True, they are different, but there is a relationship - and in fact, one way of showing relativity is to plot a point such that the distance from the x-axis is the velocity, and the distance from the origin is the speed of light, and then distance from the y-axis is speed through time - the vertical height there is the degree to which time 'slows down' for the moving object in relation to whatever it s moving compared to.
Actually, to nitpick...if you've ever learned much relativity (not that I know all that much), time is a dimension just like space, and you are traveling through it forwards at the speed of light, or if you are moving in space, very, very near to it. I know travelling through time at a speed doesn't make sense, but that is in a strange, glad-I'm-not-a-physicist-because-this-makes-no-sen se way the only measurement there is...
ha, ok, ok. Basically, life on this planet started as bacteria and now there are huge, complicated mammals on this planet, and even the bacteria on this planet are more complicated than the first bacteria. So, the evidence shows that over the past 4 billion years, evolution has moved in the direction of complexity.
What organisms rely on RNA as their primary genetic material? RNA does play a big part, but eukaryotes rely heavily on DNA in the nucleus as the library of genetic material, and prokaryotes use DNA in both a central big form and a small, round, plasmid form, but it's their library too...unless you're referring to viruses, but those are not organisms, they cannot replicate on their own.
The one thing you seem to be missing is that 99.9% of the evidence we have shows evolution moving in the direction of complexity.
We started from prokaryotic single celled organisms, moved to much more complex eukaryotic organisms, and kept going to even more complex multi-celled organisms.
And even those prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes around today (of which there are many, ask your immune system) are on average more complex than the average of previous times. Lots of useless DNA, resistance proteins, etc. etc. that are useful.
Carbon-based: well, carbon makes a very useful element, because it is very easy to string together in all sorts of ways, attaches to both hydrogen and oxygen, and like hydrogen and oxygen is rather abundant.
However, that is somewhat irrelevant, because life on a methane planet most likely would be carbon-based. Methane is CH4, and hydrogen based is out of the question, you can't string hydrogens together.
Mostly water:
True, they wouldn't have to be mostly water, they most likely just need a solvent of some type, methane might do the trick.
Oxygen-breathing:
Well, the current model of evolution includes life starting as anaerobic (not oxygen-breathing), creating oxygen as excretion, and then evolving into becoming aerobic as the oxygen built up in the atmosphere.
However, they did need a source of oxygen, which water provided. I don't know what other elements besides carbon and hydrogen are available on Titan, but hydrogen and carbon aren't enough, there just isn't enough variety there for the multitude of complex molecules that would be necessary for life. Although it's hard to know what life not like ours would be like, it is highly, highly probable that they will have at least the same amount if not the same type of variety of molecules as our planet does.
I doubt there's any coordination - it's just that people like to root for the underdog, especially Americans and downtrodden office workers, the slashdot bread and butter. Now that Google has made it almost level with Microsoft, they have lost all the good feeling that came with being an underdog.
The thing is, Google works in black and white on this issue. Even that is giving you some small personal information about your friends (the cross-links) that they probably wouldn't mind you knowing, but it's still personal, non-anonymous, available information. Google is against that. At least so far.
The reason: In order to be useful, the graphical social networking would have to prove information to non-Google people that is not anonymous.
In order to be useful, the graphic would have to show 1) connections between mutual friends 2) the strength of these connections
This is different from any other privacy things google has done because: 1) This is information specific to the person 2) it is available to people outside of google (any friends who would have the person in their graphic) 3) This information would be available without the specific request of the individual it concerns.
Basically, if I were your friend, I would be able to use google to find out what your other friendships are even though you didn't specifically provide this information to me.
This would almost certainly violate google's 'don't be evil' principle, and would get many privacy advocates really irritatingly irritated.
And then make sure at the bottom you switch the box to 'HTML Formatted' instead of 'Plain Old Text'... I didn't do that so you could see the formatting.
You're missing the grandparent's point. The grandparent does not promote the idea that software and hardware should have two fully separate standards. The idea is that patents should not be granted for any idea if the implementation of the idea is trivial compared to the creation of the idea in the first place. The iPod is a good example of this. If you have an iPod, and you use it, and see what it can do without opening it up, it would be very difficult to find all the hardware necessary to do all the things the iPod does in the tiny space it does. The implementation is difficult, and worthy of a patent. However, a good programmer should be easily capable of writing a program to do all the stuff the iPod does...it might take some time to get it out there, but it shouldn't take forever. It would take time, but not much creativity, new ideas are not necessary. The idea, for example, of the 'Now Playing' screen that shows title, album, artist and controls volume, seek, and rating might be novel, but the implementation is trivial compared to the original vision. Your point about the iPod as a hardware implementation is somewhat interesting, but the implementation there would be exceedingly difficult, and is therefore patent-worthy while if it was software that is not the case. The grandparent's idea is that it is quite easy for two people to come up with a lot of code that is different but does the same stuff while it is very, very difficult for two people or groups to each indepently come up with a significant piece of hardware that is visually identical to the others'.
In other words, the x-rays/light gets emitted not by the black hole but instead by all the stuff falling into the black hole. Think of it as seeing the screams of billions of particles as they fall into an abyss never to be seen or heard from again...it brings tears to my eyes.
Oooh! Oooh! I want to join the mad rush to quote the hitchiker's guide!
um...um..."a towel is the most useful thing in the universe...it can be used to ward off snakes...and other such creepy flying varmints that might attack you from strange angles."
Actually, it sounds like that means the interviewer actually did some fairly god research beforehand - if you're going to try and get an interview with a successful geek, what better way to find him than IRC? I think it says a fair amount for the interviewer that he knew enough about the IRC channels to navigate his way through and find him.
Not really. The internet hunting takes place on private grounds nowhere near populated areas, so it's safe. The concern is really the morality of it.
You assume that just because safety isn't an issue that therefore people aren't worried about it. Which relies on the assumption that people are completely rational, which is never good to assume.
There's 300 million people in the US, and there were less than 2000 wiretaps. That's one wiretap per 150,000 people...that seems mighty low to me, especially since I live in a drug-infested suburban town with a whopping 5,000 people which therefore had a 1 in 30 chance of ANY wiretapping at all in the past year, as I would say that my town is no more likely to have a wiretapping than the average, but I could certainly imagine one being needed. It seems to me like saying, "Holy shit! Wiretappings have risen from 10 to 100 in the US in the past year! that's a 900% increase!" It's too small for an increase of any size to make much difference.
I've actually found that in general, OSS advocates who didn't write the software to begin with tend to be the ones saying "Write it yourself" whereas the actual writers of the software are often very responsive to suggestions.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, I need to get me one of those...
True, they are different, but there is a relationship - and in fact, one way of showing relativity is to plot a point such that the distance from the x-axis is the velocity, and the distance from the origin is the speed of light, and then distance from the y-axis is speed through time - the vertical height there is the degree to which time 'slows down' for the moving object in relation to whatever it s moving compared to.
Actually, to nitpick...if you've ever learned much relativity (not that I know all that much), time is a dimension just like space, and you are traveling through it forwards at the speed of light, or if you are moving in space, very, very near to it. I know travelling through time at a speed doesn't make sense, but that is in a strange, glad-I'm-not-a-physicist-because-this-makes-no-sen se way the only measurement there is...
ha, ok, ok. Basically, life on this planet started as bacteria and now there are huge, complicated mammals on this planet, and even the bacteria on this planet are more complicated than the first bacteria. So, the evidence shows that over the past 4 billion years, evolution has moved in the direction of complexity.
What organisms rely on RNA as their primary genetic material? RNA does play a big part, but eukaryotes rely heavily on DNA in the nucleus as the library of genetic material, and prokaryotes use DNA in both a central big form and a small, round, plasmid form, but it's their library too...unless you're referring to viruses, but those are not organisms, they cannot replicate on their own.
The one thing you seem to be missing is that 99.9% of the evidence we have shows evolution moving in the direction of complexity. We started from prokaryotic single celled organisms, moved to much more complex eukaryotic organisms, and kept going to even more complex multi-celled organisms. And even those prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes around today (of which there are many, ask your immune system) are on average more complex than the average of previous times. Lots of useless DNA, resistance proteins, etc. etc. that are useful.
Carbon-based: well, carbon makes a very useful element, because it is very easy to string together in all sorts of ways, attaches to both hydrogen and oxygen, and like hydrogen and oxygen is rather abundant. However, that is somewhat irrelevant, because life on a methane planet most likely would be carbon-based. Methane is CH4, and hydrogen based is out of the question, you can't string hydrogens together. Mostly water: True, they wouldn't have to be mostly water, they most likely just need a solvent of some type, methane might do the trick. Oxygen-breathing: Well, the current model of evolution includes life starting as anaerobic (not oxygen-breathing), creating oxygen as excretion, and then evolving into becoming aerobic as the oxygen built up in the atmosphere. However, they did need a source of oxygen, which water provided. I don't know what other elements besides carbon and hydrogen are available on Titan, but hydrogen and carbon aren't enough, there just isn't enough variety there for the multitude of complex molecules that would be necessary for life. Although it's hard to know what life not like ours would be like, it is highly, highly probable that they will have at least the same amount if not the same type of variety of molecules as our planet does.
Your sig defines identical twins as not human beings...isn't that a little unfair?
I doubt there's any coordination - it's just that people like to root for the underdog, especially Americans and downtrodden office workers, the slashdot bread and butter. Now that Google has made it almost level with Microsoft, they have lost all the good feeling that came with being an underdog.
The thing is, Google works in black and white on this issue. Even that is giving you some small personal information about your friends (the cross-links) that they probably wouldn't mind you knowing, but it's still personal, non-anonymous, available information. Google is against that. At least so far.
Google would never do this.
The reason: In order to be useful, the graphical social networking would have to prove information to non-Google people that is not anonymous.
In order to be useful, the graphic would have to show
1) connections between mutual friends
2) the strength of these connections
This is different from any other privacy things google has done because:
1) This is information specific to the person
2) it is available to people outside of google (any friends who would have the person in their graphic)
3) This information would be available without the specific request of the individual it concerns.
Basically, if I were your friend, I would be able to use google to find out what your other friendships are even though you didn't specifically provide this information to me.
This would almost certainly violate google's 'don't be evil' principle, and would get many privacy advocates really irritatingly irritated.
You just use normal HTML formatting, like this:
... I didn't do that so you could see the formatting.
<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>
And then make sure at the bottom you switch the box to 'HTML Formatted' instead of 'Plain Old Text'
You're missing the grandparent's point. The grandparent does not promote the idea that software and hardware should have two fully separate standards. The idea is that patents should not be granted for any idea if the implementation of the idea is trivial compared to the creation of the idea in the first place. The iPod is a good example of this. If you have an iPod, and you use it, and see what it can do without opening it up, it would be very difficult to find all the hardware necessary to do all the things the iPod does in the tiny space it does. The implementation is difficult, and worthy of a patent. However, a good programmer should be easily capable of writing a program to do all the stuff the iPod does...it might take some time to get it out there, but it shouldn't take forever. It would take time, but not much creativity, new ideas are not necessary. The idea, for example, of the 'Now Playing' screen that shows title, album, artist and controls volume, seek, and rating might be novel, but the implementation is trivial compared to the original vision. Your point about the iPod as a hardware implementation is somewhat interesting, but the implementation there would be exceedingly difficult, and is therefore patent-worthy while if it was software that is not the case. The grandparent's idea is that it is quite easy for two people to come up with a lot of code that is different but does the same stuff while it is very, very difficult for two people or groups to each indepently come up with a significant piece of hardware that is visually identical to the others'.
Just my thought.
Also, huge power plants are much, much more efficient at turning coal or oil into energy. It's a big difference.
That and it can only look in one direction...
In other words, the x-rays/light gets emitted not by the black hole but instead by all the stuff falling into the black hole. Think of it as seeing the screams of billions of particles as they fall into an abyss never to be seen or heard from again...it brings tears to my eyes.
Darnit, you found me out...
Oooh! Oooh! I want to join the mad rush to quote the hitchiker's guide!
um...um..."a towel is the most useful thing in the universe...it can be used to ward off snakes...and other such creepy flying varmints that might attack you from strange angles."
Is that right?
Actually, it sounds like that means the interviewer actually did some fairly god research beforehand - if you're going to try and get an interview with a successful geek, what better way to find him than IRC? I think it says a fair amount for the interviewer that he knew enough about the IRC channels to navigate his way through and find him.
Not really. The internet hunting takes place on private grounds nowhere near populated areas, so it's safe. The concern is really the morality of it.
You assume that just because safety isn't an issue that therefore people aren't worried about it. Which relies on the assumption that people are completely rational, which is never good to assume.
and dogs bite...ha ha...
The way Linux and Apple and Google are doing while Longhorn isn't looking good to a lot of these bloggers...stock shares might be a bad idea.
There's 300 million people in the US, and there were less than 2000 wiretaps. That's one wiretap per 150,000 people...that seems mighty low to me, especially since I live in a drug-infested suburban town with a whopping 5,000 people which therefore had a 1 in 30 chance of ANY wiretapping at all in the past year, as I would say that my town is no more likely to have a wiretapping than the average, but I could certainly imagine one being needed. It seems to me like saying, "Holy shit! Wiretappings have risen from 10 to 100 in the US in the past year! that's a 900% increase!" It's too small for an increase of any size to make much difference.
I've actually found that in general, OSS advocates who didn't write the software to begin with tend to be the ones saying "Write it yourself" whereas the actual writers of the software are often very responsive to suggestions.