Stirling engines seem legitimate enough, but the linked site describing them seems somewhat crack-potish. They promote cold fusion and zero point energy, as well as a number of "alternative energy sources" I've never even heard of. There's also a page trying to disprove the Peak Oil theory, which should be real popular with the Slashdot crowd. Anyway, I sometimes wish that/. nerds had a greater understanding of the pure sciences, rather than just software engineering. Oh well.
I had the same problem with that book, though based on my previous experiences with British authors I suspect it's either that Clarke's style is weird or that Clarke was specificially going for a weird style. Along the same lines, the book took me at least five times as long to read as other equivalent-length fiction novels; it's probably the style which slowed me down.
I'm amazed that more people aren't upset by this. If Microsoft refused to grant a news organization interviews for a year based on one slightly negative article; there would be calls to march on Redmond in protest. When Google does it, there are posts arguing that Google was somehow right to refuse interviews. Get a sense of perspective, guys.
Actually, Prof. Brown has changed his opinion on the "What is a planet" question. He now thinks that anything Pluto-sized or larger should be a planet, thus making 2003UB313 the 10th planet (not more than ten, because this is the first to actually be larger than Pluto).
Seriously, I've seen less biased articles from the RIAA's anti-piracy campaigns. The reason Brown held onto the information was so he could get all the data before making an announcement. He wanted to be able to say, "New object is 2.73 times as large as Pluto," not "New object is probably bigger than Pluto." Is the existence of another Kupier Belt object really going to affect anyone? It's not like this was cancer research.
I would argue that the list is slanted towards biology because all of the interesting physics problems can be concatanated into a small number of questions. What doesn't fall under "origin of the Universe," "unified theory," or "real meaning of quantum probabilities"?
Then again, I am a biologist, so I may be a bit biased.
I would guess that we have so few protein-encoding genes because we have a large amount of non-protein-based regulatory machinery. In particular, the study of RNA-based regulation in mammals has exploded in the past few years, and it looks like a huge amount of regulation takes place without proteins. I would bet that many of the things which are done crudely in plants with proteins are done in extremely complicated fashions with RNA-based regulation in mammals. That isn't to say that proteins aren't involved; rather, I expect that we can get much more use out of a single protein when that protein's behaivor is affected by RNA in the cell.
As in, artificial selection versus natural selection. People making choices, not the environment per se. It's not a big difference, but it's something they seem to put some emphasis on.
Am I the only one who noticed this is just now leaving the Senate Intelligence committee, and has yet to be voted upon by the Senate as a whole, let alone the House? Seriously, people, it's all well and good to be paranoid, but wait until this is actually law. The only thing to do now is write your senators.
To clarify: I understand that the hypothesis is that intelligence was selected for, and the occasional homozygous recessive individual was worth the extra intelligence granted the heterozygous individuals. Stop bitching.
Summary of article: Linux needs better hardware drivers if it's going to compete with Mac on the same processor. No, we thought that Linus had more influence with hardware manufactures than Apple, a hardware company, does.
Summary of SynphonyOS: Ooh look! Another distro! With a unique package management system! I'm sure that'll take off.
So you're saying the argument is that the malaria-sicle cell anemia type effect can happen over much shorter timescales, and that conscious selection can be the cause? In other words, the paper shows that inbreeding is bad. Didn't we already know that?
I understand the argument being made (that intelligence was selected for, and the occasional homozygous recessive individual was worth the extra intelligence); I'm just saying that unless they can actually show that heterozygous individuals are more intelligent on average than Ashkenazi Jews who are homozygous dominant, their argument is pure speculation.
No offense, but saying that Down Syndrome is caused by a "single genetic mutation" is like saying Alderaan was only shot once with a single weapon. Down Syndrome individuals have a whole extra copy of chromosome 21. That messes up a lot of stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Stirling engines seem legitimate enough, but the linked site describing them seems somewhat crack-potish. They promote cold fusion and zero point energy, as well as a number of "alternative energy sources" I've never even heard of. There's also a page trying to disprove the Peak Oil theory, which should be real popular with the Slashdot crowd. Anyway, I sometimes wish that /. nerds had a greater understanding of the pure sciences, rather than just software engineering. Oh well.
Vi or emacs?
...does it still work if you're wearing a tin foil hat?
Windows L Vista?
I had the same problem with that book, though based on my previous experiences with British authors I suspect it's either that Clarke's style is weird or that Clarke was specificially going for a weird style. Along the same lines, the book took me at least five times as long to read as other equivalent-length fiction novels; it's probably the style which slowed me down.
I'm amazed that more people aren't upset by this. If Microsoft refused to grant a news organization interviews for a year based on one slightly negative article; there would be calls to march on Redmond in protest. When Google does it, there are posts arguing that Google was somehow right to refuse interviews. Get a sense of perspective, guys.
Actually, Prof. Brown has changed his opinion on the "What is a planet" question. He now thinks that anything Pluto-sized or larger should be a planet, thus making 2003UB313 the 10th planet (not more than ten, because this is the first to actually be larger than Pluto).
Scroll to the bottom of this page to read what Michael Brown (the professor who co-discovered 2003UB313) has to say about the alleged "hacking."
Seriously, I've seen less biased articles from the RIAA's anti-piracy campaigns. The reason Brown held onto the information was so he could get all the data before making an announcement. He wanted to be able to say, "New object is 2.73 times as large as Pluto," not "New object is probably bigger than Pluto." Is the existence of another Kupier Belt object really going to affect anyone? It's not like this was cancer research.
From the same site:
Windows 2000 services
He doesn't have a list for Windows 2003, however.
Take a look at Black Viper's list of WinXP SP2 services.
I've gotten Gmail's basic HTML view to work in Links (Lynx doesn't have https authentication). I'm sure Konqueror can do the same...
Right here.
I believe all LG points are unstable.
g range.html
No, L4 and L5 are stable (making the grandparent post incorrect as well). For a map of the LaGrange points and their numbers:
http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/la
I would argue that the list is slanted towards biology because all of the interesting physics problems can be concatanated into a small number of questions. What doesn't fall under "origin of the Universe," "unified theory," or "real meaning of quantum probabilities"?
Then again, I am a biologist, so I may be a bit biased.
I would guess that we have so few protein-encoding genes because we have a large amount of non-protein-based regulatory machinery. In particular, the study of RNA-based regulation in mammals has exploded in the past few years, and it looks like a huge amount of regulation takes place without proteins. I would bet that many of the things which are done crudely in plants with proteins are done in extremely complicated fashions with RNA-based regulation in mammals. That isn't to say that proteins aren't involved; rather, I expect that we can get much more use out of a single protein when that protein's behaivor is affected by RNA in the cell.
Why is this modded Funny? Clearly, it should be modded Insightful. It certainly describes my life to a T...
As in, artificial selection versus natural selection. People making choices, not the environment per se. It's not a big difference, but it's something they seem to put some emphasis on.
Am I the only one who noticed this is just now leaving the Senate Intelligence committee, and has yet to be voted upon by the Senate as a whole, let alone the House? Seriously, people, it's all well and good to be paranoid, but wait until this is actually law. The only thing to do now is write your senators.
To clarify: I understand that the hypothesis is that intelligence was selected for, and the occasional homozygous recessive individual was worth the extra intelligence granted the heterozygous individuals. Stop bitching.
Summary of article: Linux needs better hardware drivers if it's going to compete with Mac on the same processor. No, we thought that Linus had more influence with hardware manufactures than Apple, a hardware company, does. Summary of SynphonyOS: Ooh look! Another distro! With a unique package management system! I'm sure that'll take off.
I'm not saying it's untestable, I'm saying they didn't actually test it. Until they do, the whole thing is fairly close to meaningless.
So you're saying the argument is that the malaria-sicle cell anemia type effect can happen over much shorter timescales, and that conscious selection can be the cause? In other words, the paper shows that inbreeding is bad. Didn't we already know that?
I understand the argument being made (that intelligence was selected for, and the occasional homozygous recessive individual was worth the extra intelligence); I'm just saying that unless they can actually show that heterozygous individuals are more intelligent on average than Ashkenazi Jews who are homozygous dominant, their argument is pure speculation.
No offense, but saying that Down Syndrome is caused by a "single genetic mutation" is like saying Alderaan was only shot once with a single weapon. Down Syndrome individuals have a whole extra copy of chromosome 21. That messes up a lot of stuff.