My wireless router still works just fine from 100m down the street and through a wall, which is why I suppress SSID broadcasting and WEP104 encrypt it. When my ISP is down, I borrow my neighbour's connection with two clicks, as his ADSL router is also wireless but he hasn't locked it down.
It has a screen, keyboard and in some cases a pointing device. It has storage, and many computers these days -- especially laptops -- have an antenna. Mobile phones run WinCE, PDAs run WinCE, computers run WinCE. Mobile phone == computer. Clear on that?
Microsoft sell computer OSes, in fact have an economic monopoly on them. Microsoft have been slapped down (well, slapped on the wrist in the USA) for bundling other products with their OS (MSIE and WMP being two specific examples) to force it into peoples' hands, thus heading off competitors. Tangent have just sued Microsoft for damages from non-compliance with said slapping-down. Microsoft are convicted anti-trust violators, there is no question of that in said lawsuit. Clear on that?
Why should bundling a (doubtless proprietary and DRMmed to the gills) VoIP product in exactly the same way be any different from bundling WMP or MSIE?
It certainly flies in the face of the spirit if not the letter of their existing antitrust convictions. If they released a genuinely platform-agnostic H.323 application, then they would have no problem. Chances of that? Ahuk, ahuk.
The thumbnails load fine...
on
KDE 4 Screenshots
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...but the main images are served from a MySQL database, which, big surprise, has been smashed flat by the unexpected and overwhelming load. I'm impressed that it even manages to produce a good error message. (-:
...I wondered just how large a table-top you could fit into a linear accelerator, and which accelerator would be able to run whole kilos of material up to near-light speeds.
Water is a pretty good shock buffer, and there's a lot of energy in a tidal wave. You'd be better off putting a few big bombs in a hole somewhere else.
...with 4x 50kt jerry-rigged fission bombs, rigged for JATO/RATO, and looking for a homing signal emanating from the window-cleaning rig of the tallest (remaining) building in NY.
A timer expires or button is pushed, two RATO units fire (7t of thrust), kicking the end of the seatainer up, RATO units to be discarded (released or destroyed) when vertical. Eight more RATO units go off (28t) in what is now the "tail" of a brick-shaped rocket weighing perhaps 7t, flinging it upwards from Upper New York Bay at three gees for ten seconds. Half a second before the RATO bottles expire (for stability reasons), shaped charges kick them out the side together and then disassemble the seatainer. The nukes, each mounted on their own RATO bottle and using a near-enough guidance system (say, one borrowed from model rocketry), then kick off in four different initial directions for another ten seconds again at a delta-a of roughly three gees (grand total of 17 seconds at 3 gees minus roughly a second for organisation), with their rough guidance systems taking them all more-or-less in the direction of the "target" building.
At this point, four 50kt nukes go off together, roughly 500m above Manhatten. Four major airports, a shipping terminal and a Navy port facility are destroyed, along with the Statue of Liberty, some important pieces of civil architecture, millions of people and America's morale. If you were doing this In Real Life, you would set off three or more of them at once to up the odds of success. And you wonder why Home Security are so twitchy about terrorists...
Lots of detail to be worked out, of course, but that's the ten-minute How To Deal America A Mortal Wound On A Budget Of $1,000,000 Or Less plan. If half a dozen people from a Coast Guard vessel can go over a container-ship in a few hours and ensure that no such devices are aboard, that kind of approach suddenly becomes much harder.
Next, we look at the Big Steel Dart Plus Fairings Replaces Legitimate Satellite Payload scenario...
You also have to ask yourself: what would you expect an evolution-dominated textbook to say? "We're presenting six hundred pages on evolution here, but we don't think it's important?"
Repeated assertion is not proof.
Evolution is a theory (perhaps I should say Theory) which attempts to explain Linnaeus' organisation. That it succeeds is what's in question here. The Creationists explain the same things which evolutionary principle has had kingship of claimed for it, many of them far more plausibly. They claim, with this as justification, that creation is the central organising principle of biology.
You assert that "creation science has yet to generate a single testable, falsifiable, hypothesis, which is the first step to becoming a theory", but you do so speciously. Creation science sites are awash in hypotheses and you simply haven't noticed. Fixed speciation is one such hypothesis, and it matches reality exactly. The absence of interspecies fossils is another prediction of Creartion, and so far they've won the day on that one pretty convincingly (the closest to a refutation we've come is that glorified hoatzin called archaeopteryx).
Early Creationists (at least in Europe) got too carried away with this and insisted that not just species but individual subspecies of animal were immutable. This in the face of cross-breeding programs. Mind you, this was back in the day when Spontaneous Generation was accepted as the scientifically valid opposition to this concept, so I'm inclined to cut both sides some slack here.
Go and actually readsomeCreationistsites -- know thy enemy and all that. They've got reasonable-sounding hypotheses on geology, astronomy, all manner of stuff. If you're going into a battle of wits, do remember to go in armed! Read some of the refutationsof DDI (and DCD's errata) as well. Have an argument, not a shouting match! (-:
Meanwhile, there are many evolutionary biologists who would cheerfully donate a limb to the cause if they thought they'd get a naturalistic self-organising principle out of it. That alone should be a big hint that there's something major still missing from the panacea called evolution.
However, if someone has a proposal for the development of life as we see it which includes pink unicorns, the scientific approach is to discount it based on the effects, or lack of effects, claimed for the pink unicorns, rather than simply writing them off "because they're impossible" or "because we have no need for them".
By the way, if someone discovers a pointy horse-analogue hidden away in darkest Africa somewhere which is anything like pink, I'm just about gunna die laughing.
Back on topic: if you dismiss a claim out of hand, you have eschewed science and slipped into the arena of politics. Good luck there, it's like trying to dance on ball-bearings.
I think the concept of a military who're happy about letting a juvenile delinquent loose with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of expensive (and later we discover that they're fragile, too) starship docked to millions of tonnes of expensive space station was probably the first thing that trashed any sense of plausibility for me.
I was really looking forward to the thirty-second bomb, too. )-:
Demonstrate a plausible combination of natural forces (even if artificially accelerated, the demonstration itself should be quite telling; however, the forces must be natural, that is, no genetic surgery or whatever) causing one species to extend itself beyond anything which could reasonably be called "its kind".
Taking a bird and causing it to revert from feathers to fur would bve a good one. Try an emu, we have a significant excess of them and they're already part of the way there. Besides, the state government would be delighted to start an emu-fur industry.
If Fundamentalist Creation Science is correct (there are other breeds featuring more in common with Intelligent Design), there will not be conflict between scripture and observation. This core idea can indeed be challenged and refined by natural evidence, where natural is carefully defined to not have a leading capital letter.
By definition, Creationism cannot be challenged by Naturalistic evidence.
Both can (and inevitably have, and are) challenged by little-n natural evidence. This challenging and the rational responses to it are what make each Science. If Creationists answered everything with "goddunnit" (as I've seen several highly-educated ignoramuses assert), it would not be Science. Think about that carefully, because reciprocal is also true: the instant you claim that "godcanthavedunnit", you also eschew Science.
Even if you don't accept that last point, an observation remains for you that Creation Science can (and should) be challenged by observations.
The central organising principle of biology is not evolution, by the way. The bloke who first organised biology was Linnaeus, and he organised it because he expected it to be systematic. He expected it to be systematic because he was, essentially, a Creationist. Evolution cannot be expected to be naturally systematic. The fact that biology as we observe it is largely systematic, I count as a point in favour of the Creationists.
When I first ran across the concept, I counted the disorder we also see against Creationists, until one carefully pointed out that said disorder was an expected consequence of their theology. None of the Creationist models are really mature enough to compete head-on with the well-established Evolutionist models, but the fact that they give Evolutionists such enormous trouble for a relatively recent and trifling investment of effort should terrify anyone with a vested interest in Evolutionism. Can you imagine the depth of the pooh Evolutionism would be in if they had a research budget like NASA's to play with?
Slashdot Mirror
...depending on how you set it up.
My wireless router still works just fine from 100m down the street and through a wall, which is why I suppress SSID broadcasting and WEP104 encrypt it. When my ISP is down, I borrow my neighbour's connection with two clicks, as his ADSL router is also wireless but he hasn't locked it down.
One assignment, problem solved, that'll be $20 and take the yak of your choice.
It has a screen, keyboard and in some cases a pointing device. It has storage, and many computers these days -- especially laptops -- have an antenna. Mobile phones run WinCE, PDAs run WinCE, computers run WinCE. Mobile phone == computer. Clear on that?
Microsoft sell computer OSes, in fact have an economic monopoly on them. Microsoft have been slapped down (well, slapped on the wrist in the USA) for bundling other products with their OS (MSIE and WMP being two specific examples) to force it into peoples' hands, thus heading off competitors. Tangent have just sued Microsoft for damages from non-compliance with said slapping-down. Microsoft are convicted anti-trust violators, there is no question of that in said lawsuit. Clear on that?
Why should bundling a (doubtless proprietary and DRMmed to the gills) VoIP product in exactly the same way be any different from bundling WMP or MSIE?
It certainly flies in the face of the spirit if not the letter of their existing antitrust convictions. If they released a genuinely platform-agnostic H.323 application, then they would have no problem. Chances of that? Ahuk, ahuk.
...the tags.
Perhaps he figured that they were redundant?
(deem g/d/r implied)
...but the main images are served from a MySQL database, which, big surprise, has been smashed flat by the unexpected and overwhelming load. I'm impressed that it even manages to produce a good error message. (-:
How dare you imply that I'm not a lord of the universe? Elitist scum!
(deem enclsing sarcasm tags implied)
...I wondered just how large a table-top you could fit into a linear accelerator, and which accelerator would be able to run whole kilos of material up to near-light speeds.
Water is a pretty good shock buffer, and there's a lot of energy in a tidal wave. You'd be better off putting a few big bombs in a hole somewhere else.
...with 4x 50kt jerry-rigged fission bombs, rigged for JATO/RATO, and looking for a homing signal emanating from the window-cleaning rig of the tallest (remaining) building in NY.
A timer expires or button is pushed, two RATO units fire (7t of thrust), kicking the end of the seatainer up, RATO units to be discarded (released or destroyed) when vertical. Eight more RATO units go off (28t) in what is now the "tail" of a brick-shaped rocket weighing perhaps 7t, flinging it upwards from Upper New York Bay at three gees for ten seconds. Half a second before the RATO bottles expire (for stability reasons), shaped charges kick them out the side together and then disassemble the seatainer. The nukes, each mounted on their own RATO bottle and using a near-enough guidance system (say, one borrowed from model rocketry), then kick off in four different initial directions for another ten seconds again at a delta-a of roughly three gees (grand total of 17 seconds at 3 gees minus roughly a second for organisation), with their rough guidance systems taking them all more-or-less in the direction of the "target" building.
At this point, four 50kt nukes go off together, roughly 500m above Manhatten. Four major airports, a shipping terminal and a Navy port facility are destroyed, along with the Statue of Liberty, some important pieces of civil architecture, millions of people and America's morale. If you were doing this In Real Life, you would set off three or more of them at once to up the odds of success. And you wonder why Home Security are so twitchy about terrorists...
Lots of detail to be worked out, of course, but that's the ten-minute How To Deal America A Mortal Wound On A Budget Of $1,000,000 Or Less plan. If half a dozen people from a Coast Guard vessel can go over a container-ship in a few hours and ensure that no such devices are aboard, that kind of approach suddenly becomes much harder.
Next, we look at the Big Steel Dart Plus Fairings Replaces Legitimate Satellite Payload scenario...
Xenon, radioactive warrior goddess? (-:
...sweeping claims like that. (-:
They have whole (usually very polite, sometimes not) flamewars in the uncertainty bands, often without reference to what they're actually doing.
...is a long way from "the task for which they were trained".
Only a few.
You also have to ask yourself: what would you expect an evolution-dominated textbook to say? "We're presenting six hundred pages on evolution here, but we don't think it's important?"
Repeated assertion is not proof.
Evolution is a theory (perhaps I should say Theory) which attempts to explain Linnaeus' organisation. That it succeeds is what's in question here. The Creationists explain the same things which evolutionary principle has had kingship of claimed for it, many of them far more plausibly. They claim, with this as justification, that creation is the central organising principle of biology.
You assert that "creation science has yet to generate a single testable, falsifiable, hypothesis, which is the first step to becoming a theory", but you do so speciously. Creation science sites are awash in hypotheses and you simply haven't noticed. Fixed speciation is one such hypothesis, and it matches reality exactly. The absence of interspecies fossils is another prediction of Creartion, and so far they've won the day on that one pretty convincingly (the closest to a refutation we've come is that glorified hoatzin called archaeopteryx).
Early Creationists (at least in Europe) got too carried away with this and insisted that not just species but individual subspecies of animal were immutable. This in the face of cross-breeding programs. Mind you, this was back in the day when Spontaneous Generation was accepted as the scientifically valid opposition to this concept, so I'm inclined to cut both sides some slack here.
Go and actually read some Creationist sites -- know thy enemy and all that. They've got reasonable-sounding hypotheses on geology, astronomy, all manner of stuff. If you're going into a battle of wits, do remember to go in armed! Read some of the refutations of DDI (and DCD's errata) as well. Have an argument, not a shouting match! (-:
Meanwhile, there are many evolutionary biologists who would cheerfully donate a limb to the cause if they thought they'd get a naturalistic self-organising principle out of it. That alone should be a big hint that there's something major still missing from the panacea called evolution.
However, if someone has a proposal for the development of life as we see it which includes pink unicorns, the scientific approach is to discount it based on the effects, or lack of effects, claimed for the pink unicorns, rather than simply writing them off "because they're impossible" or "because we have no need for them".
By the way, if someone discovers a pointy horse-analogue hidden away in darkest Africa somewhere which is anything like pink, I'm just about gunna die laughing.
Back on topic: if you dismiss a claim out of hand, you have eschewed science and slipped into the arena of politics. Good luck there, it's like trying to dance on ball-bearings.
Here, nobody fills out surveys that badly. At least, nobody does so accidentally.
...termites are one of the organisms that have changed the least in their entire history.
No, seriously, you're bang on the money. (-:
The Starship Troopers observations, that is.
I think the concept of a military who're happy about letting a juvenile delinquent loose with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of expensive (and later we discover that they're fragile, too) starship docked to millions of tonnes of expensive space station was probably the first thing that trashed any sense of plausibility for me.
I was really looking forward to the thirty-second bomb, too. )-:
Demonstrate a plausible combination of natural forces (even if artificially accelerated, the demonstration itself should be quite telling; however, the forces must be natural, that is, no genetic surgery or whatever) causing one species to extend itself beyond anything which could reasonably be called "its kind".
Taking a bird and causing it to revert from feathers to fur would bve a good one. Try an emu, we have a significant excess of them and they're already part of the way there. Besides, the state government would be delighted to start an emu-fur industry.
If Fundamentalist Creation Science is correct (there are other breeds featuring more in common with Intelligent Design), there will not be conflict between scripture and observation. This core idea can indeed be challenged and refined by natural evidence, where natural is carefully defined to not have a leading capital letter.
By definition, Creationism cannot be challenged by Naturalistic evidence.
Both can (and inevitably have, and are) challenged by little-n natural evidence. This challenging and the rational responses to it are what make each Science. If Creationists answered everything with "goddunnit" (as I've seen several highly-educated ignoramuses assert), it would not be Science. Think about that carefully, because reciprocal is also true: the instant you claim that "godcanthavedunnit", you also eschew Science.
Even if you don't accept that last point, an observation remains for you that Creation Science can (and should) be challenged by observations.
The central organising principle of biology is not evolution, by the way. The bloke who first organised biology was Linnaeus, and he organised it because he expected it to be systematic. He expected it to be systematic because he was, essentially, a Creationist. Evolution cannot be expected to be naturally systematic. The fact that biology as we observe it is largely systematic, I count as a point in favour of the Creationists.
When I first ran across the concept, I counted the disorder we also see against Creationists, until one carefully pointed out that said disorder was an expected consequence of their theology. None of the Creationist models are really mature enough to compete head-on with the well-established Evolutionist models, but the fact that they give Evolutionists such enormous trouble for a relatively recent and trifling investment of effort should terrify anyone with a vested interest in Evolutionism. Can you imagine the depth of the pooh Evolutionism would be in if they had a research budget like NASA's to play with?
Responsible ACs do exist. Some of them evidently have multiple PhDs in various fields. They're just vanishingly rare.
...I think it's only polite to return the favour. What's the big deal? (-:
"Chemical Evolution".
It's mutation and natural selection for chemicals instead of organisms, but it's still the same process, still evolution.
Oh, and still impossible. (-: