Until the Mt. St. Helen eruption, geologists didn't seriously consider that sedimentation layers could be formed almost instantly.
Where is that fact published?
In the bible?
There are several examples of "quick" sedimentation. Lahars are just one of them. And there are several mapped (i.e., identified and recorded) Mt. St. Helens lahars. All of them were mapped DECADES before the 1980 eruption.
Fundementalist Christianity: Pounding falsehoods into pseudoscience.
Remember that this is the department who lost a classified hard drive. Not exactly a group packed to the ceiling with critical thinkers.
A colleague of mine walked into our DOE monitor's office one day to deliver a milestone report. That report was hand delivered to the DOE employee. The DOE employee sets the report down, engages my colleague in a bit of small talk, and then asks if he has the report ready for delivery.
DOE is a bureaucracy. It has some very bright and engaging people working in it's ranks. On the other hand, it has some "lifers" who haven't a clue. These poor souls are in a position to not only accidentily make policy decisions (see: a million monkeys), but they are also in a position to ignore good advice and strong scientific evidence.
I would put DOE's support for Cold Fusion down as one of those brain farts that they occasionally pull (much like the CIA's $200M experiment in remote viewing).
When ever I read comments like this one I think to myself "What is the point of the rage?"
If you are saying that OpenOffice has no hope of ever becoming useful, then I have to ask "Useful to whom?". It seems that the company profiled in this article have found a good use for OO and they will be using it. What is the problem with that?
As for your rant about Outlook, I use Evolution and am perfectly happy. I work in an enterprise environment and haven't noticed a bump in the road yet.
In fact, I use 90% open source products for every task at work. The only product that I need Windows for is my electronic time card. That particular application is an in-house software package that relies on another Windows-based product.
If you are pissed that people can work through their day without Microsoft products, perhaps you need to look at the source of your rage.
After all, I'm not that upset that people use Microsoft....
If you aren't taking it seriously, what are the morons doing?
Wringing their hands and taking the "Woe is me" approach to life.
The rest of us are watching the data for trends.
What you are seeing is fast indeed by geologic time standards, but the question remains: "What are you seeing?"
The evidence for an anthropogenic contribution to global warming seems to be strengthening, but the cause is more likely a sum of a variety of factors, many of which are not under our control:
1) geologic activity, 2) increasing solar flux (which we have seen increasing since the 1970's, the point at which those measurements became available), and 3) climatological response to pre-industrial geologic changes (we still do not understand glacial cycles).
Certainly there is a need to study the effects of human contributions to global climate change. What would you suggest we do, however, if the conclusion is drawn that no matter what humans do to stave off global warming, it will happen anyhow?
The idea behind 'doing something' shouldn't be to engage in some behavior so that we can pat ourselves on the back for making an attempt. We should be implementing solutions that have the best chance of making a difference. Every other attempt will probably fail due to the lack of human perception of geologic time scales.
It has been calculated that in approximatley 700 million years, no life will be possible on the Earth's surface due to the amount of radiation hitting its surface. At a certain point in geologic time, Sol will expand to the point where it incinerates the inner planets. At some other point in our history, Sol will either collapse or explode. Either case leads to death for the Earth.
I know that humans crave stability. I know that all of us would like to see a time when the Earth would quit changing and stay locked in the time we are most familiar with. I imaging that the dinosaurs would have liked that too. But the fact remains that the Earth has always been, and will continue to be, in a constant state of change.
Our best hope of survival (which is what you want for your grand children) is to be able to manage change and adapt.
I know that isn't the same thing as being happy, but that is all there really is to life.
How thick is the crust where these measurements are made? Crustal thicknesses, thus the depth to which solar energy or other radiant source can penetrate, vary considerably throughout a continent - and between different continents.
How much geologic activity is occurring in the region sampled? Is it active, like the Pacific Rim areas, or is it relatively inactive, like the cratonic regions of the continenets?
I consider this pretty important information if one is evaluating this kind of data.
The first-blush inference drawn from the article summary is that mechanisms contributing to global warming (i.e., anthropogenic sources) are driving surface temperatures on the Earth in the same way as air temperatures. No mechanism is described in either the long article from Goddard or from the summary on exactly how surface temperatures could be affected by human activities.
The Earth's crust varies from one or two kilometers to several kilometers in depth and there is a great deal of geologic activity that is going on all over the planet irrespective of man's presence. While the evidence of global warming continues to point to a strong antropogenic contribution, both article and summary fail to explain how this paticular information is realted to anything.
"What happened is that someone had scheduled Nat without letting Nat or his assistant know about this particular trip,..."
That "someone" was your Northwest Territory Sales Manager.
We worked on a meeting schedule for nearly two months. They bailed *at the last minute*.
"...someone forgot to follow up and Nat was in Boston when that happened."
Someone forgot to call the customer and let them know Nat wasn't coming. I ended up calling your Northwest Territory Sales Manager when they failed to confirm their arrival the day of the meeting.
Get this: I had to call YOUR company to confirm the meeting.
Your recollection of the events is way off. I have the entire email catalog of the event if you need specifics.
Tip #2 to successful sales: Do not blame poor planning for missed opportunities. Own up to your mistakes and attempt to make it up to the client.
Then I guess he's going to have a hard sell to make. After pulling a no-show with nearly 100 participants planned (most of whom are in a position to make purchasing decisions), we are certainly going to be taking any claims regarding customer service with a sizable grain of salt.
Had we given Microsoft's representative a similar opportunity, they would have crawled over broken glass with a killer fever to make the meeting.
Determination to meet the client on their terms and on their time is what makes a sale. Having a superior technology with crappy customer service will not make it.
"A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer..."
Not *exactly* true.
We had Nat scheduled to show up and he blew us off. I was left standing in a conference room for nearly 1/2 hour telling participants that I was sorry that Ximian bailed on us.
I had to apologize for their no-show. Not a great feeling.
Guess a national laboratory isn't the market segment Ximian was interested in.
I hope all countries save one adopt this strategy.
That would leave the one remaining free-software country with such a HUGH software development advantage that the rest of the world would be lining up to "find out how they did it".
It figures that globalization and free-trade advocates always fuck themselves silly trying to protect corporations that *marginally* have a presence in their host country. These corporations give a rats-ass-not about the host country and do everything possible to drive living wages through the floor, cut benefits, and ship taxable income to off-shore havens that benefit NO ONE but themselves.
Sad Truth: People Deserve The Government They Vote For.
I submitted this story earlier today. Funny it didn't get picked up then. I also penned a note to the non-managing directors of Viacom.
To the Directors;
I want to convey my sincere regret over the fact that Viacom has decided that punishing the customers of EchoStar in their dispute with the satellite provider is 'good business'. The only solution Viacom has offered to the EchoStar customer base in response to this debacle is "Current EchoStar/DISH Network subscribers who would like to continue receiving BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, VH1, and all our other channels can easily switch to one of these reputable operators. We urge them to do so." This offhand dismissal of the reality of our collective situation indicates to me that Viacom is completely out of touch with the audience it serves. Many of EchoStar's customers have significant investment in equipment and annual contracts and cannot afford to quickly switch providers as your press release suggests.
By punishing your *indirect* customers, the audience of your shows, you are also punishing your other customers, your advertisers. By refusing to negotiate in good faith with EchoStar, and by denying temporary access to your content during negotiations, your advertisers are losing PAID access to millions of customers of the products and services advertised on your content stream. If you have no regard for the audience of your shows, perhaps you should take the pulse of your advertisers to see how they feel about the current conflict.
I, for one, have taken the time to notify all of the advertisers who have paid *you* for access to *me* through your content stream. I have indicated that the reason I am not making a purchasing decision regarding their products and services is due to *your* intransigence. They are losing thousands of dollars in disposable income a year due to *your* inability to negotiate with EchoStar.
I blame you, not EchoStar, for this impasse. I have notified your advertisers that I will boycott all of their products and services until this issue is resolved. I will also watch carefully all future Viacom acquistions and voice my opinion regarding each proposal to the appropriate regulatory authority (i.e., FCC, SEC, USDOJ). This situation has certainly cast any future consolidation of the entertainment industry in a poor light.
>>The K/T boundary is defined by the large faunal extinction.
"So...if you have an explanation for large floral extinctions during the Cretaceous, that wouldn't involve large fauna extinctions..."
For the faunal extinction, I have physical evidence: fossils. Pollen levels are no substitute for copious amounts of plant fossils (i.e., leaf impressions, large lignite seams associated with short, quick deposition of plant matter).
On the issue of faunal extinction immediately following a floral extinction, that is my point. You have said that one necessarily leads to the other. Where is your evidence?
I have fossils of dinosaurs. You have:
1) Meteor 2)????? 3) Profit!!!
Oh, you also have your stomping of feet regarding my not providing links. I have run several queries of GeoREF for your evidence of large, global floral extictions and have found none.
Would you like me to make some up?
As for your accusations of trolling and the inappropriate nature of my replies, me thinks thou protesteth to mightily.
I've seen no evidence of large *flora* extinctions. The evidence for large faunal extinction is preserved in the geologic record. The K/T boundary is defined by the large faunal extinction.
I *never* said that there were no faunal extinctions near the K/T boundary. I said there is no evidence for a global *flora* extinction.
As for producing evidence, those who make positive assertions of fact are expected to provide the evidence. I said that I have seen no evidence of a large global Tertiary flora deposit. That does not mean that there have not been regional die-off due to changes in climate.
To me, the assumptions that underlie the theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs requires consistancy. The chain of events that starts with a meteor impact that leads, in turn, to solar intensity problems, that creates food shortages leading to herbavore extinction followed closely by carnivore extinction..... had *better* provide more convincing evidence of *global* flora extinction.
If you are asking me to support my contention that there is *no* convincing evidence of global flora extinctions, consider the possibility that you are asking me to prove a negative.
The fact is, there is no *large* (meaning, global) extinction of flora. There is no large global Tertiary deposit of the kind that would produce a complete extinction of the dinosaurs.
The reply posted before yours points to the same evidence: large forest fires and groups of plants going extinct due to suborbital impact melt.
What is missing here is the mechanism that led to the extinction of LARGE amounts of fauna. Not just one or two groups, but an entire sequence of geologic strata heavily poplulated by fossils. MASSIVE extinction of fauna across the entire planet, but only a few species of plants in two remote regions of the Earth.
You assume in your attack that there was a "North America" and and "India" during the K/T time frame.
A cursory inspection of the plate movements and alignments during this period of time reveals that your debris track would have collided with Africa as well.
Do the authors indicate that there were massive forest extinctions, or just massive forest fires? Which mechanism caused the decline of the dinosaurs? Was the extinction just in North America?
Pick up a primer on geology. Read the section on structural folds, faults, and plate tectonics. That will clear up some of your confusion.
Just for the record, I was standing on rock from the K/T boundary in Southern California, looking up 10 meters in the air at rock from the Precambrian. The section I was standing on was originally 10,000 meters of Grand Canyon sequence, attenuated 1000X, folded upside down, sheared off, and moved along northwest a lateral fault for 3.5 km.
When I was an undergrad geology student 20 years ago, the prevailing theory of how dinosaurs went extinct involved an asteroid hitting the Earth on the Atlantic Ridge system. The target location would be the present-day island of Iceland. The evidence used to support the conclusion included iridium-soaked sediments ringing Iceland dated right at the Mesozoic/Cenozoic (K/T) break, the high concentration of ultramafics at the surface, etc. etc.
The problem for this theory was (is!) the chain of events that would have led to a mass extinction. The theory assumed that the explosive force of the impact would have kicked up large amounts of dust and moisture, which would reduced solar activity and stunted or halted sufficient production of vegetative matter. That would have led to the die-off of herbivores, which in turn would have led to carnivore die-off. The hitch? Insufficient evidence of mass flora extinction at the K/T boundary.
Some years later, the location of the impact changed to Mexico, but the mechanics stayed the same. But there is still a huge lack of vegetative data to support a mass extinction.
So now there are several asteroids hitting the Earth. Did that change the fundamental assumptions?
Nope.
I'm glad the debate is still alive. Nothing bothers me more than a theory that attempts to tie everything together in a neat package.
What Mr. Perl probably meant was "We watch television, read the newspapers, and have the Internet. We are as well connected as everyone else in the world."
I would assume that due to the fact that:
1) television is a poor translator of cultural information (we do not all look like TV personalities),
2) newspapers and other media outlets cater only to what makes the producer money (as they rightfully should), and
3) the Internet is inherently full of bullshit sprinkled with tidbits of accuracy,
it is entirely reasonable taht Mr. Perl and his fellow countrymen probably DO know as much about the world as we do.
Of course I screwed up by placing the emphasis on 'environmental' instead of 'national'. All of the DOE labs grabbed a 'national' title to maintain funding. Anything having to do with national security is the next "must have" title.
I think that the folks in IT would still take your resume. There are some real live Linux gurus here, but there are plenty more of us 'novices' who are happily plugging along with our favorite obscure little OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Until the Mt. St. Helen eruption, geologists didn't seriously consider that sedimentation layers could be formed almost instantly.
Where is that fact published?
In the bible?
There are several examples of "quick" sedimentation. Lahars are just one of them. And there are several mapped (i.e., identified and recorded) Mt. St. Helens lahars. All of them were mapped DECADES before the 1980 eruption.
Fundementalist Christianity: Pounding falsehoods into pseudoscience.
Remember that this is the department who lost a classified hard drive. Not exactly a group packed to the ceiling with critical thinkers.
A colleague of mine walked into our DOE monitor's office one day to deliver a milestone report. That report was hand delivered to the DOE employee. The DOE employee sets the report down, engages my colleague in a bit of small talk, and then asks if he has the report ready for delivery.
DOE is a bureaucracy. It has some very bright and engaging people working in it's ranks. On the other hand, it has some "lifers" who haven't a clue. These poor souls are in a position to not only accidentily make policy decisions (see: a million monkeys), but they are also in a position to ignore good advice and strong scientific evidence.
I would put DOE's support for Cold Fusion down as one of those brain farts that they occasionally pull (much like the CIA's $200M experiment in remote viewing).
When ever I read comments like this one I think to myself "What is the point of the rage?"
If you are saying that OpenOffice has no hope of ever becoming useful, then I have to ask "Useful to whom?". It seems that the company profiled in this article have found a good use for OO and they will be using it. What is the problem with that?
As for your rant about Outlook, I use Evolution and am perfectly happy. I work in an enterprise environment and haven't noticed a bump in the road yet.
In fact, I use 90% open source products for every task at work. The only product that I need Windows for is my electronic time card. That particular application is an in-house software package that relies on another Windows-based product.
If you are pissed that people can work through their day without Microsoft products, perhaps you need to look at the source of your rage.
After all, I'm not that upset that people use Microsoft....
Let's have a crazy flame war...
Eureka!
You have found the answer to the global warming problem!
The whole situation can be regarded as a result of people arguing and bitching at one another over issues great and trival!
I'm putting you in for a Nobel.
If you win, can I borrow five bucks?
If you aren't taking it seriously, what are the morons doing?
.
Wringing their hands and taking the "Woe is me" approach to life.
The rest of us are watching the data for trends.
What you are seeing is fast indeed by geologic time standards, but the question remains: "What are you seeing?"
The evidence for an anthropogenic contribution to global warming seems to be strengthening, but the cause is more likely a sum of a variety of factors, many of which are not under our control:
1) geologic activity,
2) increasing solar flux (which we have seen increasing since the 1970's, the point at which those measurements became available), and
3) climatological response to pre-industrial geologic changes (we still do not understand glacial cycles).
Certainly there is a need to study the effects of human contributions to global climate change. What would you suggest we do, however, if the conclusion is drawn that no matter what humans do to stave off global warming, it will happen anyhow?
The idea behind 'doing something' shouldn't be to engage in some behavior so that we can pat ourselves on the back for making an attempt. We should be implementing solutions that have the best chance of making a difference. Every other attempt will probably fail due to the lack of human perception of geologic time scales.
It has been calculated that in approximatley 700 million years, no life will be possible on the Earth's surface due to the amount of radiation hitting its surface. At a certain point in geologic time, Sol will expand to the point where it incinerates the inner planets. At some other point in our history, Sol will either collapse or explode. Either case leads to death for the Earth.
I know that humans crave stability. I know that all of us would like to see a time when the Earth would quit changing and stay locked in the time we are most familiar with. I imaging that the dinosaurs would have liked that too. But the fact remains that the Earth has always been, and will continue to be, in a constant state of change.
Our best hope of survival (which is what you want for your grand children) is to be able to manage change and adapt.
I know that isn't the same thing as being happy, but that is all there really is to life
And yes, I have children.
How thick is the crust where these measurements are made? Crustal thicknesses, thus the depth to which solar energy or other radiant source can penetrate, vary considerably throughout a continent - and between different continents.
.
How much geologic activity is occurring in the region sampled? Is it active, like the Pacific Rim areas, or is it relatively inactive, like the cratonic regions of the continenets?
I consider this pretty important information if one is evaluating this kind of data.
The first-blush inference drawn from the article summary is that mechanisms contributing to global warming (i.e., anthropogenic sources) are driving surface temperatures on the Earth in the same way as air temperatures. No mechanism is described in either the long article from Goddard or from the summary on exactly how surface temperatures could be affected by human activities.
The Earth's crust varies from one or two kilometers to several kilometers in depth and there is a great deal of geologic activity that is going on all over the planet irrespective of man's presence. While the evidence of global warming continues to point to a strong antropogenic contribution, both article and summary fail to explain how this paticular information is realted to anything
but SuSE used to have a bright, red background with big, black bombs tiled all over the place while logged in as root in X.
A little hard to miss that much blinding backcrap.
Just out of curiosity, which national lab? Also, what date was this suppose to take place?
Pacific Northwest National Lab, July 10th, 2003.
"What happened is that someone had scheduled Nat
without letting Nat or his assistant know about
this particular trip,..."
That "someone" was your Northwest Territory Sales Manager.
We worked on a meeting schedule for nearly two months. They bailed *at the last minute*.
"...someone forgot to follow
up and Nat was in Boston when that happened."
Someone forgot to call the customer and let them know Nat wasn't coming. I ended up calling your Northwest Territory Sales Manager when they failed to confirm their arrival the day of the meeting.
Get this: I had to call YOUR company to confirm the meeting.
Your recollection of the events is way off. I have the entire email catalog of the event if you need specifics.
Tip #2 to successful sales: Do not blame poor planning for missed opportunities. Own up to your mistakes and attempt to make it up to the client.
Nat is always very interested in National labs.
Then I guess he's going to have a hard sell to make. After pulling a no-show with nearly 100 participants planned (most of whom are in a position to make purchasing decisions), we are certainly going to be taking any claims regarding customer service with a sizable grain of salt.
Had we given Microsoft's representative a similar opportunity, they would have crawled over broken glass with a killer fever to make the meeting.
Determination to meet the client on their terms and on their time is what makes a sale. Having a superior technology with crappy customer service will not make it.
"A day doesn't go by when I don't talk to a Fortune 1000 customer..."
Not *exactly* true.
We had Nat scheduled to show up and he blew us off. I was left standing in a conference room for nearly 1/2 hour telling participants that I was sorry that Ximian bailed on us.
I had to apologize for their no-show. Not a great feeling.
Guess a national laboratory isn't the market segment Ximian was interested in.
I hope all countries save one adopt this strategy.
That would leave the one remaining free-software country with such a HUGH software development advantage that the rest of the world would be lining up to "find out how they did it".
It figures that globalization and free-trade advocates always fuck themselves silly trying to protect corporations that *marginally* have a presence in their host country. These corporations give a rats-ass-not about the host country and do everything possible to drive living wages through the floor, cut benefits, and ship taxable income to off-shore havens that benefit NO ONE but themselves.
Sad Truth: People Deserve The Government They Vote For.
I submitted this story earlier today. Funny it didn't get picked up then. I also penned a note to the non-managing directors of Viacom.
To the Directors;
I want to convey my sincere regret over the fact that Viacom has decided that punishing the customers of EchoStar in their dispute with the satellite provider is 'good business'. The only solution Viacom has offered to the EchoStar customer base in response to this debacle is "Current EchoStar/DISH Network subscribers who would like to continue receiving BET, CBS, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Nite, VH1, and all our other channels can easily switch to one of these reputable operators. We urge them to do so." This offhand dismissal of the reality of our collective situation indicates to me that Viacom is completely out of touch with the audience it serves. Many of EchoStar's customers have significant investment in equipment and annual contracts and cannot afford to quickly switch providers as your press release suggests.
By punishing your *indirect* customers, the audience of your shows, you are also punishing your other customers, your advertisers. By refusing to negotiate in good faith with EchoStar, and by denying temporary access to your content during negotiations, your advertisers are losing PAID access to millions of customers of the products and services advertised on your content stream. If you have no regard for the audience of your shows, perhaps you should take the pulse of your advertisers to see how they feel about the current conflict.
I, for one, have taken the time to notify all of the advertisers who have paid *you* for access to *me* through your content stream. I have indicated that the reason I am not making a purchasing decision regarding their products and services is due to *your* intransigence. They are losing thousands of dollars in disposable income a year due to *your* inability to negotiate with EchoStar.
I blame you, not EchoStar, for this impasse. I have notified your advertisers that I will boycott all of their products and services until this issue is resolved. I will also watch carefully all future Viacom acquistions and voice my opinion regarding each proposal to the appropriate regulatory authority (i.e., FCC, SEC, USDOJ). This situation has certainly cast any future consolidation of the entertainment industry in a poor light.
>>The K/T boundary is defined by the large faunal extinction.
"So...if you have an explanation for large floral extinctions during the Cretaceous, that wouldn't involve large fauna extinctions..."
For the faunal extinction, I have physical evidence: fossils. Pollen levels are no substitute for copious amounts of plant fossils (i.e., leaf impressions, large lignite seams associated with short, quick deposition of plant matter).
On the issue of faunal extinction immediately following a floral extinction, that is my point. You have said that one necessarily leads to the other. Where is your evidence?
I have fossils of dinosaurs. You have:
1) Meteor
2)?????
3) Profit!!!
Oh, you also have your stomping of feet regarding my not providing links. I have run several queries of GeoREF for your evidence of large, global floral extictions and have found none.
Would you like me to make some up?
As for your accusations of trolling and the inappropriate nature of my replies, me thinks thou protesteth to mightily.
I've seen no evidence of large *flora* extinctions. The evidence for large faunal extinction is preserved in the geologic record. The K/T boundary is defined by the large faunal extinction.
I *never* said that there were no faunal extinctions near the K/T boundary. I said there is no evidence for a global *flora* extinction.
As for producing evidence, those who make positive assertions of fact are expected to provide the evidence. I said that I have seen no evidence of a large global Tertiary flora deposit. That does not mean that there have not been regional die-off due to changes in climate.
To me, the assumptions that underlie the theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs requires consistancy. The chain of events that starts with a meteor impact that leads, in turn, to solar intensity problems, that creates food shortages leading to herbavore extinction followed closely by carnivore extinction..... had *better* provide more convincing evidence of *global* flora extinction.
If you are asking me to support my contention that there is *no* convincing evidence of global flora extinctions, consider the possibility that you are asking me to prove a negative.
I not only read the literature, I publish.
The fact is, there is no *large* (meaning, global) extinction of flora. There is no large global Tertiary deposit of the kind that would produce a complete extinction of the dinosaurs.
Problems, problems.....
The reply posted before yours points to the same evidence: large forest fires and groups of plants going extinct due to suborbital impact melt.
What is missing here is the mechanism that led to the extinction of LARGE amounts of fauna. Not just one or two groups, but an entire sequence of geologic strata heavily poplulated by fossils. MASSIVE extinction of fauna across the entire planet, but only a few species of plants in two remote regions of the Earth.
Again, where is the large flora extinction?
Keeping my balance was easy. The whole proces took about 5 million years. ;)
Not wrong.
You assume in your attack that there was a "North America" and and "India" during the K/T time frame.
A cursory inspection of the plate movements and alignments during this period of time reveals that your debris track would have collided with Africa as well.
Do the authors indicate that there were massive forest extinctions, or just massive forest fires? Which mechanism caused the decline of the dinosaurs? Was the extinction just in North America?
Problems, problems......
Pick up a primer on geology. Read the section on structural folds, faults, and plate tectonics. That will clear up some of your confusion.
Just for the record, I was standing on rock from the K/T boundary in Southern California, looking up 10 meters in the air at rock from the Precambrian. The section I was standing on was originally 10,000 meters of Grand Canyon sequence, attenuated 1000X, folded upside down, sheared off, and moved along northwest a lateral fault for 3.5 km.
When I was an undergrad geology student 20 years ago, the prevailing theory of how dinosaurs went extinct involved an asteroid hitting the Earth on the Atlantic Ridge system. The target location would be the present-day island of Iceland. The evidence used to support the conclusion included iridium-soaked sediments ringing Iceland dated right at the Mesozoic/Cenozoic (K/T) break, the high concentration of ultramafics at the surface, etc. etc.
The problem for this theory was (is!) the chain of events that would have led to a mass extinction. The theory assumed that the explosive force of the impact would have kicked up large amounts of dust and moisture, which would reduced solar activity and stunted or halted sufficient production of vegetative matter. That would have led to the die-off of herbivores, which in turn would have led to carnivore die-off. The hitch? Insufficient evidence of mass flora extinction at the K/T boundary.
Some years later, the location of the impact changed to Mexico, but the mechanics stayed the same. But there is still a huge lack of vegetative data to support a mass extinction.
So now there are several asteroids hitting the Earth. Did that change the fundamental assumptions?
Nope.
I'm glad the debate is still alive. Nothing bothers me more than a theory that attempts to tie everything together in a neat package.
What Mr. Perl probably meant was "We watch television, read the newspapers, and have the Internet. We are as well connected as everyone else in the world."
I would assume that due to the fact that:
1) television is a poor translator of cultural information (we do not all look like TV personalities),
2) newspapers and other media outlets cater only to what makes the producer money (as they rightfully should), and
3) the Internet is inherently full of bullshit sprinkled with tidbits of accuracy,
it is entirely reasonable taht Mr. Perl and his fellow countrymen probably DO know as much about the world as we do.
Chip off your grain of salt on your way out....
According to Ted Bridis of the Associate Press, Kerberos belongs to Microsoft in his recent article, Microsoft Warns on Windows Security Flaws.
I wrote a letter to Mr. Bridis to offer a correction.
Dear Mr. Bridis;
You wrote:
"Some of Microsoft's built-in security features - such as its Kerberos cryptography system - rely on the flawed software."
This statement is factually incorrect. You're sentence should have read "... such as its implementation of the Kerberos cryptography system..."
Kerberos is, in fact, a creation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
http://web.mit.edu/kerberos/www/#what_is
Please respect the intellectual property rights of MIT in your future writings.
Thanks.
They are migrating from UNIX.... ...but landing in a non-Mac, non-Wintel universe.
I consider that an accomplishment.
>Sorry - thanks for the correction.
;)
Eh! It happens
Of course I screwed up by placing the emphasis on 'environmental' instead of 'national'. All of the DOE labs grabbed a 'national' title to maintain funding. Anything having to do with national security is the next "must have" title.
I think that the folks in IT would still take your resume. There are some real live Linux gurus here, but there are plenty more of us 'novices' who are happily plugging along with our favorite obscure little OS.