I think that 8.1 dropped support for 68030 and before chips while while still allowing 68040 chips to play along. Or maybe that was a bit earlier in the 7.5.5 timeframe?
Gwen's storyline is essentially taken up by MJ, who doesn't die. They did put in the whole wrestling, petty criminal who later becomes a killer, power/responsibility thing, and did it quite well in my opinion.
Only humans have shown an ability to change the balance of the planet for good or ill. Forgive me if I believe that that ability confers upon our species a certain level of responsibility. There is a balance on this planet, everytime there has been some sort of ecological disaster, we (humans) have been the cause.
Well, that is not completely correct. EVERY living thing changes its local enviornment to some extent, and there have been constant large scale changes in both local and planetary environments brought about by non-human creatures. The advent of photo-synthisis was a disaster for those creatures not able to adapt to an oxygen atmosphere. Countless waves of "foreign invaders" have changed the lives of countless now-extinct species as they were eaten or outcompeted. That's how life works. There is much evidence to suggest that many of the cooling and warming cycles that the earth has experienced have been highly infleuenced by various life forms.
This does nothing to address the multitude of non-human and non-life infleuences such as meteor strikes, volcanos, and changes in the solar enviornment that have occurred over the history of the planet.
...nevertheless people have been living there quite peacably in harmony with their environment until the last century or so, which saw imperial colonization, and vast (mostly forced) changes in lifestyle. I bet you also subscribe to some absolutist view of "progress".
I do not know that this idea is backed up by the available evidence.
It is my understanding that in essentially every situation where humans have had the ability to make changes to the environment, they have done so. Easter Island went from a "paradise" to a "wasteland" over the few hundred years after which it was colonized by the native peoples of the area. Once they cut down all the trees they were screwed. The loss of large animals in North America and Austrailia is coincident with the aravial of humans in those regions. Native Americans in the West dramatically changed the landscape and animal population by the use of man-made fires. The middle east, Greece, and various other regions have been overgrazed alost out of existance.
It is not the fault of our market economy or modern technology that we "rape the planet", it is part of our nature to exploit resources for short term gain - and pretty much every species in existance does the same - those that do not get wiped out. Granted however that technology makes that impulse more destructive.
The answer is not to strive for some mythical past where everything was in harmony, but rather to work towards a full understanding of the issues so that we can avoid or minimize unintended consequences. This effort seems more well thought out than the introduction of exotic species. The idea that we should do nothing might reflect a deep moral theology, but it is pretty impractical. We vacinate against illnesses, and we eliminate creatures that kill our family. We shoot bears that wander into town if we can't get rid of them in a more "humane" manner - this is no different.
Sure, but I certainly am not aware of anyone who has assigned probablilities in any meaninful manner to any identifiable subset of the population. How does the facts of the known details of the deceased terrorists change the probablilities?
What we do have is a bunch of people who figure that their perceptions of the probablilities for particular individuals justify them being treated different from other individuals. This isn't a good model for running a security system.
"The computer says you're 67% likely to be guilty, based on your past actions and associations. We're not going to release you until you can prove your loyalty."
Another problem is of course that the system couldn't possibly give percentages this high, since there are so many many many many people who fly each day who do not try to hijack the plane.
"The computer says that you are 0.0000001% likely to be a problem, have a nice flight."
"The computer says that you are 0.000001% likely to be a problem - please step into that room over there."
Like the face-scanning software, false positives will kill the usefulness of almost any system designed to protect against people who make up such a vanishingly small fraction of the flying public.
It would seem that if you could catch 10-20 people on a flight of 100 by doing a close screening of everyone on board, it would probably be done. Certainly there is nothing to prevent immigration from doing a thorough search on everyone entering the country on a particular flight, and it would make for great press coverage to catch that many drug smugglers at one time.
Most of the profiles are based on dry, boring math, just probabilities churned out by a computer somewhere.
Actually, I think that most of the "profiling" that is done is based on various people's *perceptions* of the probablilities.
The number of people stopped on drug related suspicion grounds generally disproportionaltely favours blacks, yet in that particular area, the number of people actually convicted disproportionatly favours "whites". The profiling in this case was actually wrong, yet it still occurred. (And of course I have no citation to back this up:-)
If the system used an independantly audited algorithm that accurately reflected the known factors associated with "bad" behaviour, and randomly selected people for further checks based on representitive data and modeling, then I might not have as much problem with it.
Of course I would still be concerned about the potential for privacy abuses.
One must also consider the effectiveness of any system designed to merely catch those intent on destruction. If we make the airlines "safe", would not the determined terrorist just start blowing up busses? NFL games? Little League? If you want to kill 10, 20, or 100 random people, you do not need an airplane to do it. Inciting terrorcan be done in even the most strict of police states - so is it worth the cost to become one?
But if he was such a potential danger, would it not have been wise to gather some more intelligence on him before running the raid? It is not like they didn't know about him for quite some time before hand. Presumably that further information would have indicated how small a threat he was and would not have justified the expense in sending in all the troops.
It seems clear to me that at least part of the motivation in the manner of the raid was to provide a large scare to the fellow. I do not know how comfortable I am with these types of intimidation tactics. I think it is good for the evil-drug lords and gang bangers to be afraid of the police - I am less happy with such fear being used as a tool to limit expressions of political dissent.
The unit of time, the second, was defined originally as the fraction 1/86 400 of the mean solar day. The exact definition of "mean solar day" was left to astronomical theories. However, measurement showed that irregularities in the rotation of the Earth could not be taken into account by the theory and have the effect that this definition does not allow the required accuracy to be achieved. In order to define the unit of time more precisely, the 11th CGPM (1960) adopted a definition given by the International Astronomical Union which was based on the tropical year. Experimental work had, however, already shown that an atomic standard of time-interval, based on a transition between two energy levels of an atom or a molecule, could be realized and reproduced much more precisely. Considering that a very precise definition of the unit of time is indispensable for the International System, the 13th CGPM (1967) decided to replace the definition of the second by the following (affirmed by the CIPM in 1997 that this definition refers to a cesium atom in its ground state at a temperature of 0 K):
The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
No, the older definition was a certain number of wavelengths of a particular optical transition and the current (for quite some time now) definition is based on the distance travelled by light in a well defined amount of time. They are quite different.
The first footnote of the paper seems to be incorrect, it reads:
[1] Since the mid eighties the meter has actually been defined in terms of a fixed, integral number of wavelengths of light
from a particular optical transition. Since the frequency of that optical transition is tied up in (what are believed to be
fundamental) constants of nature, the speed of light is defined through this definition of the meter.
I had thought that the meter was defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second, with the second being so many vibrations of a particular atom (cesium?).
Yep, according to NIST the length has been defined this way for quite some time:
The 1889 definition of the meter, based upon the artifact international prototype of platinum-iridium, was replaced by the CGPM in 1960 using a definition based upon a wavelength of krypton-86 radiation. This definition was adopted in order to reduce the uncertainty with which the meter may be realized. In turn, to further reduce the uncertainty, in 1983 the CGPM replaced this latter definition by the following definition:
The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
"That's the current thinking. But actually, no-ones really tested it, so we don't know."
Well, the mass/energy equivalence has a farily large body of experimental measurements to back it up, and there are a lot of theoretical results that depend on this equivalence specifically in the case of the photon, and those calculations do show agreement with real world measurements.
But yes, it is true that nobody has taken a "jar full of photons" and directly measured the gravitational field due to those photons.
" But light is quantized (photons) and yet they don't have mass... Or gravity..."
One has to be careful with one's terminology. Photons have zero REST mass. Since there is an equivelnce between mass and energy, a bunch of photons gathered together (as I understand things) would in fact produce a gravitational field.
"Actually, being picky, I believe that CGS units are SI - they just don't happen to be MKS."
I don't think so, since cgs uses things like "ergs" for energy, to name but one minor difference.
In actual fact, while essentially all other measurements systems are based or defined on the SI system, the SI system itself has a set of units and the like which are set by various bodies after much arguement.
Just because you or I decide to start talking about fleemes and microfleems defined in terms of SI units does not make our system of fleeme measurement part of the SI.
However, most theories of gravity being seriously studies have changes in gravitation fields propogating at the speed of light.
Since gravity is very weak, it is hard to make measurements about how fast its effects propagate. A fridge magnet can pick up a pin from a table - to pull the pin down to the table via gravity you need to use the entire earth! To make measurements about changing gravitational fields you need to move some very large objects.
To study large moving objects astronomers look at rotating neutron stars and rotating pairs of stars and stuff like that. You might have noticed that there are not very many of those sorts of things in our back yard - so it is challenging to make useful measurements.
"I've seen those spontaneous electron/positron pairs described this way...
One particle, with the positron being the same electron going 'backwards'. hence the opposite properties)."
I think Feynman jokingly proposed this to his thesis advisor one day. As they looked into it a bit more, they didn't find any reason to show that the idea was wrong. One might even be able to imagine that there is really only ONE electron in the universe, just traveling back and forth in time becoming a electron or a positron as it goes along the way.
This last idea doesn't fit well with the evidence of lots more electrons than protons in the universe, but perhaps that evidence is misleading.
"Actually, the math doesn't indicate a negative number, but a complex (imaginary) one."
OK, I'll take that on faith, cause I do not want to strain my brain trying to remember various Minkowsky (sp?) stuff.
The thing that "breaks the rules" is that to some "observers", an object traveling faster than c would be observed to be traveling backwards in time (arriving at one place before leaving the other, for example).
Actually, there is nothing in the theories to prohibit super-luminal motion, however what is prohibited is any super-luminal thing from going slower than c or any sub-luminal thing (like you or me) from speeding up to faster than c.
I think that USB floppies are supported, but that the built in floppies on old machines (such as on my 8600 and maybe the beige G3's) are not supported.
I can mount a floppy in my USB drive, but not the built-in, under OS X.
Even though there is a bunch of people in "the corridor" between Montreal, Toronto, and Windsor/Detroit, there are still about 2/3 of the population living outside of this region.
However, I don't think there is much of a difference between Canada and the USA in terms of the fraction of the population living rural vs urban. However, the urban centres (and the rural ones for that matter) are much more spread out than in the USA. Vancouver is a long way from Victoria, a real long way from Edmonton, and a real, real, real long way from Toronto.
Basically, Canada has about the population of California spread over an area probably ten times the size, if we only consider the Southern regions of the country.
There is a bit of difference of scale going on here. Such wonders of modernity are a bit easier with 1/8th the population.
Most would argue the opposite. Canada's population density is much lower than that of the USA, and thus it is generally MORE difficult to wire up the spread out communities.
With that said, Canada had significantly higher cable TV penetration earlier than the USA, largely due to the lack of multiple broadcast TV channels in many communities - thus the cable system was much more attractive.
Widespread broadband availability is futher enhanced by some policy decisions to encourage its penetration to smaller communities.
But on the whole, it is more difficult to connect the Canadian population than the USA population, and thus the Canadian government and businesses have more incentive to do so in innovative advanced manners.
To continue this off-topic flame-fest
A question that might be of some interest is not if some, most, or even all Jews are greedy, but if they are more greedy than some standard or average or than some other group you want to compare them to.
Or perhaps the question might be "is thinking that Jews are particularly greedy a useful method of thinking?"
I don't know of any studies comparing greed levels (however that might be defined) of different groups of people, and I would doubt that there would be much statistically significant differences but I could be wrong.
The second question of this being a useful method of thinking is probably easier to answer. While such thinking might provide a bit of protection from the occasional scam artist who is thought to be a Jew, living in paranoia from Jews is probably of little benefit. If you want to be paranoid, you might as well be paranoid about EVERYONE and protect yourself from all the greed around you.
Or work on being a little more charitable yourself and try not to ascribe base motivations to others until you see some actual evidence for it on a case-by-case basis. You will probably live a much less stressfull life and perhaps make the world a little better for all of us.
So endith the lesson.
(As an aside, how do we even define who is a Jew from the "greed" perspective anyway? Socially, religiously or nationally/legally? Are all Israeli citizens "Jews"? Are all descendants of Abraham's second son Jews? Abraham's fist son's line lead to Mohammed, so I doubt we want to consider that group among the "Jews". Are people who do not attend religious services still Jews? Are people who converted to the religion part of the group? What about people who converted away? What about people of mixed descent?)
Heck, the TRS-80 Model 1 was forced off the market because of its radio noisemaking. If I recall correctly, the FCC had let it be sold initially because they didn't think it would be popular but after it sold however many million units they realized that these computer-things would require similar regulation to other common office equipment.
I had a BASIC program that would play arbitrary music over the radio. It had various subroutines that would calculate something or another and thus generate a specific radio tone. The main program simply read in the musical data and called the appropriate subroutine to make each note.
Most games and the like however used the cassette-tape output to make sound effects, or even pretty good voices. "Robot Attack!"
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I think you can download upgrades to bring it up to 7.5.5 which had a few nice fixes to problems with 7.5.3 if I recall correctly.
I think that 8.1 dropped support for 68030 and before chips while while still allowing 68040 chips to play along. Or maybe that was a bit earlier in the 7.5.5 timeframe?
Gwen's storyline is essentially taken up by MJ, who doesn't die. They did put in the whole wrestling, petty criminal who later becomes a killer, power/responsibility thing, and did it quite well in my opinion.
Well, that is not completely correct. EVERY living thing changes its local enviornment to some extent, and there have been constant large scale changes in both local and planetary environments brought about by non-human creatures. The advent of photo-synthisis was a disaster for those creatures not able to adapt to an oxygen atmosphere. Countless waves of "foreign invaders" have changed the lives of countless now-extinct species as they were eaten or outcompeted. That's how life works. There is much evidence to suggest that many of the cooling and warming cycles that the earth has experienced have been highly infleuenced by various life forms.
This does nothing to address the multitude of non-human and non-life infleuences such as meteor strikes, volcanos, and changes in the solar enviornment that have occurred over the history of the planet.
I do not know that this idea is backed up by the available evidence.
It is my understanding that in essentially every situation where humans have had the ability to make changes to the environment, they have done so. Easter Island went from a "paradise" to a "wasteland" over the few hundred years after which it was colonized by the native peoples of the area. Once they cut down all the trees they were screwed. The loss of large animals in North America and Austrailia is coincident with the aravial of humans in those regions. Native Americans in the West dramatically changed the landscape and animal population by the use of man-made fires. The middle east, Greece, and various other regions have been overgrazed alost out of existance.
It is not the fault of our market economy or modern technology that we "rape the planet", it is part of our nature to exploit resources for short term gain - and pretty much every species in existance does the same - those that do not get wiped out. Granted however that technology makes that impulse more destructive.
The answer is not to strive for some mythical past where everything was in harmony, but rather to work towards a full understanding of the issues so that we can avoid or minimize unintended consequences. This effort seems more well thought out than the introduction of exotic species. The idea that we should do nothing might reflect a deep moral theology, but it is pretty impractical. We vacinate against illnesses, and we eliminate creatures that kill our family. We shoot bears that wander into town if we can't get rid of them in a more "humane" manner - this is no different.
Sure, but I certainly am not aware of anyone who has assigned probablilities in any meaninful manner to any identifiable subset of the population. How does the facts of the known details of the deceased terrorists change the probablilities?
What we do have is a bunch of people who figure that their perceptions of the probablilities for particular individuals justify them being treated different from other individuals. This isn't a good model for running a security system.
Another problem is of course that the system couldn't possibly give percentages this high, since there are so many many many many people who fly each day who do not try to hijack the plane.
"The computer says that you are 0.0000001% likely to be a problem, have a nice flight."
"The computer says that you are 0.000001% likely to be a problem - please step into that room over there."
Like the face-scanning software, false positives will kill the usefulness of almost any system designed to protect against people who make up such a vanishingly small fraction of the flying public.
It would seem that if you could catch 10-20 people on a flight of 100 by doing a close screening of everyone on board, it would probably be done. Certainly there is nothing to prevent immigration from doing a thorough search on everyone entering the country on a particular flight, and it would make for great press coverage to catch that many drug smugglers at one time.
Actually, I think that most of the "profiling" that is done is based on various people's *perceptions* of the probablilities.
The number of people stopped on drug related suspicion grounds generally disproportionaltely favours blacks, yet in that particular area, the number of people actually convicted disproportionatly favours "whites". The profiling in this case was actually wrong, yet it still occurred. (And of course I have no citation to back this up :-)
If the system used an independantly audited algorithm that accurately reflected the known factors associated with "bad" behaviour, and randomly selected people for further checks based on representitive data and modeling, then I might not have as much problem with it.
Of course I would still be concerned about the potential for privacy abuses.
One must also consider the effectiveness of any system designed to merely catch those intent on destruction. If we make the airlines "safe", would not the determined terrorist just start blowing up busses? NFL games? Little League? If you want to kill 10, 20, or 100 random people, you do not need an airplane to do it. Inciting terrorcan be done in even the most strict of police states - so is it worth the cost to become one?
Soneone decides who to send out the cops to, and how many to send. This isn't the case of a 911 rape call or a hot persuit or anything like that.
It seems clear to me that at least part of the motivation in the manner of the raid was to provide a large scare to the fellow. I do not know how comfortable I am with these types of intimidation tactics. I think it is good for the evil-drug lords and gang bangers to be afraid of the police - I am less happy with such fear being used as a tool to limit expressions of political dissent.
Again from NIST:
The unit of time, the second, was defined originally as the fraction 1/86 400 of the mean solar day. The exact definition of "mean solar day" was left to astronomical theories. However, measurement showed that irregularities in the rotation of the Earth could not be taken into account by the theory and have the effect that this definition does not allow the required accuracy to be achieved. In order to define the unit of time more precisely, the 11th CGPM (1960) adopted a definition given by the International Astronomical Union which was based on the tropical year. Experimental work had, however, already shown that an atomic standard of time-interval, based on a transition between two energy levels of an atom or a molecule, could be realized and reproduced much more precisely. Considering that a very precise definition of the unit of time is indispensable for the International System, the 13th CGPM (1967) decided to replace the definition of the second by the following (affirmed by the CIPM in 1997 that this definition refers to a cesium atom in its ground state at a temperature of 0 K):
The second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
[1] Since the mid eighties the meter has actually been defined in terms of a fixed, integral number of wavelengths of light from a particular optical transition. Since the frequency of that optical transition is tied up in (what are believed to be fundamental) constants of nature, the speed of light is defined through this definition of the meter.
I had thought that the meter was defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second, with the second being so many vibrations of a particular atom (cesium?).
Yep, according to NIST the length has been defined this way for quite some time:
The 1889 definition of the meter, based upon the artifact international prototype of platinum-iridium, was replaced by the CGPM in 1960 using a definition based upon a wavelength of krypton-86 radiation. This definition was adopted in order to reduce the uncertainty with which the meter may be realized. In turn, to further reduce the uncertainty, in 1983 the CGPM replaced this latter definition by the following definition:
The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.
Well, the mass/energy equivalence has a farily large body of experimental measurements to back it up, and there are a lot of theoretical results that depend on this equivalence specifically in the case of the photon, and those calculations do show agreement with real world measurements.
But yes, it is true that nobody has taken a "jar full of photons" and directly measured the gravitational field due to those photons.
One has to be careful with one's terminology. Photons have zero REST mass. Since there is an equivelnce between mass and energy, a bunch of photons gathered together (as I understand things) would in fact produce a gravitational field.
I don't think so, since cgs uses things like "ergs" for energy, to name but one minor difference.
In actual fact, while essentially all other measurements systems are based or defined on the SI system, the SI system itself has a set of units and the like which are set by various bodies after much arguement.
Just because you or I decide to start talking about fleemes and microfleems defined in terms of SI units does not make our system of fleeme measurement part of the SI.
Well that is true by definition I suppose.
However, most theories of gravity being seriously studies have changes in gravitation fields propogating at the speed of light.
Since gravity is very weak, it is hard to make measurements about how fast its effects propagate. A fridge magnet can pick up a pin from a table - to pull the pin down to the table via gravity you need to use the entire earth! To make measurements about changing gravitational fields you need to move some very large objects.
To study large moving objects astronomers look at rotating neutron stars and rotating pairs of stars and stuff like that. You might have noticed that there are not very many of those sorts of things in our back yard - so it is challenging to make useful measurements.
I think Feynman jokingly proposed this to his thesis advisor one day. As they looked into it a bit more, they didn't find any reason to show that the idea was wrong. One might even be able to imagine that there is really only ONE electron in the universe, just traveling back and forth in time becoming a electron or a positron as it goes along the way.
This last idea doesn't fit well with the evidence of lots more electrons than protons in the universe, but perhaps that evidence is misleading.
OK, I'll take that on faith, cause I do not want to strain my brain trying to remember various Minkowsky (sp?) stuff.
The thing that "breaks the rules" is that to some "observers", an object traveling faster than c would be observed to be traveling backwards in time (arriving at one place before leaving the other, for example).
Actually, there is nothing in the theories to prohibit super-luminal motion, however what is prohibited is any super-luminal thing from going slower than c or any sub-luminal thing (like you or me) from speeding up to faster than c.
I think that USB floppies are supported, but that the built in floppies on old machines (such as on my 8600 and maybe the beige G3's) are not supported.
I can mount a floppy in my USB drive, but not the built-in, under OS X.
However, I don't think there is much of a difference between Canada and the USA in terms of the fraction of the population living rural vs urban. However, the urban centres (and the rural ones for that matter) are much more spread out than in the USA. Vancouver is a long way from Victoria, a real long way from Edmonton, and a real, real, real long way from Toronto.
Basically, Canada has about the population of California spread over an area probably ten times the size, if we only consider the Southern regions of the country.
Most would argue the opposite. Canada's population density is much lower than that of the USA, and thus it is generally MORE difficult to wire up the spread out communities.
With that said, Canada had significantly higher cable TV penetration earlier than the USA, largely due to the lack of multiple broadcast TV channels in many communities - thus the cable system was much more attractive.
Widespread broadband availability is futher enhanced by some policy decisions to encourage its penetration to smaller communities.
But on the whole, it is more difficult to connect the Canadian population than the USA population, and thus the Canadian government and businesses have more incentive to do so in innovative advanced manners.
Or perhaps the question might be "is thinking that Jews are particularly greedy a useful method of thinking?"
I don't know of any studies comparing greed levels (however that might be defined) of different groups of people, and I would doubt that there would be much statistically significant differences but I could be wrong.
The second question of this being a useful method of thinking is probably easier to answer. While such thinking might provide a bit of protection from the occasional scam artist who is thought to be a Jew, living in paranoia from Jews is probably of little benefit. If you want to be paranoid, you might as well be paranoid about EVERYONE and protect yourself from all the greed around you.
Or work on being a little more charitable yourself and try not to ascribe base motivations to others until you see some actual evidence for it on a case-by-case basis. You will probably live a much less stressfull life and perhaps make the world a little better for all of us.
So endith the lesson.
(As an aside, how do we even define who is a Jew from the "greed" perspective anyway? Socially, religiously or nationally/legally? Are all Israeli citizens "Jews"? Are all descendants of Abraham's second son Jews? Abraham's fist son's line lead to Mohammed, so I doubt we want to consider that group among the "Jews". Are people who do not attend religious services still Jews? Are people who converted to the religion part of the group? What about people who converted away? What about people of mixed descent?)
I had a BASIC program that would play arbitrary music over the radio. It had various subroutines that would calculate something or another and thus generate a specific radio tone. The main program simply read in the musical data and called the appropriate subroutine to make each note.
Most games and the like however used the cassette-tape output to make sound effects, or even pretty good voices. "Robot Attack!"
Now where did I put that emulator?