Re:What day of the week is it?
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Between the money to SCO,
According to TFA, this money was necessary to obtain extended rights which would allow them to open source Solaris. Which they're going to do now.
the digs at Linux as marketing strategy
Shock: Company criticises competing OS ! Peronally I find that their comments, even though partial and biased (how could it be otherwise ?) are still much, much more objective than 99% of the typical linux fanboy comment about Solaris.
and this on again off again view of open source
Uh ? According to TFA (again), it took them years to make Solaris ready for open sourcing, buying or recoding away third-party stuff. As for open-sourcing Java, the Boss has always been rather clear that the current Java community process was exactly what they felt they need: the community can control the development of the platform, but the code doesn't get forked into incompatible fractal branches of vanishingly thin relevance. Maybe they learnt something from the Unix wars after all.
I mean, damn, they give you open office, Java and now they are open sourcing the best Unix environment out there - what more do you need ?
It was not just Plato who talked about Atlantis (like we talk about, say, Chicago), but also the Eygyptians and the Hindus in Vedic manuscripts that still exist!
Hm, do they talk about Atlantis as in "Large island, situated next to an even bigger continent which encompassed the whole ocean, the people of which invaded Northern Africa and Southern Europe and were defeated by the Greek about 9000 years B.C." ?
Or do they talk about it as in "big city in the sea, Gods angry, city sunk" ?
There are several candidates for "the city that inspired the myth of Atlantis", Santorini being the most credible one. It is even possible to imagine that Atlantis and other myths about Atlantic islands refer to real locations (be it Madeira, Capo Verde or even American archipelagos). Nevertheless it is still much more plausible that Plato made the whole thing up.
There are spirals that are found on rocks in Celtic ruins, in Spain, in North Africa and also on ruins in the American Southwest! The Hopi say these are 18 year moon-cycle calanders for observing the cycles of the moon. And yet pick up a book on the Celts and the authors don't know what these are.
Are you seriously telling us that because two people use spirals, they must have the same function ? Regardless of the fact that they are separated by a whole ocean and a whole continent, and that their last common ancestor was probably among the first modern humans to come out of Africa ? Not only that, but are you seriously ridiculing authors who do not mention this "possibility" ?
The Zuni's of the American Southwest have recently been shown to most likely have been decendant from Buddist pilgrims from Japan
No they have not. This hypothesis was stated by a given researcher, based on significant evidence, and may well be true. But as of now there has been no DNA study or archeological finding to prove this theory.
That's your problem. You don't understand the meaning of the word "show". That's why the "mafia" (i.e. people a bit more cautious than you) look down on you and your ilk, as they should. That's also why they hold academic positions, and you don't.
It is very easy to see how real history can be distorted to add magic and mythological things where none existed before.
And to be honest the Chinese were rather conservative in their historic transmissions. You want to know what Europeans (folk and scholars alike) are capable of ?
Fact: There once was a germanic tribe called the Burgunds (after which Burgundy is named). Also there was a guy called Attila who kicked some serious ass more or less at the same time.
Add Germanic poets, Norse scholars (the Icelandic scribes who wrote the sagas were the intellectual elite of medieval Europe) and let it simmer for about six-seven centuries.
In this messageboard we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
Actually there is no thermodynamic impossibility here. The grandparent poster describes the following cycle:
- Cook a burrito - Eat burrito, biochemically extract some energy from them - Use this energy to cook two burritos
Now most of the energy contained in the burrito does not come from the cooking. It comes from the energy-rich materials contained in the beans and other ingredients, which were acquired through biological processes based on solar energy (and a whole lot of chemical reactions revolving around ATP).
So clearly there is nothing impossible in the idea of using some of this energy to heat other burritos. Of course there is a limit on the amount of energy available, and thus on the degee of cooking you can apply.
They forget though it's not a zero sum game and in the end there will be more to go around for everyone.
Unless of course the dynamics of the society at hand lead to concentration of money, power and security, and divides the population between the have the have not, in which the latter have virtually no chance at all of a better life (unless they have Milton Friedman's brains or Billie Holiday's talent).
Once there was a time when labour division in capitalism was clear: the capitalist provided money, the worker provided labour. The worker didn't earn much, but the risk inherent in entrepreneurship was divided: the worker could lose his job, the capitalist could lose his money.
But in the modern American model of capitalism, every rule of the society concurs to shifting the weight of risks towards the worker. Public companies are required, by law, to do everything they can to give more money to their shareholders. Workforce has become an adjustment variable. The consequences of management errors fall first upon the worker (that is, on those whose responsibility is least involved, since they have no say in the conduct of the company !), then on management, and only if things really go wrong, on the shareholders.
Thus more and more workers find themselves into a thoroughly insecure environment. Having reasonable confidence that you'll still be able to pay the bills in six months is becoming a privilege. Only the very rich can enjoy security.
When you don't know what your future will be made of, when you're constantly under the risk of social downfall, it becomes difficult to plan anything over the long term, but such planning is necessary to improve your situation significantly. The segmentation of the population is self-reinforcing, not only by environmental effect (when you live in a destitute gettho opportunities are scarce) but also by the fundamental dynamics of the system.
Communism is sharing a small cake equally. Because of inefficiencies the cake doesn't grow and even shrinks to the point that everyone is poor (except of course members of the nomenklatura). Capitalism is making a bigger cake and it certainly works well (the power and wealth of the US is no illusion and does come from this system), but with the peculiar effect that the bigger your part is, the bigger it will become (and inversely).
That's why people in various European, South American and Asian countries tried to come up with a mixture of free economy and state intervention that allows for efficiency and fairness. As far as I can tell Scandinavia and Taiwan have fared pretty well. Germany and France used to work well too but are now crumbling under their own weight. The English are just putting a smiling, compassionate face on an increasingly American model.
The joke is on you, buddy. Circuit city and Best buy are the same company
So what ? This isn't about "punishing" a company. This is about quality of service. One branch of the company treat him like shit. The other branch treat him decently. If everybody stops buying from the former and shops at the latter instead, even the most clueless PHB will get the message at some point.
... Schröder, Chirac, Blair, Sharon and Berlusconi on the second trip?
Schroder will attract hordes of angry east German protester who will block the launch, Blair will give the plans of the ship to the US government with offers of complimentary sexual gratification to any senior member of the administration, Sharon won't get in the ship because it will probably fly over a moslem country at some point, Chirac will ask for United Nations meetings, counter-meeting, commissions and detailed reports on the size and orientation of every single joint in the fuselage, and Berlusconi will just run away with the prize !
Looks as if you are swallowing the Democrat party line of class hatred and not looking at the actual process and results of taxation and the history of how Congress votes.
I know you're probably trolling, but lots of people really believe (and spread) this kind of BS, so I'll pretend you really think what you say.
In short, you get economy 101 but apparently you didn't make it to 102.
Sweden (yes, 50%+ income tax Sweden) has a massively positive trade balance with the USA. When I say massively positive I mean they sell you almost three times as much as they buy from you ! And no, it's not biscuits or linux distros. It's high tech industry-oriented goods. Except for Ikea, Ericsson and Volvo, most Swedish exports are from small specialised companies that employ ridiculously educated workers to desing and produce high value-added goods.
France and Germany are a mess, but that's not because of taxes or social security. It's just that they dug themselves into a bureaucratic hole. Saying that a strong state with highly developed social services entails sprawling, Franco-German like bureaucracies is a lie ! Hell, you Americans share a border thousands of miles long with Canada, don't you ever look at what's going on up north ?
Your whole argument about labor costs and massive offshoring is dumb. The same BS that politicians serve us daily. Read any book by Paul Krugman as an introduction (looks like you'll need it), then hit a real economy manual. In short, wages in any given national industry tend to equal the average productivity of this industry in this country. Do you really think that wages in India and China have not risen in the last decade ? See South Korea or Taiwan for other recent examples.
They might as well just write a bloody all-in-one operating system and get it over with.:P
Man, with what they have now, if they just set up some kind of browser-based productivity/office tools (based on e.g. Echo or summat) then for all practical purposes they will have made the first true multi-platform OS ever !
The underlying OS (win, linux, whatever) will just act as a kind of bloated BIOS. The browser being somewhat equivalent to the windowing system.
Funny how you say that they don't understand genetics, yet that is what they do for a living
Microsoft programmers write Windows code for a living. Ergo Windows is stable, reliable and secure. Obvious, isn't it ?
The people who work in biotech industry are smart and understand genetics. But they're being paid to get specific results, not to worry about long term consequences. It's simply not their job. Hopefully you are not asserting that the whole scientific community regards GM organisms are fundamentally harmless and risk-free, are you ?
Don't release your software under the GPL, you don't know the ramifications of doing so.
If GPL code appears in a program, it can be deleted.
If bio-engineered resistance to a given pest/disease/parasite suddenly appears in wild species through cross-fertilisation, and turns this wild species into an invasive plant (like Caulerpa Taxifolia, but on land), and leads the pest/disease/parasite to mutate into a stronger variant...
What you fail to see is that the "other side of the argument" is supported by kooks and / or people paid by the industry. Note that I am certainly not blaming you for this: to a layman (and we are all laymen in most domains, regardless of our expertise in any particular domain), this is not obvious. The kooks exploit this fact and present themselves as respectable scientists which 99% of the time they are not.
The consensus on global warming in the scientific community (read: people who do actual science and publish papers through peer-reviewing processes) is among the strongest you'll find in any scientific field.
I think the best possible parallel is with creationism. To many people in the US, it is not at all unreasonable to think that the earth is less than 10000 years old. After all, the crackpots who support these kinds of "theories" seem respectable and their arguments sound plausible. The general public cannot be expected to know that these "arguments", when they exist (most of the creationist babble runs along the lines of "I can't understand how something as complex as life could evolve, therefore it didn't"), are based on lies and falsehoods.
Thank you for reminding us about the cycle of photosynthesis, which among other effects gobs up CO2 and water, and produces sugar (for the plant to eat) and dioxygen as a byproduct.
Now what do you think they do with all this sugar ?
Now please hit Google and learn about the other part of the energy cycle present in most plants and indeed in most modern living organisms, which is called "respiration" (you may have heard about it): an oxidation process using dioxygen to degrade aforementioned sugars into ATP (nearly universal form of energy storage in living cells) and BLOODY CARBON DIOXIDE !
This page summarises the main points in an intuitive way.
At any rate, the production of oxygen by trees is simply tiny. The massive release of oxygen in the atmosphere, arguably one of the most important events in the history of life, was caused by the first photosynthetisers, like cyanobacteria - bacteria that do use photosynthesis to produce sugar (and oxygen), but degrade this sugar through older, less efficient mechanisms such as fermentation. Of course they did not use respiration, because before they appeared there was no oxygen to breathe (duh !)
Besides causing havoc in the primitive fauna, the so-called "oxygen holocaust" led to the appearance of the much more efficient respiration mechanism. Which in turn allowed for the emergence of much more complex forms of life (Eukaryotes) in a Bacterial world.
Most experts agree that the average global temperature was higher in the middle-ages than it is now...
Pedantry is the only modus operendi in dealing with legal scams like that of "Intellectual Property"
Sure. I mean, people getting paid for the product of intellectual work - imagine that !
Stuff was, like, so much better in the Dark Ages, when 100% of artists and intellectuals who actually made a decent living (and had enough security to produce quality works such as the Arthurian cycles) had exactly two sources of income:
- Patrons (only the rich get to hear real music and elaborate poetry)
- Taxes leveraged from the poor (monks in their abbeys living off the peasantry)
Obviously the fact that the general public does not immediately hold the superiority of such models as self-evident is a clear proof that We The People are being manipulated by an evil pigopolistic conspiracy.
Not being a racist troll here, but from my experience, culturally Asians seem to be a lot less promiscuous,
But you're talking about an exponential process. If everybody has unprotected sex with n persons while being infected, as soon as n > 1, the actual value of n matters very little: the disease will spread with catastrophic speed. It might take more time to infect the whole population, but not that much.
As an example, if in one case the process spreads with multiplicative factor n1 = 2, and in the other n2 = 8, then it will only take 3 times as long for the first process to infect as many people. If n1 = 2 and n2 = 16, it will be 4 times as long.
The ratio between total infection times is equal to the ratio of the logs of the two multiplicative factors. You can check by yourself, it's just basic logarithm / exponent manipulation.
Of course in this simplistic analysis we ignore repetitions (people already infected do not contribute to any further increase in infections). But these effects become significant only when a sizeable proportion of the population is infected, so essentially if one population is small and the other is large, the disease will spread faster, for a longer time, in the second one.
Oh, btw, remember that in the case of India and China put together, we are talking about one third of mankind.
But there is an even more depressing aspect of AIDS. With AIDS, abstinence is only a protection if it is absolute. There are some populations in which such a thing exists. Most of the time it is enforced by scaringly oppressive traditions / religions / customs. In other words, when AIDS becomes widespread enough to have a significant impact on the population, it turns obscurantism into a Darwinian advantage.
Actually, I think the solution would be to simply make it a misdemeanor to upload or download music to or from the general public without permission of the copyright holder.
You shoe licking, cock sucking lackey of the evil corporate conspiracy ! Are you insinuating that you would strip us from our God-granted right to download and enjoy just about anything that can be digitized without ever giving anything in return ?
Man, art thou gonna feel the wrath of the SlashMob !
(Okay, -1 ridiculously broad generalization. But hey, look at some of the posts modded +5 Insightful above...)
I'm reading up on the FBI files on the JFK assassination atm
The JFK assassination is one case where the public was exposed to lots of information, which is not a problem - the problem is that, in remarkable accordance with Sturgeon's law, 90% of this information was absolute crap.
A majority of americans today believe that there has been some kind of conspiracy around Kennedy's murder. Oliver Stone's film is probably the number 1 culprit for this. The ever helpful BBC made a documentary which simply blasted the conspiracy theory (in particular, the "magic bullet" thing was shown to be quintessential BS). See this page for a summary of the main points.
Slashdot Mirror
Geeks ? Screw ? Bah !
Thomas-
We'll all be better off once the people who would drink gasoline, drink gasoline
God, now they're trying to slashdot the Darwin Awards !
Thomas-
Between the money to SCO,
According to TFA, this money was necessary to obtain extended rights which would allow them to open source Solaris. Which they're going to do now.
the digs at Linux as marketing strategy
Shock: Company criticises competing OS ! Peronally I find that their comments, even though partial and biased (how could it be otherwise ?) are still much, much more objective than 99% of the typical linux fanboy comment about Solaris.
and this on again off again view of open source
Uh ? According to TFA (again), it took them years to make Solaris ready for open sourcing, buying or recoding away third-party stuff. As for open-sourcing Java, the Boss has always been rather clear that the current Java community process was exactly what they felt they need: the community can control the development of the platform, but the code doesn't get forked into incompatible fractal branches of vanishingly thin relevance. Maybe they learnt something from the Unix wars after all.
I mean, damn, they give you open office, Java and now they are open sourcing the best Unix environment out there - what more do you need ?
Thomas-
It was not just Plato who talked about Atlantis (like we talk about, say, Chicago), but also the Eygyptians and the Hindus in Vedic manuscripts that still exist!
Hm, do they talk about Atlantis as in "Large island, situated next to an even bigger continent which encompassed the whole ocean, the people of which invaded Northern Africa and Southern Europe and were defeated by the Greek about 9000 years B.C." ?
Or do they talk about it as in "big city in the sea, Gods angry, city sunk" ?
There are several candidates for "the city that inspired the myth of Atlantis", Santorini being the most credible one. It is even possible to imagine that Atlantis and other myths about Atlantic islands refer to real locations (be it Madeira, Capo Verde or even American archipelagos). Nevertheless it is still much more plausible that Plato made the whole thing up.
There are spirals that are found on rocks in Celtic ruins, in Spain, in North Africa and also on ruins in the American Southwest! The Hopi say these are 18 year moon-cycle calanders for observing the cycles of the moon. And yet pick up a book on the Celts and the authors don't know what these are.
Are you seriously telling us that because two people use spirals, they must have the same function ? Regardless of the fact that they are separated by a whole ocean and a whole continent, and that their last common ancestor was probably among the first modern humans to come out of Africa ? Not only that, but are you seriously ridiculing authors who do not mention this "possibility" ?
The Zuni's of the American Southwest have recently been shown to most likely have been decendant from Buddist pilgrims from Japan
No they have not. This hypothesis was stated by a given researcher, based on significant evidence, and may well be true. But as of now there has been no DNA study or archeological finding to prove this theory.
That's your problem. You don't understand the meaning of the word "show". That's why the "mafia" (i.e. people a bit more cautious than you) look down on you and your ilk, as they should. That's also why they hold academic positions, and you don't.
Thomas-
It is very easy to see how real history can be distorted to add magic and mythological things where none existed before.
And to be honest the Chinese were rather conservative in their historic transmissions. You want to know what Europeans (folk and scholars alike) are capable of ?
Fact: There once was a germanic tribe called the Burgunds (after which Burgundy is named). Also there was a guy called Attila who kicked some serious ass more or less at the same time.
Add Germanic poets, Norse scholars (the Icelandic scribes who wrote the sagas were the intellectual elite of medieval Europe) and let it simmer for about six-seven centuries.
Result: The Nibelungenlied !
And don't even get me started about how Richard Wagner single-handedly rewrote the whole damn thing into the version that most people know today.
Thomas-
I mean its not like Sun didn't earn Linux user's scorn will the BS they've put out about Linux over the years.
Like funding GNOME and opening StarOffice ??
I guess Linux could do with more "bashing" of that kind !
Thomas-
In this messageboard we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
:)
Actually there is no thermodynamic impossibility here. The grandparent poster describes the following cycle:
- Cook a burrito
- Eat burrito, biochemically extract some energy from them
- Use this energy to cook two burritos
Now most of the energy contained in the burrito does not come from the cooking. It comes from the energy-rich materials contained in the beans and other ingredients, which were acquired through biological processes based on solar energy (and a whole lot of chemical reactions revolving around ATP).
So clearly there is nothing impossible in the idea of using some of this energy to heat other burritos. Of course there is a limit on the amount of energy available, and thus on the degee of cooking you can apply.
I know, I'm sad.
Thomas-
They forget though it's not a zero sum game and in the end there will be more to go around for everyone.
Unless of course the dynamics of the society at hand lead to concentration of money, power and security, and divides the population between the have the have not, in which the latter have virtually no chance at all of a better life (unless they have Milton Friedman's brains or Billie Holiday's talent).
Once there was a time when labour division in capitalism was clear: the capitalist provided money, the worker provided labour. The worker didn't earn much, but the risk inherent in entrepreneurship was divided: the worker could lose his job, the capitalist could lose his money.
But in the modern American model of capitalism, every rule of the society concurs to shifting the weight of risks towards the worker. Public companies are required, by law, to do everything they can to give more money to their shareholders. Workforce has become an adjustment variable. The consequences of management errors fall first upon the worker (that is, on those whose responsibility is least involved, since they have no say in the conduct of the company !), then on management, and only if things really go wrong, on the shareholders.
Thus more and more workers find themselves into a thoroughly insecure environment. Having reasonable confidence that you'll still be able to pay the bills in six months is becoming a privilege. Only the very rich can enjoy security.
When you don't know what your future will be made of, when you're constantly under the risk of social downfall, it becomes difficult to plan anything over the long term, but such planning is necessary to improve your situation significantly. The segmentation of the population is self-reinforcing, not only by environmental effect (when you live in a destitute gettho opportunities are scarce) but also by the fundamental dynamics of the system.
Communism is sharing a small cake equally. Because of inefficiencies the cake doesn't grow and even shrinks to the point that everyone is poor (except of course members of the nomenklatura). Capitalism is making a bigger cake and it certainly works well (the power and wealth of the US is no illusion and does come from this system), but with the peculiar effect that the bigger your part is, the bigger it will become (and inversely).
That's why people in various European, South American and Asian countries tried to come up with a mixture of free economy and state intervention that allows for efficiency and fairness. As far as I can tell Scandinavia and Taiwan have fared pretty well. Germany and France used to work well too but are now crumbling under their own weight. The English are just putting a smiling, compassionate face on an increasingly American model.
Thomas-
The joke is on you, buddy. Circuit city and Best buy are the same company
So what ? This isn't about "punishing" a company. This is about quality of service. One branch of the company treat him like shit. The other branch treat him decently. If everybody stops buying from the former and shops at the latter instead, even the most clueless PHB will get the message at some point.
Thomas-
... Schröder, Chirac, Blair, Sharon and Berlusconi on the second trip?
Schroder will attract hordes of angry east German protester who will block the launch, Blair will give the plans of the ship to the US government with offers of complimentary sexual gratification to any senior member of the administration, Sharon won't get in the ship because it will probably fly over a moslem country at some point, Chirac will ask for United Nations meetings, counter-meeting, commissions and detailed reports on the size and orientation of every single joint in the fuselage, and Berlusconi will just run away with the prize !
Thomas-
"Their sales of Linux."
:)
Error: Division by 0.
You mean they tried to calculate the ratio of people switching to linux over people switiching back to MS ?
Thomas-
Simple.
We're doomed.
Thomas-
Looks as if you are swallowing the Democrat party line of class hatred and not looking at the actual process and results of taxation and the history of how Congress votes.
I know you're probably trolling, but lots of people really believe (and spread) this kind of BS, so I'll pretend you really think what you say.
In short, you get economy 101 but apparently you didn't make it to 102.
Sweden (yes, 50%+ income tax Sweden) has a massively positive trade balance with the USA. When I say massively positive I mean they sell you almost three times as much as they buy from you ! And no, it's not biscuits or linux distros. It's high tech industry-oriented goods. Except for Ikea, Ericsson and Volvo, most Swedish exports are from small specialised companies that employ ridiculously educated workers to desing and produce high value-added goods.
France and Germany are a mess, but that's not because of taxes or social security. It's just that they dug themselves into a bureaucratic hole. Saying that a strong state with highly developed social services entails sprawling, Franco-German like bureaucracies is a lie ! Hell, you Americans share a border thousands of miles long with Canada, don't you ever look at what's going on up north ?
Your whole argument about labor costs and massive offshoring is dumb. The same BS that politicians serve us daily. Read any book by Paul Krugman as an introduction (looks like you'll need it), then hit a real economy manual. In short, wages in any given national industry tend to equal the average productivity of this industry in this country. Do you really think that wages in India and China have not risen in the last decade ? See South Korea or Taiwan for other recent examples.
Do the research and really think before you vote.
Yup, good idea.
Thomas-
FireFox is already extremely bloated (on Windows)
I'm posting this from an admittedly bloated version of Mozilla (which is slow on a 1.5GHz machine) which I have to use at work.
But at home, Firefox runs smoothly (as fast as IE) on a 4 years old 266 MHz Pentium II laptop running Win98.
Thomas-
keep their RIM jobs?
*RIMshot*
Thomas-
They might as well just write a bloody all-in-one operating system and get it over with. :P
/office tools (based on e.g. Echo or summat) then for all practical purposes they will have made the first true multi-platform OS ever !
Man, with what they have now, if they just set up some kind of browser-based productivity
The underlying OS (win, linux, whatever) will just act as a kind of bloated BIOS. The browser being somewhat equivalent to the windowing system.
Where do I sign up ?
Thomas-
Funny how you say that they don't understand genetics, yet that is what they do for a living
Microsoft programmers write Windows code for a living. Ergo Windows is stable, reliable and secure. Obvious, isn't it ?
The people who work in biotech industry are smart and understand genetics. But they're being paid to get specific results, not to worry about long term consequences. It's simply not their job. Hopefully you are not asserting that the whole scientific community regards GM organisms are fundamentally harmless and risk-free, are you ?
Don't release your software under the GPL, you don't know the ramifications of doing so.
If GPL code appears in a program, it can be deleted.
If bio-engineered resistance to a given pest/disease/parasite suddenly appears in wild species through cross-fertilisation, and turns this wild species into an invasive plant (like Caulerpa Taxifolia, but on land), and leads the pest/disease/parasite to mutate into a stronger variant...
then what do you do ?
Thomas-
Academic in training
The argument is convincing, and I haven't heard a good counterargument.
Curve of temperatures over the last two millenia
CO2 levels over the last 500k years as measured from the arctic ice record (notice the huge spike at the end of the graph)
What you fail to see is that the "other side of the argument" is supported by kooks and / or people paid by the industry. Note that I am certainly not blaming you for this: to a layman (and we are all laymen in most domains, regardless of our expertise in any particular domain), this is not obvious. The kooks exploit this fact and present themselves as respectable scientists which 99% of the time they are not.
The consensus on global warming in the scientific community (read: people who do actual science and publish papers through peer-reviewing processes) is among the strongest you'll find in any scientific field.
I think the best possible parallel is with creationism. To many people in the US, it is not at all unreasonable to think that the earth is less than 10000 years old. After all, the crackpots who support these kinds of "theories" seem respectable and their arguments sound plausible. The general public cannot be expected to know that these "arguments", when they exist (most of the creationist babble runs along the lines of "I can't understand how something as complex as life could evolve, therefore it didn't"), are based on lies and falsehoods.
Thomas-
Trees "inhale" CO2 and "exhale" oxygen.
Thank you for reminding us about the cycle of photosynthesis, which among other effects gobs up CO2 and water, and produces sugar (for the plant to eat) and dioxygen as a byproduct.
Now what do you think they do with all this sugar ?
Now please hit Google and learn about the other part of the energy cycle present in most plants and indeed in most modern living organisms, which is called "respiration" (you may have heard about it): an oxidation process using dioxygen to degrade aforementioned sugars into ATP (nearly universal form of energy storage in living cells) and BLOODY CARBON DIOXIDE !
This page summarises the main points in an intuitive way.
At any rate, the production of oxygen by trees is simply tiny. The massive release of oxygen in the atmosphere, arguably one of the most important events in the history of life, was caused by the first photosynthetisers, like cyanobacteria - bacteria that do use photosynthesis to produce sugar (and oxygen), but degrade this sugar through older, less efficient mechanisms such as fermentation. Of course they did not use respiration, because before they appeared there was no oxygen to breathe (duh !)
Besides causing havoc in the primitive fauna, the so-called "oxygen holocaust" led to the appearance of the much more efficient respiration mechanism. Which in turn allowed for the emergence of much more complex forms of life (Eukaryotes) in a Bacterial world.
Most experts agree that the average global temperature was higher in the middle-ages than it is now...
Yeah right.
Someone save us from the product of the US education system !
Thomas-
Pedantry is the only modus operendi in dealing with legal scams like that of "Intellectual Property"
Sure. I mean, people getting paid for the product of intellectual work - imagine that !
Stuff was, like, so much better in the Dark Ages, when 100% of artists and intellectuals who actually made a decent living (and had enough security to produce quality works such as the Arthurian cycles) had exactly two sources of income:
- Patrons (only the rich get to hear real music and elaborate poetry)
- Taxes leveraged from the poor (monks in their abbeys living off the peasantry)
Obviously the fact that the general public does not immediately hold the superiority of such models as self-evident is a clear proof that We The People are being manipulated by an evil pigopolistic conspiracy.
Thomas-
Your chances of sleeping with an HIV-infected female pickup in the USA is about 1 in 1500
This is Slashdot. You forgot a few zeroes.
Thomas-
Not being a racist troll here, but from my experience, culturally Asians seem to be a lot less promiscuous,
But you're talking about an exponential process. If everybody has unprotected sex with n persons while being infected, as soon as n > 1, the actual value of n matters very little: the disease will spread with catastrophic speed. It might take more time to infect the whole population, but not that much.
As an example, if in one case the process spreads with multiplicative factor n1 = 2, and in the other n2 = 8, then it will only take 3 times as long for the first process to infect as many people. If n1 = 2 and n2 = 16, it will be 4 times as long.
The ratio between total infection times is equal to the ratio of the logs of the two multiplicative factors. You can check by yourself, it's just basic logarithm / exponent manipulation.
Of course in this simplistic analysis we ignore repetitions (people already infected do not contribute to any further increase in infections). But these effects become significant only when a sizeable proportion of the population is infected, so essentially if one population is small and the other is large, the disease will spread faster, for a longer time, in the second one.
Oh, btw, remember that in the case of India and China put together, we are talking about one third of mankind.
But there is an even more depressing aspect of AIDS. With AIDS, abstinence is only a protection if it is absolute. There are some populations in which such a thing exists. Most of the time it is enforced by scaringly oppressive traditions / religions / customs. In other words, when AIDS becomes widespread enough to have a significant impact on the population, it turns obscurantism into a Darwinian advantage.
Thomas-
Actually, I think the solution would be to simply make it a misdemeanor to upload or download music to or from the general public without permission of the copyright holder.
You shoe licking, cock sucking lackey of the evil corporate conspiracy ! Are you insinuating that you would strip us from our God-granted right to download and enjoy just about anything that can be digitized without ever giving anything in return ?
Man, art thou gonna feel the wrath of the SlashMob !
(Okay, -1 ridiculously broad generalization. But hey, look at some of the posts modded +5 Insightful above...)
Thomas-
I'm reading up on the FBI files on the JFK assassination atm
The JFK assassination is one case where the public was exposed to lots of information, which is not a problem - the problem is that, in remarkable accordance with Sturgeon's law, 90% of this information was absolute crap.
A majority of americans today believe that there has been some kind of conspiracy around Kennedy's murder. Oliver Stone's film is probably the number 1 culprit for this. The ever helpful BBC made a documentary which simply blasted the conspiracy theory (in particular, the "magic bullet" thing was shown to be quintessential BS). See this page for a summary of the main points.
Thomas Miconi
"Unsubstantiated rumours and wild-ass guesses for nerds"
Bluff that matters.