for dinner" for more than a few minutes at a time, you're not even in the ballpark. --
The above might have rated an "Offtopic", but not "Flamebait". I think it should have been "Insightful". There is no reason for the visibility of a post to a particular person to be governed by the judgement of others, aside from the relatively few author-related options set in one's user preferences. There is every reason for a user to set the effective threshold for visibility on an author-by-author basis, both downward and upward.
(Posted at +2 to make a point.)
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The part you missed is: possessive pronouns are complete as-is. "His", "hers" and "its" have no apostrophes. Neither does "mine", for that matter.
I don't have an Oxford Unabridged handy, or I'd look up the origins of the current forms of the pronouns. Irregular forms are generally earlier than regular forms, so "mine" and "his" (arising from "me" and "him") probably precede "hers" and "its". --
I don't see anything in these cases to keep all the RF from leaking out. Forget Tempest, I just want to be able to use my radio and TV somewhere in the same house! --
(Posting at the risk of another self-righteous moderator kicking me down from my lowest-possible posting score of 1...)
There are only three people on the entire Internet who know the distinction between "it's" and "its."
Then all of them must have a half-dozen aliases on just one mailing list I'm on (and it is really jarring to go from reading that, where people actually care about clarity and precision, over to Slashdot where the predominant ethos is "The heck with making it easier to understand, I can't be bothered and I have to get in quicker or I won't get any karma points!"). Feh. --
It's hard to evaluate all the possibilities at this point, but take the silicon-encapsulated cells and the dendrite-thingy packaged DNA as examples. The cells in their Si hard cases can't multiply, so they're useless for spreading a plague. They'd just wash or brush off skin and be swept out of the eyes, nose and lungs along with dust. The DNA might have a better chance of getting somewhere, but it's bare; its chances of getting anywhere through the air without being damaged by oxygen appear small.
Even if either of them could be engineered to kill people, they would only hit those who got it directly; they could not create a plague. Not much of a terror weapon as these things go. --
Today's poor enjoy antibiotics and vaccines which are rather inexpensive commodity items. Sixty years ago antibiotics did not exist, and for some time after that they were quite expensive. They came down. Smallpox vaccine got so cheap the disease is now extinct in the wild, and polio is not far from the same fate.
The "gap" may "grow" in absolute terms as technology moves faster and faster, but in terms of years it will probably stay about the same. Today's hyper-expensive breakthrough is tomorrow's best standard of care, and in 20 years it is available in clinics in Africa. The march of progress tends to turn anything useful into a commodity. Don't worry too much about determining who gets what. People turn their efforts away from areas which are political footballs, and if you spend a lot of political capital hammering the outfits which bring these advances to market about their contributions to "social injustices" you will just have fewer advances to argue about. --
It's a lot less threatening when you pause to consider that these things have to be injected first. You could put them on the shrapnel of a fragmentation device, but what's the point? You don't increase the range or power significantly, and you make the area containing the fragments dangerous long after the explosion. It would be a lot less dangerous than depleted uranium, since the active ingredients are organic; you could get rid of them with plenty of UV, hydrogen peroxide or just plain grocery-store bleach. This means that it would not be very useful as a way to deny an enemy the use of an area either. These packaged bits of DNA just do not have significant weapons potential. --
Slashdot Mirror
There's only one thing that could give a solid (though not irrefutable) indication that Earth life originated on Mars: we go to Mars and we find a number of varieties of life, only one or two of which biochemically match the major categories found on Earth. Articles like the Wired piece are a waste of bits.
--
(What do you bet this post would be blocked by the net filters?)
--
The taxpayers paid for the Holland library, and if someone wants to get a copy of the Kama Sutra by inter-library loan or look up a picture of a naked ass (aren't they all naked? since when do donkeys wear clothes?), government has no right to discriminate against their tastes.
--
We have met the enemy, and they is us. -- Pogo
Hmmm, where to begin with this? I think the definition will do:Main Entry: tyranny : oppressive power tyranny over the mind of man -- Thomas Jefferson>; especially : oppressive power exerted by government tyranny of a police state> : a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler; especially : one characteristic of an ancient Greek city-state b : the office, authority, and administration of a tyrant : a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force tyranny of the clock -- Dixon Wecter> : a tyrannical act
Pronunciation: 'tir-&-nE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -nies
Etymology: Middle English tyrannie, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin tyrannia, from Latin tyrannus tyrant
Date: 14th century
1
2 a
3
4
He can't get the definition right, he can't even spell the word right... I don't think I can beat that today!
--
Of course, Microsoft could just do what IBM did after they lost the fight to bundle the software with the mainframes: start charging a lot for the (non-OS) software.
--
--
Or maybe twice. Don't wear it out.
--
(This is posted at plus-two to keep it from vanishing beneath your threshold anytime soon.)
--
- The government could buy a censor-ware company or its product and open-source it.
- The government could hold a competition, say with the American Library Association as the judging body, and award a prize for the best filter (which is then open-sourced).
- The government could fund an open-source development effort.
There are a ton of issues around those things, though. Can you imagine what the ruckus would be if someone cracked the library computers and messed with people's smart cards? Better add Counterpane Systems to the list of judges. And the ACLU, and the American Psychological Association, and....--
Now that is decent. Shows promise. If I had mod points I'd give it another "funny", or maybe an "under-rated".
--
Seriously, it might also be alcohol that's driving your weight down. It tends to drive mine up, but I've got more of a German metabolism.
--
One of the things that will drive your metabolism up is nicotine. Have you tried quitting the cigs for a while and seeing what it does to your weight?
--
I noticed that you turned your attention to education after you left the top post at Fermilab. As I'm sure you're aware, American students consistently test near the bottom in math and science among industrialized countries and even nations like South Korea. Do you think that America can continue to be a leader in these fields if the schools (especially public schools) do so poorly in giving children the basis from which to go on to undertake the complex and difficult jobs?
On a related note, do you think that the influence of religion on science education is currently positive or negative?
Finally, do you think that our society can make intelligent judgements about such subjects as gentically engineered foods, pesticides, appropriate use of antibiotics, global warming and preserving the ozone layer if the voters do not have any grasp of the science behind the issues?
--
If the foremost question in your mind is "What should I have for dinner" for more than a few minutes at a time, you're not even in the ballpark.
--
(Posted at +2 to make a point.)
"
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Look at it here.
--
I know a guy who put six old motherboards on his cube wall. He's running SETI@HOME on the whole cluster.
--
All this, just because I was out riding my hobbi-horse. ;-)
--
I don't have an Oxford Unabridged handy, or I'd look up the origins of the current forms of the pronouns. Irregular forms are generally earlier than regular forms, so "mine" and "his" (arising from "me" and "him") probably precede "hers" and "its".
--
I don't see anything in these cases to keep all the RF from leaking out. Forget Tempest, I just want to be able to use my radio and TV somewhere in the same house!
--
--
Even if either of them could be engineered to kill people, they would only hit those who got it directly; they could not create a plague. Not much of a terror weapon as these things go.
--
Today's poor enjoy antibiotics and vaccines which are rather inexpensive commodity items. Sixty years ago antibiotics did not exist, and for some time after that they were quite expensive. They came down. Smallpox vaccine got so cheap the disease is now extinct in the wild, and polio is not far from the same fate.
The "gap" may "grow" in absolute terms as technology moves faster and faster, but in terms of years it will probably stay about the same. Today's hyper-expensive breakthrough is tomorrow's best standard of care, and in 20 years it is available in clinics in Africa. The march of progress tends to turn anything useful into a commodity. Don't worry too much about determining who gets what. People turn their efforts away from areas which are political footballs, and if you spend a lot of political capital hammering the outfits which bring these advances to market about their contributions to "social injustices" you will just have fewer advances to argue about.
--
It's a lot less threatening when you pause to consider that these things have to be injected first. You could put them on the shrapnel of a fragmentation device, but what's the point? You don't increase the range or power significantly, and you make the area containing the fragments dangerous long after the explosion. It would be a lot less dangerous than depleted uranium, since the active ingredients are organic; you could get rid of them with plenty of UV, hydrogen peroxide or just plain grocery-store bleach. This means that it would not be very useful as a way to deny an enemy the use of an area either. These packaged bits of DNA just do not have significant weapons potential.
--
--