Cockroaches may be hardy compared to most other higher life forms, but compared to many bacteria they have one foot in the grave and the other 5 on a banana peel the moment they hatch. The simple fact that they are eukaryotic means they are very fragile life forms with fairly rigid life requirements. Cockroaches aren't all that much more rad-hardened than us. They have the same potential problems as we do (direct DNA damage) and the same repair mechanisms so most of their "resistance" is as a species, not an individual. They are small, tend to live in places that would shield them somewhat from any sort of radiation, need very small amounts of food and water to live, the food they need can easily come from leftover human trash, and they reproduce prolifically. These things together make them a very hardy species, but without O2 they die quite quickly.
There are MANY bacteria (including some of the best survivors) which need no gases to live. There are bacteria which need nothing but Fe2+ or elemental sulfur, water, and an inorganic carbon source to live. While the vast majority of life that you and I see every day uses the standard aerobic respiration of glucose or photosynthesis to survive, there are definitely a lot of other core catabolic processes at the bacterial level.
Close, but no cigar. IBM can afford to keep the PowerPC line up to date because of the Power line of server processors. The embedded CPU market is very different from the current desktop market. I don't remember ever seeing an embedded CPU that dissipated 70+ watts of heat and that is the range of the G5.
IBM also does a lot of fab work for other companies, so they can keep their foundry up to date as well.
Actually, there is a LOT of life that has evolved to fit our world. They are almost ALL pests (or pets), but few people could argue that various flies, mosquitos, pigeons, rodents many bacteria and unicellular organisms(Plasmodium falciparium (malaria) springs to mind as an organism which absolutely depends on mankind), etc haven't benefited greatly from man's changing of the world.
I agree with your sentiment though, the diversity we see in the natural world today can not exist in the version of the world humans would ultimately create if we don't change our path.
Your campus or facility has a site license. I've never heard of the medical exams, but the license is real and you will have to take certification courses in order to use the material as well as use appropriate safety devices.
If your institution DOESN'T follow these procedures (and is in the US...), let us all know so we can call your RSO and your state health department and get you shutdown for making the rest of us look bad.
I'm not in stem cell research, but I am in molecular biology so I have at least a bit of a point of reference. Only an almost insignificant number of grants are for 10 million a year, most are in the 60,000-500,000 range. The overall plan is probably to support one or two really large foundation building type grants (where really expensive things like confocal scopes are purchased). That takes up a small subset of their yearly budget and then they dole out the rest of the money in much smaller packets, remember this is almost like taking the place of the NIH and NSF in the stem cell area...they aren't trying to just get their names spread around by having buildings named after them. This will fund science, not construction. If they fund 500 proposals a year (I would say that is far closer to reality than 30), that means they get a minimum of 5,000 proposals to REVIEW a year (and that is assuming one in ten get approved, which isn't even close to reality in the national picture). While they will convene panels to do much of the reviewing, internal employees will chair those panels and also do all the completeness checking etc. I would say that of those 50 employees, less than 20 will be "check writers" most of the rest will be receptionists, data entry clerks, secretaries, and other office personel. So, while still not a bad job to have, it is far from the one check per year per person you perceive.
Here's a better analogy. Imagine that candy bars in stores cost 55 cents each now, they come with wrappers that explain the ingredients nutritional value, a list of those ingredients, a pretty package, and a sanitary seal. Many different middlemen were involved in getting it from the factory to you (the manufacturer, the wholesaler, the various distributors, the stock room, and finally the display room). Each one of those costs money as does store shelf space. Also you can't buy just one candy bar, or even just a few of the ones you like. The company makes you buy an assortment of what they think you might like, bringing the total to about $10. Now imagine that you happen to live right next door to the Mars factory and want to buy a Mars bar, well you head over there and ask how much it is to buy one right off the factory line and the response is 90 cents. Mars has saved all the various money they would have spent getting the product to you, the packaging, etc and yet they want MORE money. Oh, and they also put the stipulation that you CAN NOT take the candy bar with you, you HAVE to eat it right there. Does that make sense? While you going to the Mars factory and stealing a bar isn't exactly legal still, part of the reason you would make that decision is because of their arcane logic of charging more for less.
This analogy isn't perfect, but the truth of the matter is probably actually worse. This analogy also has more to do with downloading music and movies than actual street piracy, which really is a bad thing and SHOULD be illegal, regardless of the practices of the seller.
Which hypothetical Dell are you refering to? The closest I've seen on their site comes with a 17 in FP and starts at $999 (Dimension 8400) but when you add the decent card and upgrade it to a 19 in FP it is $1298.
You could always build your own, then you know what is going into it and know where you skimped and where you spent. You could easily built a kick ass system for $1000 (obviously not top end, after all the graphics card would be $500 if you went that route...).
I agree fully, but the problem with your specific example is that most farms in at least this country are located in very low wind zones. Higher altitudes and ridgelines aren't very conducive to farming.
In general though, I agree with your concepts...the problem is coming up with actual ways that we can both remove ourselves from the organics burning teet (coal, oil, nat gas) while SAVING money because until that happens or we run out of the organics, we won't be switching...
"For all intensive purposes"??? What the hell does that mean in relation to your sentence? Did you mean to type "For all intents and purposes" ?
What the poster was trying to say is that while those sources of energy may SEEM infinite, they aren't infinitely harnessable. Sunlight won't just "stop" being a source of energy, instead we will run out of places to put solar panels that actually have a decent return on investment. More importantly if we all of a sudden started using a few percent of the sunlight reaching Earth to do work directly, we will change our weather pretty significantly. The same can be said for wind power, putting a turbine in 95% of the places on Earth wouldn't be a very good return on investment even though there IS some wind. Tidal power is also a problem, there aren't that many places on Earth where the tidal difference is enough to really exploit.
Nuclear power is more accessible, is just as safe, is very long term, and is ultimately cheaper than those alternative energy sources. All of this squabbling will be moot in 10 years when they develop fusion into a working reactor anyway...(dripping with sarcasm;).
Actually the truth is somewhere between the two. There is no hack to the drivers to get them to work outside of the firegl line. The same drivers work out of the box on any recent Ati chipset and they are DESIGNED to do this. You don't get support on the box, but you do get some customer support. The drivers released for the "regular" chipset are the same drivers released for the FireGL, so the "once or twice a year" thing applies to both (I think there were actually five released last year, but only two significant ones...but that is from memory). The newest drivers were released in January and support Xorg quite nicely.
So, do you normally go out of your way to intentionally kill someone else? You know that only very specific cases of homicide carry the penalty of death, right? Even then, there are really only a few states which use it and only a handful that use it more than once every few years (Texas and Florida spring to mind...both of which are major tourist destinations...go figure).
I'll give you OKC and Austin, but Atlanta is the principal city in the ninth largest metro area in the US...not exactly in the same class as the other cities listed. However, after looking at a population listing of other cities, your point is proven. Most of the cities in the same range (Kansas City, Sacramento, Cincinnati, San Antonio etc) are less white (not necessarily less Caucasian, as most demographics count Hispanic in Caucasian) than Portland. I'll admit when I'm wrong...
Population information from: http://www.citypopulation.de/USA-CombMetro.html
According to census information, Portland is 78% white. While that is obviously mostly white, there aren't many cities in this country of Portland's size outside of the southwest or southern Florida that are LESS white.
At Challenger's launch time, the ambient temp at the Cape was 36F. While that is moderately cold for Florida, I doubt 99% of the people on this board would call it "bitterly cold." While the temp did play with the O-rings sealing ability, the O-ring had previously failed to seal at 56F. I would say that the problem would more correctly be termed "complete and total cheap crap" than a design flaw or oversight. I can imagine the engineers at Thiokol...Engineer 1 "you mean it isn't always 90F in Florida? We should think about changing our design then!" PHB1: "Do you know how much that would cost? It is almost ALWAYS above 70F there, so the O-rings will be fine 99.9% of the time. That's a better than average failure rate!!!"
The most important different is that I made a near worthless post on a message board, this is barely more formal than an e-mail. The grammar I was criticizing was not only in a far more formal editorial posting by a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine it's grammar was FAR worse than mine. Did you actually read it?
"Newsweek has lowdown on something" is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. My problem I guess isn't that the grammar is really bad, but that it doesn't seem that the author even went back over his article after typing it up. I might not have done that in my post, but as I said before this is a semi-anonymous post on a message board and not an article published by a senior writer in a medium trying its best to gain respectability. At the same time, part of my issue with the article is that I tried to read it out loud to my wife without pre-reading it. There are numerous places where I had to translate what was written into something which could actually be spoken aloud in a meaningful way.
Yea, but that is a spelling error and not a grammar error and definitely not a grammer error;)
Seriously though, one has to see the difference between a single spelling error versus a multiple paragraph article that appears to be written by an eighth grader as a cell phone text message.
but do most of them contain grammer this horrific? The linked article read more like a stream of consciousness e-mail (a poorly written one at that) than a published piece of literature.
I'll argue with just one of your points (most of the rest is true, but I don't work in IT, so don't really know the workplace nearly as much as I know academia). Our top level comp sci classes are about 80-85% men like you (basically) said, BUT I don't know if even half of them are Caucasian. At least a third and probably closer to half are Indian or Pakistani. Then there are a couple of Japanese, a few Chinese, and a representative or two from each major country in Southeast Asia. The remaining 40% or so (of the 80% that AREN'T women) are a mix of African American and Caucasian (probably 1:4 ratio).
White men are not even close to the dominate race in the top level comp sci classes in my school. Now in my DEPARTMENT (biology) it is about 60:40 men:women and the majority of those are white or black.
Cockroaches may be hardy compared to most other higher life forms, but compared to many bacteria they have one foot in the grave and the other 5 on a banana peel the moment they hatch. The simple fact that they are eukaryotic means they are very fragile life forms with fairly rigid life requirements. Cockroaches aren't all that much more rad-hardened than us. They have the same potential problems as we do (direct DNA damage) and the same repair mechanisms so most of their "resistance" is as a species, not an individual. They are small, tend to live in places that would shield them somewhat from any sort of radiation, need very small amounts of food and water to live, the food they need can easily come from leftover human trash, and they reproduce prolifically. These things together make them a very hardy species, but without O2 they die quite quickly.
There are MANY bacteria (including some of the best survivors) which need no gases to live. There are bacteria which need nothing but Fe2+ or elemental sulfur, water, and an inorganic carbon source to live. While the vast majority of life that you and I see every day uses the standard aerobic respiration of glucose or photosynthesis to survive, there are definitely a lot of other core catabolic processes at the bacterial level.
Close, but no cigar. IBM can afford to keep the PowerPC line up to date because of the Power line of server processors. The embedded CPU market is very different from the current desktop market. I don't remember ever seeing an embedded CPU that dissipated 70+ watts of heat and that is the range of the G5.
IBM also does a lot of fab work for other companies, so they can keep their foundry up to date as well.
Actually, there is a LOT of life that has evolved to fit our world. They are almost ALL pests (or pets), but few people could argue that various flies, mosquitos, pigeons, rodents many bacteria and unicellular organisms(Plasmodium falciparium (malaria) springs to mind as an organism which absolutely depends on mankind), etc haven't benefited greatly from man's changing of the world.
I agree with your sentiment though, the diversity we see in the natural world today can not exist in the version of the world humans would ultimately create if we don't change our path.
$0.02 Netgear routers don't require a reboot to change port forwarding...
Most of humanity will STILL live close to the coast, the coast will just have moved inland a bit...
After re-reading your previous post, I see that emphasis now...my bad...
Your campus or facility has a site license. I've never heard of the medical exams, but the license is real and you will have to take certification courses in order to use the material as well as use appropriate safety devices.
If your institution DOESN'T follow these procedures (and is in the US...), let us all know so we can call your RSO and your state health department and get you shutdown for making the rest of us look bad.
I'm not in stem cell research, but I am in molecular biology so I have at least a bit of a point of reference. Only an almost insignificant number of grants are for 10 million a year, most are in the 60,000-500,000 range. The overall plan is probably to support one or two really large foundation building type grants (where really expensive things like confocal scopes are purchased). That takes up a small subset of their yearly budget and then they dole out the rest of the money in much smaller packets, remember this is almost like taking the place of the NIH and NSF in the stem cell area...they aren't trying to just get their names spread around by having buildings named after them. This will fund science, not construction. If they fund 500 proposals a year (I would say that is far closer to reality than 30), that means they get a minimum of 5,000 proposals to REVIEW a year (and that is assuming one in ten get approved, which isn't even close to reality in the national picture). While they will convene panels to do much of the reviewing, internal employees will chair those panels and also do all the completeness checking etc. I would say that of those 50 employees, less than 20 will be "check writers" most of the rest will be receptionists, data entry clerks, secretaries, and other office personel. So, while still not a bad job to have, it is far from the one check per year per person you perceive.
Here's a better analogy. Imagine that candy bars in stores cost 55 cents each now, they come with wrappers that explain the ingredients nutritional value, a list of those ingredients, a pretty package, and a sanitary seal. Many different middlemen were involved in getting it from the factory to you (the manufacturer, the wholesaler, the various distributors, the stock room, and finally the display room). Each one of those costs money as does store shelf space. Also you can't buy just one candy bar, or even just a few of the ones you like. The company makes you buy an assortment of what they think you might like, bringing the total to about $10. Now imagine that you happen to live right next door to the Mars factory and want to buy a Mars bar, well you head over there and ask how much it is to buy one right off the factory line and the response is 90 cents. Mars has saved all the various money they would have spent getting the product to you, the packaging, etc and yet they want MORE money. Oh, and they also put the stipulation that you CAN NOT take the candy bar with you, you HAVE to eat it right there. Does that make sense? While you going to the Mars factory and stealing a bar isn't exactly legal still, part of the reason you would make that decision is because of their arcane logic of charging more for less.
This analogy isn't perfect, but the truth of the matter is probably actually worse. This analogy also has more to do with downloading music and movies than actual street piracy, which really is a bad thing and SHOULD be illegal, regardless of the practices of the seller.
Which hypothetical Dell are you refering to? The closest I've seen on their site comes with a 17 in FP and starts at $999 (Dimension 8400) but when you add the decent card and upgrade it to a 19 in FP it is $1298.
You could always build your own, then you know what is going into it and know where you skimped and where you spent. You could easily built a kick ass system for $1000 (obviously not top end, after all the graphics card would be $500 if you went that route...).
I agree fully, but the problem with your specific example is that most farms in at least this country are located in very low wind zones. Higher altitudes and ridgelines aren't very conducive to farming.
In general though, I agree with your concepts...the problem is coming up with actual ways that we can both remove ourselves from the organics burning teet (coal, oil, nat gas) while SAVING money because until that happens or we run out of the organics, we won't be switching...
"For all intensive purposes"??? What the hell does that mean in relation to your sentence? Did you mean to type "For all intents and purposes" ?
;).
What the poster was trying to say is that while those sources of energy may SEEM infinite, they aren't infinitely harnessable. Sunlight won't just "stop" being a source of energy, instead we will run out of places to put solar panels that actually have a decent return on investment. More importantly if we all of a sudden started using a few percent of the sunlight reaching Earth to do work directly, we will change our weather pretty significantly. The same can be said for wind power, putting a turbine in 95% of the places on Earth wouldn't be a very good return on investment even though there IS some wind. Tidal power is also a problem, there aren't that many places on Earth where the tidal difference is enough to really exploit.
Nuclear power is more accessible, is just as safe, is very long term, and is ultimately cheaper than those alternative energy sources. All of this squabbling will be moot in 10 years when they develop fusion into a working reactor anyway...(dripping with sarcasm
Actually the truth is somewhere between the two. There is no hack to the drivers to get them to work outside of the firegl line. The same drivers work out of the box on any recent Ati chipset and they are DESIGNED to do this. You don't get support on the box, but you do get some customer support. The drivers released for the "regular" chipset are the same drivers released for the FireGL, so the "once or twice a year" thing applies to both (I think there were actually five released last year, but only two significant ones...but that is from memory). The newest drivers were released in January and support Xorg quite nicely.
Well, obviously it isn't ready but there are steps between "hey, I've got a good idea" and "you want to buy this product from me???"
Ha! In the really geek crowd, people are still arguing about original NES vs. Sega Genesis...
More like what a jury of 12 people think you did and the preponderance of evidence shows that you did and why you did it.
Very rarely is someone convicted of murder in the first degree without a very obvious motive, regardless of the other evidence.
So, do you normally go out of your way to intentionally kill someone else? You know that only very specific cases of homicide carry the penalty of death, right? Even then, there are really only a few states which use it and only a handful that use it more than once every few years (Texas and Florida spring to mind...both of which are major tourist destinations...go figure).
Coral cache doesn't work either...maybe the original site was slammed before they got their copy...
I'll give you OKC and Austin, but Atlanta is the principal city in the ninth largest metro area in the US...not exactly in the same class as the other cities listed. However, after looking at a population listing of other cities, your point is proven. Most of the cities in the same range (Kansas City, Sacramento, Cincinnati, San Antonio etc) are less white (not necessarily less Caucasian, as most demographics count Hispanic in Caucasian) than Portland. I'll admit when I'm wrong...
Population information from: http://www.citypopulation.de/USA-CombMetro.html
According to census information, Portland is 78% white. While that is obviously mostly white, there aren't many cities in this country of Portland's size outside of the southwest or southern Florida that are LESS white.
At Challenger's launch time, the ambient temp at the Cape was 36F. While that is moderately cold for Florida, I doubt 99% of the people on this board would call it "bitterly cold." While the temp did play with the O-rings sealing ability, the O-ring had previously failed to seal at 56F. I would say that the problem would more correctly be termed "complete and total cheap crap" than a design flaw or oversight. I can imagine the engineers at Thiokol...Engineer 1 "you mean it isn't always 90F in Florida? We should think about changing our design then!" PHB1: "Do you know how much that would cost? It is almost ALWAYS above 70F there, so the O-rings will be fine 99.9% of the time. That's a better than average failure rate!!!"
The most important different is that I made a near worthless post on a message board, this is barely more formal than an e-mail. The grammar I was criticizing was not only in a far more formal editorial posting by a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine it's grammar was FAR worse than mine. Did you actually read it?
"Newsweek has lowdown on something" is the beginning of the first sentence of the article. My problem I guess isn't that the grammar is really bad, but that it doesn't seem that the author even went back over his article after typing it up. I might not have done that in my post, but as I said before this is a semi-anonymous post on a message board and not an article published by a senior writer in a medium trying its best to gain respectability. At the same time, part of my issue with the article is that I tried to read it out loud to my wife without pre-reading it. There are numerous places where I had to translate what was written into something which could actually be spoken aloud in a meaningful way.
Yea, but that is a spelling error and not a grammar error and definitely not a grammer error ;)
Seriously though, one has to see the difference between a single spelling error versus a multiple paragraph article that appears to be written by an eighth grader as a cell phone text message.
but do most of them contain grammer this horrific? The linked article read more like a stream of consciousness e-mail (a poorly written one at that) than a published piece of literature.
I'll argue with just one of your points (most of the rest is true, but I don't work in IT, so don't really know the workplace nearly as much as I know academia). Our top level comp sci classes are about 80-85% men like you (basically) said, BUT I don't know if even half of them are Caucasian. At least a third and probably closer to half are Indian or Pakistani. Then there are a couple of Japanese, a few Chinese, and a representative or two from each major country in Southeast Asia. The remaining 40% or so (of the 80% that AREN'T women) are a mix of African American and Caucasian (probably 1:4 ratio).
White men are not even close to the dominate race in the top level comp sci classes in my school. Now in my DEPARTMENT (biology) it is about 60:40 men:women and the majority of those are white or black.