You don't have to build a fully-enclosed Dyson sphere to get vast benefits from stellar engineering. "Simply" putting up a fleet of steerable mirrors (a Dyson swarm) in solar orbit is fantastically useful all by itself, but it also gives you enough energy to make more of them, which in turn gives you enough power to fully surround, if not enclose, the star...which lets you harness its entire output as you like.
Everyone gets hung up on that one episode of Star Trek, but stellar engineering really does get more practical the more you do it.
Having sexual intercourse with someone of the same gender is usually a choice (Assuming there is no gun to your head). It is at least as much a choice as being overweight, underweight, or continuing an addiction. As a matter of fact, in some cases stopping an addiction can be deadly, but refraining from homosexual relationships is not.
Perhaps not directly. But depression can kill you (i.e. suicide) - and depression and/or suicide could be the end result of a misguided attempt to fight one's own natural tendencies.
We have already tacitly decided as a culture that we have no problem telling people to fight their natural tendencies; that ship sailed a long time ago.
We tell the fatasses to lose weight, and bombard them (and allow corporate d-bags to bombard them) with propaganda to get them to hate their bodies (so we can sell them diet and exercise products that won't work and we know won't work). How many fat people suffer from depression? How many of these people commit suicide annually?
We tell the ugly (and less than “knockout-level” attractive) people (especially girls) to do everything in their power, including surgery, to transform themselves into something that should be allowed to appear in public. How many teenage girls commit suicide annually because of the unrealistic body-images we show all day long on TV?
And you know what? We get the hell over it, because that's how the economy works and it's how we pay for all of our entertainment: if it weren't for the ads that make us hate something about ourselves, our bodies, our finances, our self-esteem (hah!), our allergies, our car, our house, our ISP, ad infinitum...there'd be no money to pay for the TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, Web sites, etc. we use every day...and there'd be no reason to buy much of anything, and there'd be no paychecks for the auto workers, drug makers, home builders, and sweatshop kids making all that crap we buy but don't need.
Sometimes it makes us feel bad, but we have a cure for that too.
Apple owns CUPS. The same printing system as used by most linux distros as well as the BSD's.
Sure, because they bought it from Easy Software Products, and hired the guy (Mike Sweet) who actually wrote it.
...and then have the cojones to put this on the main page: “CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for Mac OS® X and other UNIX®-like operating systems.”
This is basically true, in that Apple continue to pay Mike, and he continues to develop CUPS...but it's also so so wrong.
Both science and religion attempt to reconcile our observations of the world with our understanding of the world, so yes, they are comparable at a certain abstraction.
The difference is that one makes stuff up and says it's true no matter what, while the other one makes stuff up and includes the caveat: if it doesn't work as expected, it's time to come up with something better that has to fit all previous observations. In this sense, religion is the antithesis of science, as religion is 100% confident, while science's maximum is 99.999...%.
Religion also has a moral, social component that in order to maintain the above component, is likewise absolute and true regardless. If one discards the above and only follows this second component, religion becomes less religion and more organized spirituality. Then it is compatible with science.
You've got it exactly backwards (and wrong, but that's not the point I'm making). Understanding the world is not at all what religion is about, because it is irrelevant to religious thought. For example, the actual mechanism of the origin of species doesn't matter one bit to the religious part of a person, because he's far more interested in the facts on the ground -- what's going on around him, and religion has a lot to say on those subjects. That is, the explanations about the natural world provided by virtually all religions are purely in service of moral and social directives -- not the other way around.
The main reason we have this problem today is probably that the Catholic church was by far the largest sponsor of actual scientific inquiry, as well as the most organized educational system, and the largest source of government power, for hundreds of years.
People generally don't care how the universe works. What they want to know is how they should behave...but when the people telling you how to behave are also telling you how the universe works (because they're the only people actually investigating it), you believe them.
Galileo wasn't persecuted because he proved that the Earth revolved around the Sun (after all, Pope Clement VII had already expressed interest in Copernicus's theories); he was persecuted because he wanted to change Church dogma because of it...and that was just stupid.
Apple owns Objective-C. They have licensed portions back to GCC w/o the Apple runtime.
No, they don't, and no, they haven't.
Some time about 1999, Apple signed over the copyrights on their changes to GCC back to the FSF (who then licensed them back to Apple).
What Apple DID have was a trade mark on the name "Objective-C" (which Next Computer had previously bought from Stepstone Corp.), but it was canceled by the USPTO in 2006. (though there is a related trademark that was registered in 2008).
Either way, ownership of a trade mark does not equate to ownership of a programming language.
The problem with Crusade was that is was basically 'The Galan Show'. He was, intended or not, the main character, the one pulling all the strings, and by far the most interesting. Unfortunatelly that wasn't really meant to be the focus of the show, which resulted in a confused mess.
The problem you're referring to was mainly caused by the short season. TNT contracted for a full 22 episode first season, stopped production after five were done, made some changes, etc. then killed it after 7 more. Now, when you've plotted out 22 episodes of a TV show, you write and film them out of order so that you have all your actors when you need them.
Even with the changes made after the first five episodes filmed, if they'd had the full 22 ep. run they would have spread out the Galen story arc so that they weren't all running together. But because they hadn't been able to film "Appearances and Other Deceits" (in which there would be a "laundry accident" to bridge the two uniform types that were filmed, allowing the first five eps to be placed in the middle of the season somewhere), about the only way the series could be shown was the order that it WAS shown.
These things have all happened over periods of thousands or millions of years though. The earth's temperature has got noticeably hotter over the last 100 years or so. This is an unusual event, not business as usual, and even if it wasn't, being worried about it is a sign of common sense not stupidity.
Not so much. They happened many times over thousands and millions of years, but didn't happen over that range of time scales.
It has been shown that cooling and warming tend to be fast-moving events. For example, the Permian extinction that kicked off the evolution of dinosaurs and mammals, started out with modest warming of about 5 degrees C. This wouldn't have been a huge problem, except the oceans warmed enough to release vast methane hydrite deposits.
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 is, on the order of four times more powerful. These methane deposits raised the average global temperature by at least another ten degrees over the course of perhaps a year. Now, because methane reacts strongly with oxygen and warm water doesn't hold much oxygen either, the result was an oxygen crash that killed about 99.6% of the world's animals, and 92% of the species.
That's a pretty bad worst-case scenario, but definitely a good reason to keep an eye on the oceanic methane hydrite deposits. Because if those start going off at a high rate, it's chain-reaction time: methane increases warming, raising the temperature of the ocean, which causes more methane to get released, which raises the temperature further, and so on until you're out of methane to release. "Luckily", there aren't enough greenhouse gases on the planet to go runaway, so it settles down eventually (until a billion years from now when the Sun heats the Earth enough to set up a water vapor-based runaway greenhouse that boils the oceans permanently).
Also luckily, we seem to be in an interglacial period -- one of those rare and short-lived times when it's warm. Mostly because of the current configuration of the continents, "long-term" climate studies (unfortunately limited to only the past 250,000 years or so) show short periods of warm global temperatures surrounded by deep glacial chills.
Personally, my hunch is that human activity has had an effect on the length and height of the warm period, and that it is significant, but probably is not the driving force and definitely not the sole cause. And re: my earlier "scary" scenario, don't think we have too much to worry about on that front; if it gets much warmer, Greenland and the Arctic are likely to melt enough to temporarily shut down the thermohaline conveyor and trigger global cooling (resulting in re-desertification of India and southeast Asia, but that's "only" a quarter of the planet's humans and not a matter of _species_ survival).
I'd like to think that humans are the driving force behind the present warming, and in fact I hope we are...because the idea that we're still just along for the ride and can't Do Something About It is far FAR scarier than the idea that we caused it. If we did it, we are likely to be powerful enough to do something about it. If we had little ot no effect, then we're basically just passengers on this rock and have no choice but to adapt.
Surely every organisation makes an effort to secure their networks.. but put it in a mission statement? I think to 'fight in cyberspace' sounds much more exciting than just to secure networks.
Yes, it would seem to be more exciting, and it matches far better with the USAF mission than say, the Army's.
You use the Army when you need to take or control places on land. You use the Navy and its right arm the Marine Corps when you need to project long-term power. But when it Absolutely Positively Has To Be Destroyed In Twenty Minutes Or Less, the Air Force are simply the right guys to talk to. One of their main jobs is to make far away things go "boom" quickly...and their other main job is to take pictures of those far-away things on a moment's notice so that they can make them go "boom" if ordered to, or relay those pictures to other armed services so they can do their jobs.
As such, cyberwar seems like a very good fit for the Air Force -- it's just how they operate, and part of why they're often called the Chair Force by the other services.:)
Regarding your Antarctic ice comments, it's not about how much snow is in a year, but that there are only four seasons in a year and they form an annual pattern, like tree rings (which also show a record of time lasting longer than 6000 years).
In addition, it seems incredibly unlikely that the strength of the weak nuclear force, as demonstrated by the rate of decay of various radioactive elements, would have changed appreciably since the Earth was formed. The rate of decay of the Earth's uranium deposits tells us that the surface finally finished solidifying about 4.2 billion years ago -- after the so-called "heavy bombardment" stage.
Geomagnetic combined with igneus rock deposition data also gives us a record of the Earth's magnetic field reversals going back billions of years.
Radiocarbon dating can only be used to date living things though, not ices, and it is not particularly precise for creatures that died more than about 40,000 years or so ago IIRC. It's based on the amount of radioactive Carbon-14 in the bodies of creatures relative to the level of regular Carbon-12. During a creature's lifetime, the level remains _fairly_ constant (thus its inaccuracy) but after it dies the levels begin to drop due to radioactive decay.
As for the length of time life has been evolving, it hasn't been 4.5 billion years. Life has only been on the planet for 3.6 billion, and the first multicellular life didn't appear until after the last Snowball event ended 620 million years ago. Before that time, all the life on Earth was stuff like bacteria and algae and the occasional protozoa..and they are still by far the dominant life forms on the planet.
Really? Personally I would think it would be a lot more interesting to design a really cool computer from the get-go, if you knew how, rather than starting off with vacuum tubes and working your way slowly up from there.
But that's not the equivalent of evolution. Equivalent would be the creation of a single "vacuum tube" with the capability to spontaneously develop into a vast supercomputer network. And that is a way cooler trick than designing a mere computer in the first place, wouldn't you say?
The aliens must be laughing themselves sick at our hubris. The possibility that our weapons might prove a threat to a culture capable of mere interstellar travel (let alone "intergalactic") is about the same as an ant colony against the U.S. Army.
If there were any advanced alien species out there with interstellar travel, we wouldn't have been allowed to survive this long. This is not out of evil, or imperialist tendencies, but simple self-preservation.
For the same reason, should we reach the interstellar-travel stage, we would not allow other species to develop to a point where they are even a potential threat.
Even if one would like to believe that other species would be benevolent, when you're dealing with the survival of your whole species you simply cannot afford to be wrong. It's just not an option.
And if there exist aliens who came before us (unlikely, for a host of reasons not limited to the fact that our planet was not colonized by them millions of years ago), then we don't even want them to know we're here -- they probably wouldn't even notice swatting us.
So. Object (eventually, if you like) weighing, say, 1 kiloton (to give you some perspective, the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier, is about 77 kilotons), comes into Earth's atmosphere at a relative velocity of, oh, say 1,000,000 K/sec, coming straight down (to minimize friction and time-in atmosphere.)
Three times the speed of light? Suuuuuure.
A 1KT mass at a "mere" 50,000 kps (one sixth the speed of light) would impact with a force orders of magnitude greater than all of the nuclear weapons ever manufactured by man. It's what you call an extinction event. And at that delta-v it doesn't matter what angle it strikes...you're toast, period.
we dont have a quasar at the center of out galaxy, the closest one is over 200 Mpc away.
We don't currently have an active quasar in the center of our galaxy. When (note: not if) the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy begins feeding again (within the next billion years or so, when stars start getting thrown into its immediate vicinity by the gravity of the Andromeda galaxy), the quasar will go active again.
Quasars are just supermassive black holes getting fed lots of material. And as such, they turn on and off.
Oops, it's not a neutron star that triggers a Type 1a ("Type A") supernova, it's a carbon-oxygen white dwarf that reaches the Chandrasekhar limit (aka "critical mass").
Of course, you may wonder how we figured out how far some objects were to begin with to USE our distance = (constant) x speed formula. This post is getting a bit long, but it turns out that supernova, explosions of very massive stars at the end of their lives, tend to have an absolute maximum brightness that has a simple relationship to the length of time they "explode". Thus, supernovae can serve as a yardstick if we can spot them in other galaxies; and fortunately, they are bright enough so that we can - I think they are the ONLY individual stars we can discern in other galaxies; all the others are just too dim from those distances....
Specifically, we talk about Type A supernovae, which always have the same intrinsic brightness.
Type A supernovae are what happen when a neutron star is drawing matter from (feeding from) a companion normal star, usually in the main sequence. As it collects matter, it gets to a certain point and explodes. Usually, both of the stars survive, with the companion being somewhat less massive afterward.:)
The reason Type A supernovae are always the same brightness is that it always takes the same amount of matter for the neutron star to reach critical mass.
We can tell the distance for Type A supernovae by observing one occurring near a Cepheid variable star (and thus relatively nearby).
Cepheids are stars whose variability (the rate at which it dims and brightens) is directly related to its luminosity. So by looking at a Cepheid's variability, we can calculate how intrinsically bright it is. If a Type A supernova occurs near a known Cepheid, we can use the supernova's brightness to refine our calculations of how far other Type As are. And so we have two linked "Standard Candles" for the universe, one for relatively short distances and one for the rest of the universe.
A plant fulfilling orders from your largest customer is never obsolete as long as [...]
Guess what? Losing the use of such an absurdly expensive plant in this manner is a net drain on Intel's profitability, relative to that of other fabs.
When you've got a fab making Pentium 4 wafers and three chips don't spec at 3.6 GHz (but do spec at 3.2), you can and probably will still sell all of them.
If that very same fab is making 733MHz Celeron wafers, and three of the chips on a wafer don't spec at 733, they are junk and you eat the cost, because no one will buy them. It doesn't matter if it specs lower, because that's not what the customer will buy.
We're discussing a multi-billion-dollar facility whose sole purpose is to produce $30 chips; and it costs nearly that much to produce them. The very same facility could be producing chips that sell for $1000 or more at retail.
Intel recognize that it was a bad business decision to provide the CPU for the first Xbox, and will not make that mistake again.
There's another alternative - buy a commercial package that does what you need - and given MS' profits for teh last qtr I'd say a lot of people are chosing that alternative. That's the key - if OSS deveopers want people to use their software, then it has to be a viable alternative; simply being free is not enough if it doesn't do what is needed.
You got it right, but missed it.:)
Most of us don't care if you, or anyone else, uses the stuff we write. Your needs weren't considered in the first place; the code was written because we needed it.
If you use the result, great; maybe you'll use it to solve some problem that will bug us some day. But if you don't, it's not going to bother us in the slightest because unless we're being paid to care about what you want, there's no reason for us to do it -- and we don't.
Luckilly common sense prevailed and they didn't use such things in WW2.
Chemical weapons were not used in WW2 because the other side was prepared for it -- the same reason they weren't used late in WW1. If you shoot off a chemical weapon and the soldiers on the other side have protective gear, the only people you'll be killing will be people who don't; i.e. civilians. Thus, no reason to use them.
You however, say the military is just part of a natural evolution of technology. You are only half right. Some new technologies have been developed by the military first, like the internet. There are also many other inventions/technologies that were the product of a small group of inventors researchers...like powered human flight.
Powered human flight was developed by two guys who were trying to get a War Department contract. In fact, those same two gentlemen got the US Army to start the Army Signal Corps Aeronautical Division, the forerunner of today's Air Force.
The first person to die in an airplane crash was Signal Corps Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge -- Orville Wright himself was at the controls, and suffered serious injuries.
I can't find the link (or the title) now, but Card's approach to the science fiction field reminds me in some subtle way of a sf story about a brilliant molecular geneticist who engineered a virus that would promote his religion's idea of chastity but didn't have quite enoug foresight to predict all its effects. (Does anyone know what I'm talking about? It's fairly well-known.)
I think you're thinking of "The White Plague", by Frank Herbert.
The X window system is the only *multiuser* GUI out there. The Mac is an interesting hybrid in that it features a nice multi-user kernel with a single user GUI bolted on. Being able to remote that would bring a lot of power to the already fine Apple experience.
Boy, you're going to really throw a rod when you hear this...
They used to be able to do a remote GUI, until they killed DPS.
NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP applications could run their displays on other machines, and it was actually more responsive than X because the drawing commands and most of the event handling were done on the machine actually displaying the app.
The app would send commands (possibly including PostScript code fragments to be executed in the display server...) over a compressible text link, and get feedback over that same link.
Oh, goody. Mac-hating troll boy is back. Your "there's really nothing new" troll was bogus when I schooled you here, and it's bogus now. Crawl back into your hole and leave the grown-ups to talk.
Let's go through the list of the Apple Innovations you used to "school" your hapless "troll boy", shall we?
Message Framework
Apple Help
Address Book
AppleScript
Key-Value Coding and data binding
Serialization
Search Kit (and Spotlight)
Property Lists
NSUserDefaults
the Undo architecture
Cocoa Drag and Drop
Quartz 2D
Distributed Objects
Cocoa XML-RPC and SOAP APIs
the various NSURL interfaces
Web Kit
Core Audio
Rendezvous
CFNetwork
the printing API
QuickTime
Keychain
Certificate services
Authorization services
the entire massive text subsystem
Of your list, the following are actually Apple Mac OS X additions:
data binding
Cocoa XML-RPC and SOAP APIs
the various NSURL interfaces
Web Kit (partial credit for this)
CFNetwork
All of the rest were either done by other people (Rendezvous: Motorola; Keyring, Auth, Cert: Intel) or inherited from NeXT.
Slashdot Mirror
that's 'older than time_t.'
You don't have to build a fully-enclosed Dyson sphere to get vast benefits from stellar engineering. "Simply" putting up a fleet of steerable mirrors (a Dyson swarm) in solar orbit is fantastically useful all by itself, but it also gives you enough energy to make more of them, which in turn gives you enough power to fully surround, if not enclose, the star...which lets you harness its entire output as you like.
Everyone gets hung up on that one episode of Star Trek, but stellar engineering really does get more practical the more you do it.
We have already tacitly decided as a culture that we have no problem telling people to fight their natural tendencies; that ship sailed a long time ago.
We tell the fatasses to lose weight, and bombard them (and allow corporate d-bags to bombard them) with propaganda to get them to hate their bodies (so we can sell them diet and exercise products that won't work and we know won't work). How many fat people suffer from depression? How many of these people commit suicide annually?
We tell the ugly (and less than “knockout-level” attractive) people (especially girls) to do everything in their power, including surgery, to transform themselves into something that should be allowed to appear in public. How many teenage girls commit suicide annually because of the unrealistic body-images we show all day long on TV?
And you know what? We get the hell over it, because that's how the economy works and it's how we pay for all of our entertainment: if it weren't for the ads that make us hate something about ourselves, our bodies, our finances, our self-esteem (hah!), our allergies, our car, our house, our ISP, ad infinitum...there'd be no money to pay for the TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, Web sites, etc. we use every day...and there'd be no reason to buy much of anything, and there'd be no paychecks for the auto workers, drug makers, home builders, and sweatshop kids making all that crap we buy but don't need.
Sometimes it makes us feel bad, but we have a cure for that too.
Sure, because they bought it from Easy Software Products, and hired the guy (Mike Sweet) who actually wrote it.
This is basically true, in that Apple continue to pay Mike, and he continues to develop CUPS...but it's also so so wrong.
You've got it exactly backwards (and wrong, but that's not the point I'm making). Understanding the world is not at all what religion is about, because it is irrelevant to religious thought. For example, the actual mechanism of the origin of species doesn't matter one bit to the religious part of a person, because he's far more interested in the facts on the ground -- what's going on around him, and religion has a lot to say on those subjects. That is, the explanations about the natural world provided by virtually all religions are purely in service of moral and social directives -- not the other way around.
The main reason we have this problem today is probably that the Catholic church was by far the largest sponsor of actual scientific inquiry, as well as the most organized educational system, and the largest source of government power, for hundreds of years.
People generally don't care how the universe works. What they want to know is how they should behave...but when the people telling you how to behave are also telling you how the universe works (because they're the only people actually investigating it), you believe them.
Galileo wasn't persecuted because he proved that the Earth revolved around the Sun (after all, Pope Clement VII had already expressed interest in Copernicus's theories); he was persecuted because he wanted to change Church dogma because of it...and that was just stupid.
No, they don't, and no, they haven't.
Some time about 1999, Apple signed over the copyrights on their changes to GCC back to the FSF (who then licensed them back to Apple).
What Apple DID have was a trade mark on the name "Objective-C" (which Next Computer had previously bought from Stepstone Corp.), but it was canceled by the USPTO in 2006. (though there is a related trademark that was registered in 2008).
Either way, ownership of a trade mark does not equate to ownership of a programming language.
The problem you're referring to was mainly caused by the short season. TNT contracted for a full 22 episode first season, stopped production after five were done, made some changes, etc. then killed it after 7 more. Now, when you've plotted out 22 episodes of a TV show, you write and film them out of order so that you have all your actors when you need them.
Even with the changes made after the first five episodes filmed, if they'd had the full 22 ep. run they would have spread out the Galen story arc so that they weren't all running together. But because they hadn't been able to film "Appearances and Other Deceits" (in which there would be a "laundry accident" to bridge the two uniform types that were filmed, allowing the first five eps to be placed in the middle of the season somewhere), about the only way the series could be shown was the order that it WAS shown.
Not so much. They happened many times over thousands and millions of years, but didn't happen over that range of time scales.
It has been shown that cooling and warming tend to be fast-moving events. For example, the Permian extinction that kicked off the evolution of dinosaurs and mammals, started out with modest warming of about 5 degrees C. This wouldn't have been a huge problem, except the oceans warmed enough to release vast methane hydrite deposits.
Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 is, on the order of four times more powerful. These methane deposits raised the average global temperature by at least another ten degrees over the course of perhaps a year. Now, because methane reacts strongly with oxygen and warm water doesn't hold much oxygen either, the result was an oxygen crash that killed about 99.6% of the world's animals, and 92% of the species.
That's a pretty bad worst-case scenario, but definitely a good reason to keep an eye on the oceanic methane hydrite deposits. Because if those start going off at a high rate, it's chain-reaction time: methane increases warming, raising the temperature of the ocean, which causes more methane to get released, which raises the temperature further, and so on until you're out of methane to release. "Luckily", there aren't enough greenhouse gases on the planet to go runaway, so it settles down eventually (until a billion years from now when the Sun heats the Earth enough to set up a water vapor-based runaway greenhouse that boils the oceans permanently).
Also luckily, we seem to be in an interglacial period -- one of those rare and short-lived times when it's warm. Mostly because of the current configuration of the continents, "long-term" climate studies (unfortunately limited to only the past 250,000 years or so) show short periods of warm global temperatures surrounded by deep glacial chills.
Personally, my hunch is that human activity has had an effect on the length and height of the warm period, and that it is significant, but probably is not the driving force and definitely not the sole cause. And re: my earlier "scary" scenario, don't think we have too much to worry about on that front; if it gets much warmer, Greenland and the Arctic are likely to melt enough to temporarily shut down the thermohaline conveyor and trigger global cooling (resulting in re-desertification of India and southeast Asia, but that's "only" a quarter of the planet's humans and not a matter of _species_ survival).
I'd like to think that humans are the driving force behind the present warming, and in fact I hope we are...because the idea that we're still just along for the ride and can't Do Something About It is far FAR scarier than the idea that we caused it. If we did it, we are likely to be powerful enough to do something about it. If we had little ot no effect, then we're basically just passengers on this rock and have no choice but to adapt.
I think then I should most likely have sex with Samanta Carter. She just might catch something from my intellect. ;)
Herpes? :)
Surely every organisation makes an effort to secure their networks.. but put it in a mission statement? I think to 'fight in cyberspace' sounds much more exciting than just to secure networks.
Yes, it would seem to be more exciting, and it matches far better with the USAF mission than say, the Army's.
You use the Army when you need to take or control places on land. You use the Navy and its right arm the Marine Corps when you need to project long-term power. But when it Absolutely Positively Has To Be Destroyed In Twenty Minutes Or Less, the Air Force are simply the right guys to talk to. One of their main jobs is to make far away things go "boom" quickly...and their other main job is to take pictures of those far-away things on a moment's notice so that they can make them go "boom" if ordered to, or relay those pictures to other armed services so they can do their jobs.
As such, cyberwar seems like a very good fit for the Air Force -- it's just how they operate, and part of why they're often called the Chair Force by the other services. :)
Regarding your Antarctic ice comments, it's not about how much snow is in a year, but that there are only four seasons in a year and they form an annual pattern, like tree rings (which also show a record of time lasting longer than 6000 years).
In addition, it seems incredibly unlikely that the strength of the weak nuclear force, as demonstrated by the rate of decay of various radioactive elements, would have changed appreciably since the Earth was formed. The rate of decay of the Earth's uranium deposits tells us that the surface finally finished solidifying about 4.2 billion years ago -- after the so-called "heavy bombardment" stage.
Geomagnetic combined with igneus rock deposition data also gives us a record of the Earth's magnetic field reversals going back billions of years.
Radiocarbon dating can only be used to date living things though, not ices, and it is not particularly precise for creatures that died more than about 40,000 years or so ago IIRC. It's based on the amount of radioactive Carbon-14 in the bodies of creatures relative to the level of regular Carbon-12. During a creature's lifetime, the level remains _fairly_ constant (thus its inaccuracy) but after it dies the levels begin to drop due to radioactive decay.
As for the length of time life has been evolving, it hasn't been 4.5 billion years. Life has only been on the planet for 3.6 billion, and the first multicellular life didn't appear until after the last Snowball event ended 620 million years ago. Before that time, all the life on Earth was stuff like bacteria and algae and the occasional protozoa..and they are still by far the dominant life forms on the planet.
Really? Personally I would think it would be a lot more interesting to design a really cool computer from the get-go, if you knew how, rather than starting off with vacuum tubes and working your way slowly up from there.
But that's not the equivalent of evolution. Equivalent would be the creation of a single "vacuum tube" with the capability to spontaneously develop into a vast supercomputer network. And that is a way cooler trick than designing a mere computer in the first place, wouldn't you say?
The aliens must be laughing themselves sick at our hubris. The possibility that our weapons might prove a threat to a culture capable of mere interstellar travel (let alone "intergalactic") is about the same as an ant colony against the U.S. Army.
If there were any advanced alien species out there with interstellar travel, we wouldn't have been allowed to survive this long. This is not out of evil, or imperialist tendencies, but simple self-preservation.
For the same reason, should we reach the interstellar-travel stage, we would not allow other species to develop to a point where they are even a potential threat.
Even if one would like to believe that other species would be benevolent, when you're dealing with the survival of your whole species you simply cannot afford to be wrong. It's just not an option.
And if there exist aliens who came before us (unlikely, for a host of reasons not limited to the fact that our planet was not colonized by them millions of years ago), then we don't even want them to know we're here -- they probably wouldn't even notice swatting us.
So. Object (eventually, if you like) weighing, say, 1 kiloton (to give you some perspective, the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier, is about 77 kilotons), comes into Earth's atmosphere at a relative velocity of, oh, say 1,000,000 K/sec, coming straight down (to minimize friction and time-in atmosphere.)
Three times the speed of light? Suuuuuure.
A 1KT mass at a "mere" 50,000 kps (one sixth the speed of light) would impact with a force orders of magnitude greater than all of the nuclear weapons ever manufactured by man. It's what you call an extinction event. And at that delta-v it doesn't matter what angle it strikes...you're toast, period.
we dont have a quasar at the center of out galaxy, the closest one is over 200 Mpc away.
We don't currently have an active quasar in the center of our galaxy. When (note: not if) the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy begins feeding again (within the next billion years or so, when stars start getting thrown into its immediate vicinity by the gravity of the Andromeda galaxy), the quasar will go active again.
Quasars are just supermassive black holes getting fed lots of material. And as such, they turn on and off.
Oops, it's not a neutron star that triggers a Type 1a ("Type A") supernova, it's a carbon-oxygen white dwarf that reaches the Chandrasekhar limit (aka "critical mass").
Of course, you may wonder how we figured out how far some objects were to begin with to USE our distance = (constant) x speed formula. This post is getting a bit long, but it turns out that supernova, explosions of very massive stars at the end of their lives, tend to have an absolute maximum brightness that has a simple relationship to the length of time they "explode". Thus, supernovae can serve as a yardstick if we can spot them in other galaxies; and fortunately, they are bright enough so that we can - I think they are the ONLY individual stars we can discern in other galaxies; all the others are just too dim from those distances....
Specifically, we talk about Type A supernovae, which always have the same intrinsic brightness.
Type A supernovae are what happen when a neutron star is drawing matter from (feeding from) a companion normal star, usually in the main sequence. As it collects matter, it gets to a certain point and explodes. Usually, both of the stars survive, with the companion being somewhat less massive afterward. :)
The reason Type A supernovae are always the same brightness is that it always takes the same amount of matter for the neutron star to reach critical mass.
We can tell the distance for Type A supernovae by observing one occurring near a Cepheid variable star (and thus relatively nearby).
Cepheids are stars whose variability (the rate at which it dims and brightens) is directly related to its luminosity. So by looking at a Cepheid's variability, we can calculate how intrinsically bright it is. If a Type A supernova occurs near a known Cepheid, we can use the supernova's brightness to refine our calculations of how far other Type As are. And so we have two linked "Standard Candles" for the universe, one for relatively short distances and one for the rest of the universe.
Hope this helps. :)
A plant fulfilling orders from your largest customer is never obsolete as long as [...]
Guess what? Losing the use of such an absurdly expensive plant in this manner is a net drain on Intel's profitability, relative to that of other fabs.
When you've got a fab making Pentium 4 wafers and three chips don't spec at 3.6 GHz (but do spec at 3.2), you can and probably will still sell all of them.
If that very same fab is making 733MHz Celeron wafers, and three of the chips on a wafer don't spec at 733, they are junk and you eat the cost, because no one will buy them. It doesn't matter if it specs lower, because that's not what the customer will buy.
We're discussing a multi-billion-dollar facility whose sole purpose is to produce $30 chips; and it costs nearly that much to produce them. The very same facility could be producing chips that sell for $1000 or more at retail.
Intel recognize that it was a bad business decision to provide the CPU for the first Xbox, and will not make that mistake again.
Not many Intel chips in the next generation consoles, are there?
That's by Intel's choice. Intel hate having to keep a fab churning out 733MHz Celerons 24/7 just for the Xbox.
Or do you actually think that PowerPC was Microsoft's first choice for the X360, making backward compatibility that much more difficult?
No, Intel simply would not make the same mistake again.
There's another alternative - buy a commercial package that does what you need - and given MS' profits for teh last qtr I'd say a lot of people are chosing that alternative. That's the key - if OSS deveopers want people to use their software, then it has to be a viable alternative; simply being free is not enough if it doesn't do what is needed.
You got it right, but missed it. :)
Most of us don't care if you, or anyone else, uses the stuff we write. Your needs weren't considered in the first place; the code was written because we needed it.
If you use the result, great; maybe you'll use it to solve some problem that will bug us some day. But if you don't, it's not going to bother us in the slightest because unless we're being paid to care about what you want, there's no reason for us to do it -- and we don't.
Chemical weapons were not used in WW2 because the other side was prepared for it -- the same reason they weren't used late in WW1. If you shoot off a chemical weapon and the soldiers on the other side have protective gear, the only people you'll be killing will be people who don't; i.e. civilians. Thus, no reason to use them.
Powered human flight was developed by two guys who were trying to get a War Department contract. In fact, those same two gentlemen got the US Army to start the Army Signal Corps Aeronautical Division, the forerunner of today's Air Force.
The first person to die in an airplane crash was Signal Corps Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge -- Orville Wright himself was at the controls, and suffered serious injuries.
Boy, you're going to really throw a rod when you hear this...
They used to be able to do a remote GUI, until they killed DPS.
NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP applications could run their displays on other machines, and it was actually more responsive than X because the drawing commands and most of the event handling were done on the machine actually displaying the app.
The app would send commands (possibly including PostScript code fragments to be executed in the display server...) over a compressible text link, and get feedback over that same link.
Now ain't that a kick in the head?
Let's go through the list of the Apple Innovations you used to "school" your hapless "troll boy", shall we?
- Message Framework
- Apple Help
- Address Book
- AppleScript
- Key-Value Coding and data binding
- Serialization
- Search Kit (and Spotlight)
- Property Lists
- NSUserDefaults
- the Undo architecture
- Cocoa Drag and Drop
- Quartz 2D
- Distributed Objects
- Cocoa XML-RPC and SOAP APIs
- the various NSURL interfaces
- Web Kit
- Core Audio
- Rendezvous
- CFNetwork
- the printing API
- QuickTime
- Keychain
- Certificate services
- Authorization services
- the entire massive text subsystem
Of your list, the following are actually Apple Mac OS X additions:All of the rest were either done by other people (Rendezvous: Motorola; Keyring, Auth, Cert: Intel) or inherited from NeXT.