my neighbor seems to supply all the electricity he and his family need from 3 rather small photovoltaic panels.
His panels, house, car, refrigerator, the road outside his house and so on were not built using solar power (there is one solar panel factory actually run mostly using solar panels). The shops he buys food aren't standalone solar, nor is the service station (`gas station' to Nordamericanos) he fuels up at. And so on. And he doesn't run an airconditioner, spa or chest freezer off those panels, either, does he?
The Australian Ecogeneration Association believes that wind could contribute at least 2,950 gigawatt hours of electricity out of the 9,500 gigawatt hours MRET target. The Association has stated that the MRET target should be increased to 21,400 gigawatt hours a year by 2010, with wind capable of contributing more than 10,000 gigawatt hours.
Yes, there is a windfarm at home, but even the enthusiastic Cailfornian windfarms won't make anything like enough for half of California's power demands (which was the topic of discussion), and this is the usual case. Australia is fortunate in having enormous amounts of (mostly uninhabitable) land to plonk windmills down on.
he argues based on a need (energy) rather than talking about exploration and science for its own sake.
No wonder nobody else replied - you mentioned a factor that was actually important. (-:
Solar power, wind power and stuff is nice, but the bottom line is there cannot possibly be enough of it even for our current needs even if we coated the entire countryside with collectors - so we need some new source of energy.
We ain't getting it here on Earth, so the obvious answer is...
Idiot hippy environmentalists [who] speak of cutting dependence on (foreign) oil by moving to electric cars.
...as if electric power were magicked out of the air. It turns out that they're right about the GM plants but for mostly the wrong reasons. GM agriculture is running into all kinds of problems including - tahdahh - lower yields. It's a research cul-de-sac so far.
Once at the target star system, a Dyson sphere can be constructed around that star.
Yup, just whip a handy-handy Sears Roebuck discount Dyson Sphere out of your back pocket, follow the directions, and you'll have your own private Dyson sphere in minutes, just like on the movies... no worries, mate! (-:
Once at the target star system, a Dyson sphere can be constructed around that star.
Yup, just whip a handy-handy Sears Roebuck discount Dyson Sphere out of your back pocket, follow the directions, and you'll have your own private Dyson sphere in minutes, just like on the movies... no worries, mate! (-:
Answer: Mac because it is the least available operating system and as such fewer attacks have been created for it, even if there are hypothetically more bugs.
There are at least two huge flaws in this; firstly, a generic attack (or a manual followup to a generic probe) is more likely to work, and secondly the hack-attack numbers reflect a smaller population, not necessarily a smaller proportion of a population. It's a great comfort to know that you're unique as you sit there looking at your Mac server full of zeroes.
If I wanted to take advantage of the features advocated by the lecturer, I'd use something like Roxen on Linux on a MIPS box, chrooted and as far as possible readonly (chown/chmod then chattr +i then remove the chattr binary, and if possible also mount -o ro).
Yes, you can. Your Windows box can randomly throw 'sploits at a box you don't know exists until it finds one the admin didn't patch or didn't know about. Often, you don't know your Windows box is doing this, because you don't know that it's been thoroughly zombied.
One-of-a-kinds generally don't help as much as you might think because what you gain in obscurity you lose in maturity (ie, some script kiddie stuff will still work becuase the author made the same mistakes that were found and removed from Apache years ago).
The theory of evolution is one of sciences most impressive theories which has withstood attacks both fair and foul.
Not so much `withstood' as `denied and papered over the wounds from'.
This consists very much of closing one's eyes and crying `It *IS*, dammit!' - only it's generally done professionally and en masse (cf Wistar and similar conferences).
Fossils are found things, not theoretical constructs.
True, but you left out a pivotal part of the story: what happened to them and when is a theoretical construct.
Determining their [a]ge depends a lot on physics (through radioactive dating) but only weakly, if at all, on biology.
Now that's just completely wrong. Biologists extracting blood cells from T-Rex bones can get a fairly good idea of an upper limit for the bone's age, based on home much the organic material has decayed. And it's shy at least four noughts of any figure you're likely have in mind. (-:
Of course, when people dig up fresh dinosaur bones, or extract fresh wood from within Manley sandstone, that generally presents them with a pretty big hint about the age of what they've found. But, of course, the false assumptions undergirding this assertion...
The fossil record is "tied to" Darwinian theory only in that the latter is the most successful explanation of the former.
...are so important on philosophical/metaphysical grounds that inconvenient observations like those tend to just get swept under the carpet.
I think the pi in your post is a sign from the gods of science that you're making them do too many beetles, and you need to step outside of your reality bubble for a while so they can discuss things with you. (-:
Because all of a sudden, their fossils stopped appearing in the geological column.
And here's me thinking that fossils of practically everything appear and disappear abruptly in the fossil record. Now where on earth did I get that silly idea? Oh, yes: Earnst Mayer, Stephen Gould, Niles Eldredge, Richard Goldschmidt, Roger Lewin, and let's not forget Charles Darwin. Sounds a bit like a who's who, dunnit?
Makes you wonder if we're here to discover it happened because it happened.
No, it doesn't. Take as many apes as you please, put them in a dirty nuclear reactor and wind the dial up to `Max' for a few days and see if they evolve at all.
There's a reason you wear a lead coat when you go to have your insides xrayed - and the technician stands behind another lead screen - and it's not the risk of becoming too smart for your family to bear.
The next member of the gang expected to go supernova is Antares, which at almost 500,000 light-years away is too distant to rattle our planet, they say.
What kind of dope are these astronomers smoking? Antares is 500 light years away.
They're really astrologers. They believe incredible things about the past, and try to predict the future (often with a flattened-out glass ball, although recently they re-potted their orbiting crystal divination tube).
They even have the physicists jumping through hoops and stretching statistics out of shape in order to make non-optical instruments fit the astrologers' wild theories.
If companies did this kind of thing, they'd be writted* out of the picture before you could blink, but this is Science (insert respectful silence) and cannot be questioned (insert shocked inhalations at `the very idea!').
* Writted (ri'-ted), v, to saturate with offensive court documents.
For example, the discovery of Santa's flying reindeer would be a big step on the road to understanding the physics of his journey, akin in chemistry to discovering the transuranic series, and would have much more impact than finding yet another sign of a stressed creator. For example, the CIA would be absolutely fascinated to get a handle one someone who ``knows when you've been naughty''.
``But seriously folks,'' add to this the 250,000+ species known from fossils and it should be clear that at least every 8th-to-80th transitional form should have shown up in the fossil record we've exhumed so far (BTW, the above ref cites TL Erwin in The Tropical Forest Canopy within Biodiversity, 1988, NAP (WA DC) for a generous ceiling of 30 million species, mostly insects). If we had equal parts transitional and stable species (really, we need many times that because most attempted changes would fail according to any reasonable theory), for example, there should be an absolute scratching minimum of about 2,000 known transitional species discovered in the fossil record by now.
While we're having fun, take DM Raup's figure of 99.9% (Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?, 1991, WW Norton NY - see this too for commentary and a ceiling of 40M species) extinct species, there should be at least 20 transitional species alive today, and using the 10-30 million species range vs 2 million known, we should have found somewhere between 1 and 4 of those by now.
Maybe one of those is Santa's reindeer? Which, BTW, are probably female...
The code, all the code, nothing but the code
on
Abusing the GPL?
·
· Score: 2
For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.
This explicitly includes the unobfuscated code and almost certainly the obfuscator as well although it is not clear that the obfuscator's source code is a necessary inclusion.
Pigs... In chain mail... [...] I want them, *now*!
Ah, another Hogfather fan... (-:
If you then practiced, er, discipline with them, could they then be mail order pigs without being Catholic? The Catholics seem to have a monopoly on male-order pigs...
sometimes it just feels like they're pushing the science thing to the viewers. After a while, it tires me to hear they repeat after the millionth time that they only believe in pure science:-)
Not a bad thing, except that they're not actually pushing `pure science'.
They're only pushing materialism - as if it were the be-all and end-all, the totality of science - in the guise of total, pure science. Materialism can only take you as far as you currently believe `reality' extends, which can seem to be a long way but is pretty limiting in the grand scheme of things (think Copernicus).
In the end the only proof of her position a materialist actually has is her faith: exclusive proofs are generally impossible, and one good counterexample can break generations of hereinbefore `irrefutable' beliefs.
The big myth underlying materialism is that you can completely understand and control the universe around you, which is again only true in a strictly limited degree, and in reality is just arrogance. Anyone who proclaims total control of their life, to say nothing of the lives of others, is simply displaying the limits of their knowledge (from another POV, their ignorance) in public.
I will try to put Linux on every computer in your company wether it makes sense to or not
Whereas a quality zealot will bury you in mostly-useless paperwork instead. Great choice.
But Advocate != Zealot. I'd avoid hiring a zealot of any kind, if I could, they're more trouble than they're worth. This is not to say that strong personal preferences are bad (they generally aren't), but that monomania is.
Sun have provided the ability for third parties to write drivers for Solaris for as long as I can remember.
Some drivers, yes. I shouldn't have been quite so specific.
I can do almost everything on Solaris that I can do on Linux, and I can do almost everything on Linux that I can do on Solaris. Both are good operating systems, and each have their strengths and weaknesses. Use whichever one is right for you for the task in hand, and be thankful you don't have to use Windows...
Apologies to the moderators for replying to a Score:0 AC comment, but one point does bear answering.
One of the reasons linux sucks so bad is because you HAVE to modify the source code just to get the crap to work right
Firstly, I have to modify Linux source code very seldom (maybe one system in thirty), and when I do it's for very obscure reasons, and it's good (yea, verily, even great!) to have the choice in that circumstance - especially since I specialise in odd systems (the kind of stuff that the MCSE brigade don't even dream of doing (and when they're stupid enough to try anyway the resulting house-of-cards heap of VB makes Heath Robinson look positively conservative)).
If I installed ``cookie-cutter'' Office+Web+Email desktops all day, and servers to suit, there's no reason I'd ever bother working with source. Or for that matter, for dirtying my hands with media, since net boot ROMs have become common.
The alternatives are:
It never works properly
You have to hope that the issue becomes important enough to the vendor for them to make a fix (and if they're Microsoft, also pray hard that the fix doesn't make things worse).
Your company is important enough to the vendor to permit bullying them into fixing it
to anyone taken in by Ted's garbage, I suggest a few searches on ted holden and talk.origins
Yah, and be sure follow the threads through to their termination. TO runs the gamut of dud debating techniques, there are constant examples of any class of mistake imaginable (the dialogue with Remine illustrated most of them) and they ``win'' most arguments by begging the question, as you are about to do. (-:
Oh, and by publishing before all of the outstanding answers are in, and calling their claims unanswerable.
the human mind doesn't accept scale very well
If you say so.
Seriously, very few people have a real understanding of what a billion items, a cubic kilometer, or a nanometer actually is. A nanometer sounds really small, but how small? How do you visualise something invisibly small?
You can measure mark out a square kilometer on a flat patch of land and use that to imagine a cubic kilometer, but that doesn't really give you a feel for what a cubic kilometer really involves. Now scale to parsecs.
This is why a lot of quantitative arguments don't come to satisfactory conclusions. When you see 1:10E50 as a probability, at some level of awareness you're almost certainly reading it as 1:50, which doesn't seem that unreasonable.
We're talking fait accompli, baby. We're here, explain it without resort to the old "and then a miracle happened" game, and you'll have a point.
You've just illustrated a point rather neatly. (-:
Why did you insist that the grounds of debate be materialism? Why reason with on hemisphere tied behind your back? Is it some kind of religious conviction?
I've never seen ``we're here'' explained without ``and then a miracle happened'' or more often ``and then a whole passel of miracles rode onto the scene, shot the inconvenient facts, and rescued the hypothesis''. I'd be delighted to see you make a worthwhile attempt. (-:
You see, your statement is both begging the question, and a tautology. Begging the question in that you assume your point is true and insist that I prove it, and a tautology because you've said, in essence ``here is a problem that has no materialistic solution. give me a materialistic solution.''
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His panels, house, car, refrigerator, the road outside his house and so on were not built using solar power (there is one solar panel factory actually run mostly using solar panels). The shops he buys food aren't standalone solar, nor is the service station (`gas station' to Nordamericanos) he fuels up at. And so on. And he doesn't run an airconditioner, spa or chest freezer off those panels, either, does he?
Yes, there is a windfarm at home, but even the enthusiastic Cailfornian windfarms won't make anything like enough for half of California's power demands (which was the topic of discussion), and this is the usual case. Australia is fortunate in having enormous amounts of (mostly uninhabitable) land to plonk windmills down on.
On Barsoom, maybe, but not here.
No wonder nobody else replied - you mentioned a factor that was actually important. (-:
Solar power, wind power and stuff is nice, but the bottom line is there cannot possibly be enough of it even for our current needs even if we coated the entire countryside with collectors - so we need some new source of energy.
We ain't getting it here on Earth, so the obvious answer is...
Got it in one. )-:
...as if electric power were magicked out of the air. It turns out that they're right about the GM plants but for mostly the wrong reasons. GM agriculture is running into all kinds of problems including - tahdahh - lower yields. It's a research cul-de-sac so far.
Yup, just whip a handy-handy Sears Roebuck discount Dyson Sphere out of your back pocket, follow the directions, and you'll have your own private Dyson sphere in minutes, just like on the movies... no worries, mate! (-:
Yup, just whip a handy-handy Sears Roebuck discount Dyson Sphere out of your back pocket, follow the directions, and you'll have your own private Dyson sphere in minutes, just like on the movies... no worries, mate! (-:
There are at least two huge flaws in this; firstly, a generic attack (or a manual followup to a generic probe) is more likely to work, and secondly the hack-attack numbers reflect a smaller population, not necessarily a smaller proportion of a population. It's a great comfort to know that you're unique as you sit there looking at your Mac server full of zeroes.
If I wanted to take advantage of the features advocated by the lecturer, I'd use something like Roxen on Linux on a MIPS box, chrooted and as far as possible readonly (chown/chmod then chattr +i then remove the chattr binary, and if possible also mount -o ro).
Yes, you can. Your Windows box can randomly throw 'sploits at a box you don't know exists until it finds one the admin didn't patch or didn't know about. Often, you don't know your Windows box is doing this, because you don't know that it's been thoroughly zombied.
One-of-a-kinds generally don't help as much as you might think because what you gain in obscurity you lose in maturity (ie, some script kiddie stuff will still work becuase the author made the same mistakes that were found and removed from Apache years ago).
Not so much `withstood' as `denied and papered over the wounds from'.
This consists very much of closing one's eyes and crying `It *IS*, dammit!' - only it's generally done professionally and en masse (cf Wistar and similar conferences).
True, but you left out a pivotal part of the story: what happened to them and when is a theoretical construct.
Now that's just completely wrong. Biologists extracting blood cells from T-Rex bones can get a fairly good idea of an upper limit for the bone's age, based on home much the organic material has decayed. And it's shy at least four noughts of any figure you're likely have in mind. (-:
Of course, when people dig up fresh dinosaur bones, or extract fresh wood from within Manley sandstone, that generally presents them with a pretty big hint about the age of what they've found. But, of course, the false assumptions undergirding this assertion...
...are so important on philosophical/metaphysical grounds that inconvenient observations like those tend to just get swept under the carpet.
I think the pi in your post is a sign from the gods of science that you're making them do too many beetles, and you need to step outside of your reality bubble for a while so they can discuss things with you. (-:
And here's me thinking that fossils of practically everything appear and disappear abruptly in the fossil record. Now where on earth did I get that silly idea? Oh, yes: Earnst Mayer, Stephen Gould, Niles Eldredge, Richard Goldschmidt, Roger Lewin, and let's not forget Charles Darwin. Sounds a bit like a who's who, dunnit?
Ergo: non sequitur.
No, it doesn't. Take as many apes as you please, put them in a dirty nuclear reactor and wind the dial up to `Max' for a few days and see if they evolve at all.
There's a reason you wear a lead coat when you go to have your insides xrayed - and the technician stands behind another lead screen - and it's not the risk of becoming too smart for your family to bear.
They're really astrologers. They believe incredible things about the past, and try to predict the future (often with a flattened-out glass ball, although recently they re-potted their orbiting crystal divination tube).
They even have the physicists jumping through hoops and stretching statistics out of shape in order to make non-optical instruments fit the astrologers' wild theories.
If companies did this kind of thing, they'd be writted* out of the picture before you could blink, but this is Science (insert respectful silence) and cannot be questioned (insert shocked inhalations at `the very idea!').
* Writted (ri'-ted), v, to saturate with offensive court documents.
True, in these widely divergent cases, but what else shall we exterminate?
Lions? [Y/n]
Sharks? [Y/n]
Dolphins? [Y/n]
Where do you draw the line? And yes, dolphins do kill people, in some places more people than sharks.
For example, the discovery of Santa's flying reindeer would be a big step on the road to understanding the physics of his journey, akin in chemistry to discovering the transuranic series, and would have much more impact than finding yet another sign of a stressed creator. For example, the CIA would be absolutely fascinated to get a handle one someone who ``knows when you've been naughty''.
``But seriously folks,'' add to this the 250,000+ species known from fossils and it should be clear that at least every 8th-to-80th transitional form should have shown up in the fossil record we've exhumed so far (BTW, the above ref cites TL Erwin in The Tropical Forest Canopy within Biodiversity, 1988, NAP (WA DC) for a generous ceiling of 30 million species, mostly insects). If we had equal parts transitional and stable species (really, we need many times that because most attempted changes would fail according to any reasonable theory), for example, there should be an absolute scratching minimum of about 2,000 known transitional species discovered in the fossil record by now.
While we're having fun, take DM Raup's figure of 99.9% ( Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? , 1991, WW Norton NY - see this too for commentary and a ceiling of 40M species) extinct species, there should be at least 20 transitional species alive today, and using the 10-30 million species range vs 2 million known, we should have found somewhere between 1 and 4 of those by now.
Maybe one of those is Santa's reindeer? Which, BTW, are probably female...
This explicitly includes the unobfuscated code and almost certainly the obfuscator as well although it is not clear that the obfuscator's source code is a necessary inclusion.
Ah, another Hogfather fan... (-:
If you then practiced, er, discipline with them, could they then be mail order pigs without being Catholic? The Catholics seem to have a monopoly on male-order pigs...
Not a bad thing, except that they're not actually pushing `pure science'.
They're only pushing materialism - as if it were the be-all and end-all, the totality of science - in the guise of total, pure science. Materialism can only take you as far as you currently believe `reality' extends, which can seem to be a long way but is pretty limiting in the grand scheme of things (think Copernicus).
In the end the only proof of her position a materialist actually has is her faith: exclusive proofs are generally impossible, and one good counterexample can break generations of hereinbefore `irrefutable' beliefs.
The big myth underlying materialism is that you can completely understand and control the universe around you, which is again only true in a strictly limited degree, and in reality is just arrogance. Anyone who proclaims total control of their life, to say nothing of the lives of others, is simply displaying the limits of their knowledge (from another POV, their ignorance) in public.
There, have I used enough emotive words now? (-:
I'm guessing that's the magazine's view of us, anyway. (-:
Whereas a quality zealot will bury you in mostly-useless paperwork instead. Great choice.
But Advocate != Zealot. I'd avoid hiring a zealot of any kind, if I could, they're more trouble than they're worth. This is not to say that strong personal preferences are bad (they generally aren't), but that monomania is.
Some drivers, yes. I shouldn't have been quite so specific.
Amen, brother, amen... (-:
Firstly, I have to modify Linux source code very seldom (maybe one system in thirty), and when I do it's for very obscure reasons, and it's good (yea, verily, even great!) to have the choice in that circumstance - especially since I specialise in odd systems (the kind of stuff that the MCSE brigade don't even dream of doing (and when they're stupid enough to try anyway the resulting house-of-cards heap of VB makes Heath Robinson look positively conservative)).
If I installed ``cookie-cutter'' Office+Web+Email desktops all day, and servers to suit, there's no reason I'd ever bother working with source. Or for that matter, for dirtying my hands with media, since net boot ROMs have become common.
The alternatives are:
Yah, and be sure follow the threads through to their termination. TO runs the gamut of dud debating techniques, there are constant examples of any class of mistake imaginable (the dialogue with Remine illustrated most of them) and they ``win'' most arguments by begging the question, as you are about to do. (-:
Oh, and by publishing before all of the outstanding answers are in, and calling their claims unanswerable.
Seriously, very few people have a real understanding of what a billion items, a cubic kilometer, or a nanometer actually is. A nanometer sounds really small, but how small? How do you visualise something invisibly small?
You can measure mark out a square kilometer on a flat patch of land and use that to imagine a cubic kilometer, but that doesn't really give you a feel for what a cubic kilometer really involves. Now scale to parsecs.
This is why a lot of quantitative arguments don't come to satisfactory conclusions. When you see 1:10E50 as a probability, at some level of awareness you're almost certainly reading it as 1:50, which doesn't seem that unreasonable.
You've just illustrated a point rather neatly. (-:
Why did you insist that the grounds of debate be materialism? Why reason with on hemisphere tied behind your back? Is it some kind of religious conviction?
I've never seen ``we're here'' explained without ``and then a miracle happened'' or more often ``and then a whole passel of miracles rode onto the scene, shot the inconvenient facts, and rescued the hypothesis''. I'd be delighted to see you make a worthwhile attempt. (-:
You see, your statement is both begging the question, and a tautology. Begging the question in that you assume your point is true and insist that I prove it, and a tautology because you've said, in essence ``here is a problem that has no materialistic solution. give me a materialistic solution.''
After that, maybe we can negotiate ethics... (-: