Improving the value of notGhosts
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 2
Those unused sectors will most probably be full of binary zeroes, which compress to almost nothing.
And if not, just run over it with SecureDelete's wipe-the-empty-space utility. If you don't have that to hand, this command will do near enough:
dd if=/dev/zero of=zeroes; rm -f zeroes
You'll need to run those once on every real partition.
Speed increase? How about rsync?
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 2
I'd be tempted to sniff the partition table (do diskslices have an equivalent?) and if it was similar, throw rsync at the problem. If you're repairing a minimally but obscurely damaged disk, rsync should leave no bit unturned but also involve very little network traffic.
It would probably be instructive to try rsync anyway. It dramatically slashes the transfer time even on compressed CDs (e.g. Mandrake Cooker CD's a few subreleases apart).
Setting that aside and turning to multiple clients, having a `what-do-I-need' MD5 broadcasting session followed by a multicast or broadcast of the required blocks (and refrain, in case a client missed anything) would probably save a lot of bandwidth except on initial installs where every answer would be `I need everything'. You could invent a nifty little sparse-blocks reply algorithm that listed ranges in the simple case and bitmaps on messy sections.
If it keeps static images at low power, it should make a great OHP device at full power. Use a large (12"?) screen, cheap fresnel lens for focus, globes that cost much less than AUD$700 a pop (literally, in some cases), maybe a supermarket 500W flood and correct the gamma electronically.
Not very portable compared to the book-sized SIMM-eating wonders of today, but potentially very bright and certainly a damn sight cheaper. Advertisers would love it; now you can afford to have your logo take up the entire side of your building, at least at night.
An Amateur friend in Albany [detailed PDF, 300kB][grotty GIF, 29kB][GIF of context, 9kB] was listening with half an ear one day while doing other stuff, when he suddenly realised that he was overhearing local traffic in Adelaide. So he wound his 1KW linear amp down to (IIRC) 4W, clicked on and said `Hi, such-and-such', naming one of the participants instead of using a callsign. He ID'd later in the conversation, and there were some thuds of dropping jaws when he did.
The duct covered roughly 1600km LOS on a few watts. I don't know if that's a record, but it certainly impressed me.
A year or two ago, we stuck in Cables artificial reef at Leighton beach (webcam, requires Java) to improve the surf there. I can't remember how many million dollars that cost (maybe $6 million?), on a coastline not exactly stuck for surfing spots, but if we'd put it to Namibia instead they'd be swimming in computers.
copy it out of a textbook maybe? You'd probably get that wrong.
I was given a C program to work on once, typed in from a book by a receptionist `to save money'. The results were whimsical, to say the least. `||' became `ll', `;' and `:' were more or less interchangeable, and you don't want to know about `--'. Plus a few words got misread. It was worse than bad OCR.
An operating system must *assume* apps badly written by complete incompetents.
It must also be expecting programs written by incomplete incompetents, ie, people who are clever enough to get most of the coding right, then put in a weird twist on the last call that guts the OS. Programs writen by complete incompetents are often disqualified (GPF) before they get so far.
The NT crash brought down every other NT box on the ship, not good news on a ship powered entirely by NT, is it? (-:
I have a friend (who still works for IBM) who was learning to program on mainframes, ran his app, killed it after 2.5 seconds, and went down to collect his print run. One and a half boxes of paper. He thought that was expensive... but consider running an app on your smartship while it's manouvering in close quarters, and bringing down NT. One and a half boxes of sailors. A bit expensive...
If windows works the best then please don't let your bias affect how the company runs.
...but your tagline said...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion
Microsoft obtains a lot of its revenue by coercion as well. If you object to that, surely it should influence you decision even if Windows apparently does a better job.
Er, `Open Source: it's the difference between trust and antitrust?' (-:
that's probably what companies are asking for -- "Give us something that looks like what we're used to for web surfing already!"
Web-based? In that case, Linux on the server lest your PABX get CodeRedded. IRL, marketroids would still drown the web pages in half-broken JavaScript like they do with the little routers - but at least there's a half-decent server platform involved.
From a Sperry Univac System 80 RPG II compiler, non-reproducible, upon being fed a piece of code by a certain gentleman who is still with us, still writing code that bad.
Same gent wrote an order-N-cubed sort algorithm (on the same machine, still in RPG II) that occasionally lost up to four results - from the top of the list, no less, and for the business's key revenue-raising activity, no less - and when ordered out of that business by a court, his successor replaced the monstrosity with a simple order-N-squared(ish) bubble sort that didn't lose anything and generally worked well. A few months later, however, our ace programmer returned armed with nastier court documents - and put his broken, slow sort back in again...
An interesting error non-message from a DEC CoBOL compiler: you didn't need an INDENTIFICATION DIVISION but if you had one, and it was wrong, the compiler silently deleted your source code. Get the message? (-:
The bottom line is that XP is better than 9X, but not as long-term stable as any of the Unices, including OS/X and BeOS. Microsoft are stil fixing things by piling on the bandaids instead of doing it right the first time.
AND do have a bit of a think about the implications of the Microsoft-hired ad agency regarding the removak and reinstallation your email client as such a routine event that they left it in an ad promoting Microsoft!
I guess they had to do something to keep it from crashing during the filming of the ad.
Well, one does wonder... the advertiser may have been worried about whether the thing actually died in the saddle or not, but the original Microsoft page that this SlashDot story is about says (used to say):
Later, I had to uninstall and reinstall Outlook
...which to me looks like she'd probably have to uninstall XP to stop it from crashing.
So... if this is Microsoft's new, fantastic, reliable, easy-to-use replacement for OS/X, why did our anonymous but very pretty switcher have to spend time sysadminning her brand new toy? And why did Microsoft publish that point? They're basically confirming every Windows user's constant nightmare: that the system might suddenly and without obvious cause irretrievably screw itself.
When was the last time you had to remove and reinstall KMail to get it working?
you seem to believe that mutations need a reason (other than the physical reason for the change in the DNA, such as radiation or whatever) to occur.
They certainly do. Every mutation has a price. If a mutation is to survive, it must propagate. Propagation implies competing with nearly identical organisms that don't have the mutation. What that boils down to is that for every mutated survivor, a non-mutated creature must die - unless you postulate unlimited resources, which we don't have and have never had. What motivation does nature have to pay this price? Is not the tendency of mechanistic nature toward survival? And if so, why? If nature is truly impartial, an organism has no more motivation to live than to die.
On top of this, the vast majority of mutations are highly destructive, so they kill off the organism (in some situations, the entire species), and there is no principle to counteract this destruction in mechanistic science.
Finally, unlike in frauds like Mr Dawkins' weasel, selectivity is very weak, and the natural tendency observed in biology is for novelties to become de-selected again rather than to propagate.
Selectivity, as you are so careful to point out, has no real idea of what to select for. Naturalism's watchmaker isn't just blind, he's deaf and has no sense of touch, and no brains. Good luck keeping the time.
"Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time"
That IS the definition of evolution, no matter how much you want to extend it to anything and everything under the sun.
Plain, ordinary degeneration falls under that definition. What you're saying is that if a colony of rats take up residence on a toxic waste dump, and they start to be born with defective or missing limbs, patchy hair, blindness etc, this is evolution; this is progress.
And before we start writing off the example against, say, the fossil record... you'd need to explain how `changes' like Trilobite -> Crinoid represent progress, since Trilobites generally precede Crinoids (generally precede most things) in the fossil record. Trilobites are extremely complicated and well-developed animals, yet they appear right near the start of `progress'. You coud argue that Trilobites degenerated, but you would still have to show how they arose in the first place, and why other species did not degenerate.
the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution
This is completely idiotic. That would be like saying that quantum mechanics has to explain ballroom dancing because they are both natural phenomena.
Um, no?
Ballroom dancing is not a prerequisite of quantum mechanics, nor vice versa. Actually, we might be close to the key to your abberration: ballroom dancing is not natural. Ballroom dancing is highly stylised and artificial. If you can regard it as natural, it seems certain that you will have mistaken other artifacts as natural too.
Evolution is a biological observation, nothing more.
Mr Montag, are you having a lend of me? Where has biology observed evolution? Can you name any situation in which genuine developmental improvement has been witnessed, let alone witnessed to be a result of evolutionary processes?
"In one graduate class, the professor told us we didn't have to memorize the dates of the geologic systems since they were far too uncertain and conflicting. Then in geophysics we went over all of the assumptions that go into radiometric dating. Afterwards, the professor said something like this, 'If a fundamentalist ever got hold of this stuff, he would make havoc out of the radiometric dating system. So, keep the faith.'"
Rather what they are doing is going from "things change" to "this may be how and why things change" and that is not a blind leap of faith because it is based on evidence
No, it isn't. It's based almost entirely on surmise, and what evidence is available for its support is invariably better explained by a competing perspective. Not only that, but you started off with `things change' as an axiom, and it's a pretty useless axiom unless it carries the riders `by themselves' plus `and become increasingly complex'. IRL, they degrade and degenerate. That is an observation, not an inference.
and there are competing theories, such as natural selection vs. punctuated equilibrium.
Er, what? Because they compete, one of them must be factual? Come off the grass!
Snake worshipper theology competes with Sun worshipper theology, therefore at least one of these cults must be right? Wanna buy a bridge?
...so, if honourable East Asian nation of large population nuke loud, brash section of Americas (mostly part between Mexico and Canada), honourable East Asian nation continue to be able to get processor. Also, can nuke without fear of software or hardware backdoor giving tipoff to enemy or interfering with launch, guidance or business afterward.
Which begs the question: what effect would nuking Washington have on the USA's computing ability? Substantial improvement? IMHO, it would be better for the USA to strike first by disbanding microsoft and assigning many of their previous employees to Open Source projects.
Inch by inch, anything's... er, just plain silly
on
Ready, Steady, Evolve
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· Score: 2
The following text was pasted in to bypass slashdot's braindead lameness filtering, but hey, it's informative as well: Talk.Origins is very hard to target-a fact that may be so by design. For example, if a person disagrees with TO on the 'fact of evolution', these people will employ a definition of evolution ["Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time"] that makes it impossible to disagree and, if one does argue, then that person comes across as being uninformed or irrational or fanatical. This might be acceptable if only it remained right there. But it doesn't! That statement about evolution (which happens to be accurate, i.e., genetic characteristics of populations do vary over time) is subsequently modified / extended throughout TO's many articles and feedback responses so that not only is the person to accept the (empirically corroborated) fact of change, but also that this change is the sole causing agent for the diversity and complexity within an organism (internal organs, cellular structures, etc.) as well as outside of the organism including Earth's entire flora and fauna. The metaphysical extrapolation of the data that is required to accomplish this feat is somehow missed by TO-either by ignorance or by design. What's more, if we are to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm then the term 'evolution' must somehow be further extended to include life from non-life, i.e., the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution. There's more. The origin of the basic materials that make up all objects (living or not) must also somehow be accounted for so yet other forms of evolution enter the scene-chemical, stellar and planetary. In fact, the universe itself must also be accounted for by evolution. Thus, whether they hypothesize a Big Bang, a quantum fluctuation, aliens from another dimension or some other natural explanation, the universe began and has 'evolved' to what it is today. Few would argue with the notion that 'things change.' But to take the step from 'things change' to 'and therefore, that's how it all got here' is a leap of blind, irrational faith that would send even the most fanatical snake worshipper reeling. The bottom line to all this is that the fundamental concept of evolution is clearly a manifestation of a metaphysical-not a scientific-worldview and, just as with any other religion, the facts must continually be interpreted and adjusted to fit with this belief. We return you to our regularly scheduled program.
Yes, but it answers the question posed perfectly.
No it doesn't. It bullshits its way around the issues, step by step. And I quote:
Some invaginations (now reservoirs) become so deep that the others are inconsequential by comparison.
Said invaginations, as well as collecting poisons, would also collect pollution. This would have multiple effects, including blocking of any putative ducts (insect suffers infection, and/or pollution encourages parasites, and/or dilutes/osmoses out the poisons), increasing the risk of epidermal rupture, increases the risk of adhesion or impalement causing direct damage, makes the insect easier for a predator to hold.
The channels become a duct, specialized
Yeah? How? It's all very well having a slowmo movie in your head of that happening, but what prompted it? What caused them to get deeper and not shallower? What drove the `deeper is good' message into the genes? What decided that deeper `was' good?
different defensive chemicals besides quinones appear.
Oh, yes, `appear'... again, out of thin air? How many different possible chemicals can a mutation produce without killing or impairing the insect? Wouldn't a mutation be far more likely to smash the existing mechanism than to refine it, or add a whole new mechanism to make a different chemical without touching the existing mechanism?
Cells that secrete the hydroquinones develop in multiple layers over part of the reservoir, allowing more hydroquinones to be produced. Channels between cells allow hydroquinones from all layers to reach the reservoir.
So... which came first, did the unnecessary channels soak up valuable resources for aeons, or did cells produce poisons first but no way of safely transporting them?
This stage -- secretory glands connected by ducts to reservoirs -- exists in many beetles. The particular configuration of glands and reservoirs that bombardier beetles have is common to the other beetles in their suborder.
What here distinguishes between common design principles and gradual development?
Cells secreting a small amount of catalases and peroxidases appear along the output passage of the reservoir
Here we go `appearing' again. How? Did the beetle wave a wand? Stop in at a GE lab and ask for a batch of those new catalase cells, please?
the walls toughen and shape into a reaction chamber.
...and up to this point, the unfortunate beetle just goes `pop' when it lights the blue touch paper, and spreads itself all over the landscape? In an earlier stage, it might have got away with burning it's own backside off.
Any of these points makes it possible for complexity, even irreducible complexity, to evolve gradually.
No, they didn't. The entire page is just a flight of fantasy! Nowhere is any driving mechanism explored, nowhere is any reason given for any of these things.
evolution also predicts patterns - especially a nested heirarchical organization of characteristics - and that's the pattern we see.
Only when wearing your heirarchy-coloured glasses. Anyone taking an unprejudiced look would see a matrix of features, rather than a heirarchy.
Classic example: microbats have a completely different vision system (eyes, brain, the whole nine yards) to macrobats, yet share identical wing structure. Macrobats have a vision system like that of rats, or us. An evolutionist is forced to cry `parallel evolution' (i.e. the miracle of furry flight squared) but really the evidence says that there are overlapping features, incompatible with a heirarchical development schema.
I sympathize with Christians who feel that they must make a choice between their religion and science, but I wish they'd find the strength of character to admit to themselves and to others what they're doing: denying the most workable, parsimonious scientific theory we have for explaining our origins because they're afraid it's true.
The choice to make is not between science and religion, but between dogma and data. Evolution, ironically, is the dogma in this case. I can show you many data which completely cross evolution as an idea IF you don't start with materialist assumptions that would prohibit you from accepting the data as they stand. As soon as you reinterpret the data, you have left the realm of science and entered the realm of philosophy, and it doesn't matter whether that philosophy is Atheism, Gaianism or Christianity, it is still philosophy.
I can also show you data that scare both long-age gradualist Atheists and young-earth creationist Christians. (-:
For the sake of discussion, there are two main world-views: atheism and theism. Both are all encompassing (that is, they are pretty much able to swallow all observations and fit them into the system, although they each have their problems).
Well... WRT evolution, there are actually three basic world-views:
It was organised accidentally (evolution)
It organised itself (Gaia/pantheist)
It was externally organised (creation)
Within those, there are divergent views (e.g. punk-eek vs gradualism, old-earth vs young-earth). I'm pleased to say (born stirrer that I am) that there are many observations for which all extant theories are unmistakeably inadequate (-: yes, including all of the tinfoil-hat ones that I know of:-)
And your worldview, in large part, dictates how you evaluate evidence.
Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?
Item: India can (has) put a tonne into geosynchronous orbit or 3 tonnes into LEO for $12M, about the same cost (according to this article) as getting one DoD microsatellite to the moon as a hitchhiker.
Item: A shuttle launch costs about $300M, representing 29 tonnes to LEO for roughly $11M/t
Conclusion: India can loft cargo for roughly 1/3 the price of the Shuttle.
Item: An unmanned return Moon mission (also ex the article) costs about $600M.
Conclusion: Estimating roughly half of this cost to be launch, if India did the launches, the missions would cost $400 apiece.
Item: The cost of putting up a space elevator has been set at $10G; a space elevator would drop launch costs (measured against the Shuttle) about a hundredfold (ie, to roughly $100k/t).
Conclusion: This would, in theory, involve a single Shuttle launch, making the $200M saving realised by having India loft it probably not worthwhile against the added complexity of a segmented load and the added flexibility of a Shuttle.
Conclusion: If instead of America doing 18 return Moon missions for $10G (or 25 missions if India lofted them), they were to put up a space elevator for $10G, they would achieve payback before the 40th mission. This is on return automated Moon missions alone. DoD could probably then toss cans at the moon for under $5M apiece.
Speculation: The additional space infrastructure which an elevator implies would probably hasten payback. The availablility of cheap ($100/kg, compare that with the price of, say, caviar - vs $10,000/kg now) steadily deliverable supplies would even further reduce the cost of manned missions. Payback from other items like solar power satellites (to say nothing of the reduction in pollution etc) would probably make an elevator worthwhile anyway.
Summary: leave the moon alone for a decade. Put up an elevator instead. Then you can have all the moon you want for a fraction of the price.
Idealism has its place. Standing in front of rampant commercialism would mean that it's place will shortly be a very thin blot on the landscape. Esoteric UN pronouncements sound good, so let's hear about the reality, whall we?
Slashdot Mirror
And if not, just run over it with SecureDelete's wipe-the-empty-space utility. If you don't have that to hand, this command will do near enough:
You'll need to run those once on every real partition.
It would probably be instructive to try rsync anyway. It dramatically slashes the transfer time even on compressed CDs (e.g. Mandrake Cooker CD's a few subreleases apart).
Setting that aside and turning to multiple clients, having a `what-do-I-need' MD5 broadcasting session followed by a multicast or broadcast of the required blocks (and refrain, in case a client missed anything) would probably save a lot of bandwidth except on initial installs where every answer would be `I need everything'. You could invent a nifty little sparse-blocks reply algorithm that listed ranges in the simple case and bitmaps on messy sections.
Not very portable compared to the book-sized SIMM-eating wonders of today, but potentially very bright and certainly a damn sight cheaper. Advertisers would love it; now you can afford to have your logo take up the entire side of your building, at least at night.
The duct covered roughly 1600km LOS on a few watts. I don't know if that's a record, but it certainly impressed me.
A year or two ago, we stuck in Cables artificial reef at Leighton beach (webcam, requires Java) to improve the surf there. I can't remember how many million dollars that cost (maybe $6 million?), on a coastline not exactly stuck for surfing spots, but if we'd put it to Namibia instead they'd be swimming in computers.
I was given a C program to work on once, typed in from a book by a receptionist `to save money'. The results were whimsical, to say the least. `||' became `ll', `;' and `:' were more or less interchangeable, and you don't want to know about `--'. Plus a few words got misread. It was worse than bad OCR.
It must also be expecting programs written by incomplete incompetents, ie, people who are clever enough to get most of the coding right, then put in a weird twist on the last call that guts the OS. Programs writen by complete incompetents are often disqualified (GPF) before they get so far.
The NT crash brought down every other NT box on the ship, not good news on a ship powered entirely by NT, is it? (-:
I have a friend (who still works for IBM) who was learning to program on mainframes, ran his app, killed it after 2.5 seconds, and went down to collect his print run. One and a half boxes of paper. He thought that was expensive... but consider running an app on your smartship while it's manouvering in close quarters, and bringing down NT. One and a half boxes of sailors. A bit expensive...
...but your tagline said...
Microsoft obtains a lot of its revenue by coercion as well. If you object to that, surely it should influence you decision even if Windows apparently does a better job.
Er, `Open Source: it's the difference between trust and antitrust?' (-:
Web-based? In that case, Linux on the server lest your PABX get CodeRedded. IRL, marketroids would still drown the web pages in half-broken JavaScript like they do with the little routers - but at least there's a half-decent server platform involved.
From a Sperry Univac System 80 RPG II compiler, non-reproducible, upon being fed a piece of code by a certain gentleman who is still with us, still writing code that bad.
Same gent wrote an order-N-cubed sort algorithm (on the same machine, still in RPG II) that occasionally lost up to four results - from the top of the list, no less, and for the business's key revenue-raising activity, no less - and when ordered out of that business by a court, his successor replaced the monstrosity with a simple order-N-squared(ish) bubble sort that didn't lose anything and generally worked well. A few months later, however, our ace programmer returned armed with nastier court documents - and put his broken, slow sort back in again...
An interesting error non-message from a DEC CoBOL compiler: you didn't need an INDENTIFICATION DIVISION but if you had one, and it was wrong, the compiler silently deleted your source code. Get the message? (-:
The bottom line is that XP is better than 9X, but not as long-term stable as any of the Unices, including OS/X and BeOS. Microsoft are stil fixing things by piling on the bandaids instead of doing it right the first time.
AND do have a bit of a think about the implications of the Microsoft-hired ad agency regarding the removak and reinstallation your email client as such a routine event that they left it in an ad promoting Microsoft!
Well, one does wonder... the advertiser may have been worried about whether the thing actually died in the saddle or not, but the original Microsoft page that this SlashDot story is about says (used to say):
...which to me looks like she'd probably have to uninstall XP to stop it from crashing.
So... if this is Microsoft's new, fantastic, reliable, easy-to-use replacement for OS/X, why did our anonymous but very pretty switcher have to spend time sysadminning her brand new toy? And why did Microsoft publish that point? They're basically confirming every Windows user's constant nightmare: that the system might suddenly and without obvious cause irretrievably screw itself.
When was the last time you had to remove and reinstall KMail to get it working?
They certainly do. Every mutation has a price. If a mutation is to survive, it must propagate. Propagation implies competing with nearly identical organisms that don't have the mutation. What that boils down to is that for every mutated survivor, a non-mutated creature must die - unless you postulate unlimited resources, which we don't have and have never had. What motivation does nature have to pay this price? Is not the tendency of mechanistic nature toward survival? And if so, why? If nature is truly impartial, an organism has no more motivation to live than to die.
On top of this, the vast majority of mutations are highly destructive, so they kill off the organism (in some situations, the entire species), and there is no principle to counteract this destruction in mechanistic science.
Finally, unlike in frauds like Mr Dawkins' weasel, selectivity is very weak, and the natural tendency observed in biology is for novelties to become de-selected again rather than to propagate.
Selectivity, as you are so careful to point out, has no real idea of what to select for. Naturalism's watchmaker isn't just blind, he's deaf and has no sense of touch, and no brains. Good luck keeping the time.
Plain, ordinary degeneration falls under that definition. What you're saying is that if a colony of rats take up residence on a toxic waste dump, and they start to be born with defective or missing limbs, patchy hair, blindness etc, this is evolution; this is progress.
And before we start writing off the example against, say, the fossil record... you'd need to explain how `changes' like Trilobite -> Crinoid represent progress, since Trilobites generally precede Crinoids (generally precede most things) in the fossil record. Trilobites are extremely complicated and well-developed animals, yet they appear right near the start of `progress'. You coud argue that Trilobites degenerated, but you would still have to show how they arose in the first place, and why other species did not degenerate.
Um, no?
Ballroom dancing is not a prerequisite of quantum mechanics, nor vice versa. Actually, we might be close to the key to your abberration: ballroom dancing is not natural. Ballroom dancing is highly stylised and artificial. If you can regard it as natural, it seems certain that you will have mistaken other artifacts as natural too.
Mr Montag, are you having a lend of me? Where has biology observed evolution? Can you name any situation in which genuine developmental improvement has been witnessed, let alone witnessed to be a result of evolutionary processes?
Wrong, and I quote:
No, it isn't. It's based almost entirely on surmise, and what evidence is available for its support is invariably better explained by a competing perspective. Not only that, but you started off with `things change' as an axiom, and it's a pretty useless axiom unless it carries the riders `by themselves' plus `and become increasingly complex'. IRL, they degrade and degenerate. That is an observation, not an inference.
Er, what? Because they compete, one of them must be factual? Come off the grass!
Snake worshipper theology competes with Sun worshipper theology, therefore at least one of these cults must be right? Wanna buy a bridge?
...so, if honourable East Asian nation of large population nuke loud, brash section of Americas (mostly part between Mexico and Canada), honourable East Asian nation continue to be able to get processor. Also, can nuke without fear of software or hardware backdoor giving tipoff to enemy or interfering with launch, guidance or business afterward.
Which begs the question: what effect would nuking Washington have on the USA's computing ability? Substantial improvement? IMHO, it would be better for the USA to strike first by disbanding microsoft and assigning many of their previous employees to Open Source projects.
The following text was pasted in to bypass slashdot's braindead lameness filtering, but hey, it's informative as well: Talk.Origins is very hard to target-a fact that may be so by design. For example, if a person disagrees with TO on the 'fact of evolution', these people will employ a definition of evolution ["Biological evolution is a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time"] that makes it impossible to disagree and, if one does argue, then that person comes across as being uninformed or irrational or fanatical. This might be acceptable if only it remained right there. But it doesn't! That statement about evolution (which happens to be accurate, i.e., genetic characteristics of populations do vary over time) is subsequently modified / extended throughout TO's many articles and feedback responses so that not only is the person to accept the (empirically corroborated) fact of change, but also that this change is the sole causing agent for the diversity and complexity within an organism (internal organs, cellular structures, etc.) as well as outside of the organism including Earth's entire flora and fauna. The metaphysical extrapolation of the data that is required to accomplish this feat is somehow missed by TO-either by ignorance or by design. What's more, if we are to remain exclusively within the natural (material) realm then the term 'evolution' must somehow be further extended to include life from non-life, i.e., the emergence of life itself must also be accounted for by the ever-stretching definition of evolution. There's more. The origin of the basic materials that make up all objects (living or not) must also somehow be accounted for so yet other forms of evolution enter the scene-chemical, stellar and planetary. In fact, the universe itself must also be accounted for by evolution. Thus, whether they hypothesize a Big Bang, a quantum fluctuation, aliens from another dimension or some other natural explanation, the universe began and has 'evolved' to what it is today. Few would argue with the notion that 'things change.' But to take the step from 'things change' to 'and therefore, that's how it all got here' is a leap of blind, irrational faith that would send even the most fanatical snake worshipper reeling. The bottom line to all this is that the fundamental concept of evolution is clearly a manifestation of a metaphysical-not a scientific-worldview and, just as with any other religion, the facts must continually be interpreted and adjusted to fit with this belief. We return you to our regularly scheduled program.
No it doesn't. It bullshits its way around the issues, step by step. And I quote:
Said invaginations, as well as collecting poisons, would also collect pollution. This would have multiple effects, including blocking of any putative ducts (insect suffers infection, and/or pollution encourages parasites, and/or dilutes/osmoses out the poisons), increasing the risk of epidermal rupture, increases the risk of adhesion or impalement causing direct damage, makes the insect easier for a predator to hold.
Yeah? How? It's all very well having a slowmo movie in your head of that happening, but what prompted it? What caused them to get deeper and not shallower? What drove the `deeper is good' message into the genes? What decided that deeper `was' good?
Oh, yes, `appear'... again, out of thin air? How many different possible chemicals can a mutation produce without killing or impairing the insect? Wouldn't a mutation be far more likely to smash the existing mechanism than to refine it, or add a whole new mechanism to make a different chemical without touching the existing mechanism?
So... which came first, did the unnecessary channels soak up valuable resources for aeons, or did cells produce poisons first but no way of safely transporting them?
What here distinguishes between common design principles and gradual development?
Here we go `appearing' again. How? Did the beetle wave a wand? Stop in at a GE lab and ask for a batch of those new catalase cells, please?
...and up to this point, the unfortunate beetle just goes `pop' when it lights the blue touch paper, and spreads itself all over the landscape? In an earlier stage, it might have got away with burning it's own backside off.
No, they didn't. The entire page is just a flight of fantasy! Nowhere is any driving mechanism explored, nowhere is any reason given for any of these things.
Only when wearing your heirarchy-coloured glasses. Anyone taking an unprejudiced look would see a matrix of features, rather than a heirarchy.
Classic example: microbats have a completely different vision system (eyes, brain, the whole nine yards) to macrobats, yet share identical wing structure. Macrobats have a vision system like that of rats, or us. An evolutionist is forced to cry `parallel evolution' (i.e. the miracle of furry flight squared) but really the evidence says that there are overlapping features, incompatible with a heirarchical development schema.
The choice to make is not between science and religion, but between dogma and data. Evolution, ironically, is the dogma in this case. I can show you many data which completely cross evolution as an idea IF you don't start with materialist assumptions that would prohibit you from accepting the data as they stand. As soon as you reinterpret the data, you have left the realm of science and entered the realm of philosophy, and it doesn't matter whether that philosophy is Atheism, Gaianism or Christianity, it is still philosophy.
I can also show you data that scare both long-age gradualist Atheists and young-earth creationist Christians. (-:
Well... WRT evolution, there are actually three basic world-views:
- It was organised accidentally (evolution)
- It organised itself (Gaia/pantheist)
- It was externally organised (creation)
Within those, there are divergent views (e.g. punk-eek vs gradualism, old-earth vs young-earth). I'm pleased to say (born stirrer that I am) that there are many observations for which all extant theories are unmistakeably inadequate (-: yes, including all of the tinfoil-hat ones that I know ofVery true, and amazingly opaque to most people.
Bit of a headscratcher for you: http://www.kronia.com/library/journals/venair.txt
Enclosed, careful descriptions of how Microsoft is (1) going bankrupt; and (2) ripping everyone off in the process; and (3) effectively stealing from every US taxpayer; and (4) thereby destabilisiing the whole economy. Who needs terrorists?
t ml and Microsoft Collapses AOL Part II - FTC Inquiry Requested
...and so on, ad nauseum, plenty more waiting to be read...
Proposed HP Merger: Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) Found Not Independent and along with Barclays plays key Role in Microsoft Pyramid Scheme
Inside Story on Microsoft and Enron
Senate Proposal Could Cost Microsoft Billions
Microsoft Circles of Influence and Enron's Collapse
http://www.billparish.com/20010404americaonline.h
Buybacks Backfire, Microsoft Loses $8.4B Speculating on Own Stock
Microsoft Scheme Costs Seattle Its Largest Employer, Boeing
"How Cisco Systems and Microsoft Avoid Tax"
Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary and Microsoft Financial Pyramid Summary Updated
How Microsoft Pays No Federal Income Tax on Current Income
IIRC, dense secondary radiation from sparse high-energy impacts in the hull is more of a worry than direct exposure.
And if radiation does trouble you, sacrifice 1000km/hr and launch from a polar pad. Cool.
think again [warning: this link points to a huge PowerPoint file].
Item: India can (has) put a tonne into geosynchronous orbit or 3 tonnes into LEO for $12M, about the same cost (according to this article) as getting one DoD microsatellite to the moon as a hitchhiker.
Item: A shuttle launch costs about $300M, representing 29 tonnes to LEO for roughly $11M/t
Conclusion: India can loft cargo for roughly 1/3 the price of the Shuttle.
Item: An unmanned return Moon mission (also ex the article) costs about $600M.
Conclusion: Estimating roughly half of this cost to be launch, if India did the launches, the missions would cost $400 apiece.
Item: The cost of putting up a space elevator has been set at $10G; a space elevator would drop launch costs (measured against the Shuttle) about a hundredfold (ie, to roughly $100k/t).
Conclusion: This would, in theory, involve a single Shuttle launch, making the $200M saving realised by having India loft it probably not worthwhile against the added complexity of a segmented load and the added flexibility of a Shuttle.
Conclusion: If instead of America doing 18 return Moon missions for $10G (or 25 missions if India lofted them), they were to put up a space elevator for $10G, they would achieve payback before the 40th mission. This is on return automated Moon missions alone. DoD could probably then toss cans at the moon for under $5M apiece.
Speculation: The additional space infrastructure which an elevator implies would probably hasten payback. The availablility of cheap ($100/kg, compare that with the price of, say, caviar - vs $10,000/kg now) steadily deliverable supplies would even further reduce the cost of manned missions. Payback from other items like solar power satellites (to say nothing of the reduction in pollution etc) would probably make an elevator worthwhile anyway.
Summary: leave the moon alone for a decade. Put up an elevator instead. Then you can have all the moon you want for a fraction of the price.
Idealism has its place. Standing in front of rampant commercialism would mean that it's place will shortly be a very thin blot on the landscape. Esoteric UN pronouncements sound good, so let's hear about the reality, whall we?