Yes, but while you have a light saber for the first 3 feet, the lasers are still burning holes in people's flesh at 50 and 100 feet. "A more elegant weapon for a more civilized time" my butt.
Some of the ideas of what this technology would be doing are pretty off-the-wall. This isn't "24"... think more of "Patriot Games." These are satellites that have to be pointed at a single target, and have the ability to track that piece of land, and can then give real-time images in either visible light or different infra-red spectra for night time and for heat detection, along with laser and radar technology for penetrating structures. Depending on where the target is, they sometimes even have to adjust the orbit to get a decent shot. I don't know how many sats there are, but this is obviously not something for community use. There's got to be a queue of agencies with various priorities to decide what they get to point the suckers at. If you think they're going to be looking for you smoking pot in your back yard, just extend the tin foil down into a wide bell shape, and you'll be covered.
As a bonus, once these are over our cities, the deadly laser beams will protect us from any terrorist-controlled aircraft that don't know the special route navigate through them without bursting into flames. We'll probably have fewer pigeon problems as well.
But Christianity and Judaism are okay, despite following the same "God"? I say we get rid of them all, since they've been making countries less free since their conception!
You might want to turn that history book right-side-up and try again.
Well, it's not the kinetic energy of the projectile, it's the amount of kinetic energy that is transferred from the projectile to the tiles, which means things like hardness and elasticity play a part as well. Also, a whole lot depends on the size and shape of the ice. A thin sheet of ice is likely to get accelerated by air speed nearly as much as foam.
I think you might be on to something. While we're at it, how about requiring real names for posting on/.? I see a new golden age of reasoned discussion as the paranoid run for the hills.
As a biologist, I can tell you your thoughts on bacteria are wrong on so many levels. First, what we would call the simplest form of LIFE capable of evolving is a virus, and derivatives thereof.
If a virus is a form of life, it is only such in conjunction with a host organism. It's only by means of the complexity of a host organism that it can reproduce or evolve. So the complexity (or lack thereof) of a virus says nothing more about the complexity needed for replication or evolution. If I write a simple computer program which evolves into something more complex, that may be even simpler than a virus, but it's equally beside the point because it's not evolving on its own, but through the agency of something far more complex (namely me).
In fact, one of the most interesting theories on the origins of life is that of the self-replicating RNA. RNA is ribonucleic acid, a polymer made up of ribonucleotides. These ribonucleotides can spontaneously polymerize at an agonizingly slow rate (maybe other factors present in the primordial Earth could speed it up). However, once you allow the possibility of RNA assembly, you can start to get macromolecules, and at some point, one of these RNA sequences could acquire an enzymatic activity. The most intriguing activity being replication. So far, in a laboratory setting, scientists have be able to select RNA sequences (from random ribonucleotide polymers) that have the ability to ligate two RNAs together. This is an extraordinary proof of principle that a very simple self-replicating molecule can arrive from even simpler components. Once you have RNA (which is already an information carrier, like DNA), random mutations can be the force for evolution.
I'm aware of the theory, and it's interesting work. However, it comes nowhere close to actually modeling an organism that could grow, reproduce and evolve indenfinitely. Hopefully somewhere down the road there will be more to it.
Never lose sight of the fact that all evolution is about cumulated changes over time. In a sense, it could also provide a framework to think about the origin of "life". The tornado analogy fails even there, since exceedingly simple "life" is nowhere near as complex as a 747 (on the other hand your comparison is wrong because a bacterium is far more complex than a puny jumbojet).
First of all, it was my point that a bacterium is far more complex than a jumbo jet. Second, if you can point me to a colony of virueses which reproduce and evolve without the aid of more complex systems, or any other complete system that can reproduce and evolve that is significantly less complex than a bacterium, (or a jumbo jet, for that matter) please do.
Viruses, RNA chains, proteins (prions), etc, etc, etc.
In the absence of pre-existing organic life, none of those things are self-replicating. Ideas evolve as well, even simple ones, but that is again not helpful in determining the simplest thing which can (without help from another organism) replicate. To my knowledge, bacteria, or the bacteria-like organisms thought to precede them, are the simplest such things currently known, or in any meaningful way theorized. It's been speculated that maybe there was an RNA-based life form that was simpler, but I don't believe any actual model for such has ever been suggested.
Theory of the Article: We developed inside a radioactive ball of clay, water and organic molecules and were stuck there for millions of years until we crashed into the earth, after which we developed into terrestrial creatures.
Psalm 40:1-2: "I waited patiently for the LORD, and He turned to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a tumultuous pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."
1. intelligent design, and fundamentalism, deserves to be mocked
2. if you are a fundamentalist, that is, you hew to what is written in a dusty book more than you do to your own sense of humanity (don't tell me there are no conflicts between those two things) then you deserve to be mocked as well, or worse, for creating suffering, poverty, death, and evil in this world, as all fundamentalists do, directly or indirectly
fundamentalism, whether abrahamic, dharmic, or even atheist (stalinism, for example), is the very definition of evil on this planet, and fundamentalism is the enemy of peace, and the enemy of every good moderate religious person (ie, humanists, who will champion good common sense when pressed to choose between the commands of a dusty book and basic decency)
If you think that your own innate sense of decency is superior guide to goodness than what can be achieved by humility before God, and instruction from Him, you might want to reflect on the fact that you have sectioned off vast parts of humanity as deserving to be mocked, apparently without any objections from your lofty sense of decency. If you are looking for the source of evil in this world, I suggest that it is precisely this lust for a sense of superiority over our fellow man, and the actions that proceed from it. Though this lust can infect the religious as well as the non-religious, humility before God leads also to humility before one's fellow man, and wisdom from God commands love of one's fellow man. Your stated positions imply that your innate decency has somehow failed to bestow these lessons upon you.
Theory of the Article: We developed inside a radioactive ball of clay, water and organic molecules and were stuck there for millions of years until we crashed into the earth, after which we developed into terrestrial creatures.
Psalm 40:1-2: "I waited patiently for the LORD, and He turned to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a tumultuous pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."
I just looked at your website. 1) If you really are trying to promote tolerance, you shouldn't mock other people's beliefs like you did in your original post. 2) You should probably define what you mean by "fundamentalist" on your page. I generally consider myself to qualify as a "fundamentalist," yet as such, none of your assumptions about me (in the first few paragraphs anyway) are true.
For those interested in why the tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747 is a useless analogy for the process of evolution, the simple explanation is that evolution works by a ratcheting effect: improvements are made one tiny step at a time, in sequence, for a cumulative effect of complexity. The selection process by which those steps are made - i.e. mutations that constitute an improvement in fitness survive and others die out - is simple and nonrandom. The tornado analogy implies instant emergence of full complexity, which is nothing at all like what actually happens.
The tornado analogy is not meant to be an analogy for evolution; it's meant to be an analogy for the origin of life. Evolution may work as a gradual ratcheting up, but it only works amongst reproducing organisms. The simplest thing we have that is theorized to be capable of evolving is a bacterium, which is orders of magnitude more complex than a 747. While it is hypothesized that in the past there may have been simpler forms capable of reproduction and evolution, we would need to have a full-blown theory -- a workable model -- of such, to see whether such a thing would be more or less complex than a 747.
I couldn't help but notice a parallel to one of my favorite psalms. And as there is obviously no one on/. antagonistic toward religion, I thought I would share...;-)
Theory of the Article: We developed inside a radioactive ball of clay, water and organic molecules and were stuck there for millions of years until we crashed into the earth, after which we developed into terrestrial creatures.
Psalm 40:1-2: "I waited patiently for the LORD, and He turned to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a tumultuous pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."
Good info. That's amazing that there is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liquid hydrogen...
Geologically, CO2 has been over 15x greater than now. Our paleoclimatologists say CO2 is not linked to planetary temperatures in the geological record.
Minor correction: CO2 concentrations are strongly linked to planetary temperatures, but as an effect rather than a cause. CO2 changes lag temperatures by 400-1200 years. Some people attribute this to CO2 absorption by the oceans, but it seems to me that it's more likely linked to the increase in animal and fungus life as the temperatures, ice-free surface areas, and amount of plant life increases.
10,400,000 acres * 4,046.8564224 sq meters/acre = 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters / 678,051,000 sq. meters = 62.071004678055190538764783180026 land masses the size of the US State of Texas 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 1,717,855,000 sq. meters = 24.499918091433793888308384584264 land masses the size of the US State of Alaska. 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 9,631,420,000 sq. meters = 4.3697924909265715751156111975181 land masses the size of the United States 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 3,166,414,000 sq. meters = 13.29178900578382990979701327748 land masses the size of India 42,087,306,792.96 sq. meters/ 17,075,400,000 sq. meters = 2.4647918521943849045995994237324 land masses the size of Russia
That's a good point... but what's with the rough estimates? Couldn't you give us some numbers to 50 or 60 significant figures, so we have a clearer idea?;-)
For instance, if they feed the bacteria corn syrup, the carbon that will go into the gasoline comes from the CO2 absorbed by the corn from the atmosphere.
It's OK to put CO2 into the atmosphere as long as it came from the atmosphere to begin with. That's why ethanol is "cleaner" than gasoline - it's carbon neutral. Compare this with releasing as CO2 the carbon that has been stored in oil and coal reserves for millions of years.
So carbon-neutral seems like a bad idea -- as our total capacity for food production is limited to the carbon content of the atmosphere, if we're storing some of that carbon as fuel, we should replace at least that much of it from elsewhere. Anyway, by your reasoning, isn't burning fossil fuels "carbon neutral" as well, over the long term, as that carbon content originally came from the atmosphere as well?
Truth is pipedream. For the most part truth is unattainable. It always relies on someones perception of events. Even if verified from other sources you cannot know for sure. I long ago accepted that truth does not exist, there is only the accepted "truth" and what I see, and I can't trust either.
While you can call truth "unattainable" it is also infinitely approachable. Truth does not rely on anyone's perception of it; only our understanding relies on perception. If you convince yourself that truth does not exist, you have given up on the approach to truth and the gradual perfection of your own understanding. "Accepted truth" has very little value. Raw experience has very little value. The gradual eternal approach to Truth through reason, perception, revelation and humility has great value. And Truth itself has infinite value.
No, a man stands up for what he believes in and keeps his word. I seem to recall the President swears to uphold and defend this little document called the Constitution when he is sworn into office. Bush has taken a paper shredder to it.
What are you talking about? Bush is one of the few men in Washington willing to stand up for the Constitution and defend it.
Soldiers risk everything to defend what they believe in. The founding fathers of the US of A risked hanging and their homes to create this country and the rights people today so easily let go. Tell me one thing Bush has done that shows he is willing to risk ANYTHING so much as someone disagreeing with him?
Bush risked many things for what he believed in. Some of those things he lost. He lost a great deal of political capital by insisting on reforming Social Security, because it was the right thing to do, despite the entire political establishment of both parties being against it. He lost a lot of credibility which greatly undermined his power, by taking a lone and unpopular position on Iraq, in front of the whole world, based on the intelligence available to him, because he believed it was the right thing to do for the country and for the world. Bush is the closest thing we've had to another Lincoln, and in time history will remember him that way. And so will Iraq.
A man as you say... would not use fear to control. He would not use fear to get his people to let him spy on them. He would not use fear and threats to intimidate people into doing what he wanted. A man does not do these things. Bush is a coward, a bully and an idiot that has violated his oath to the American people. Colin Powell was a man, and he would not sacrifice his own personal honor to give Bush credibility.
Bush has done no such thing. Bush has insisted on maintaining our ability to spy on our military adversaries, to protect the country, as is his duty under the Constitution. I have a hard time believing you honestly can't tell the difference between insisting on the good of protecting the country, with intimidating people into submission. What person has been intimidated by him, or is afraid of him, other than Osama and his cohorts?
Have you even read the articles on his executive orders here, the BBC anywhere?
How about the one where the government can now IN SECRET, presenting no evidence or holding no hearing or trial as GUARANTEED by the Constitution, seize your assets? How is that "protecting the constitution?"
I'm familiar with the executive orders, and there is no such executive order.
Slashdot Mirror
And another swing and miss. Juries, not judges, decide if defendants are guilty, and that is again criminal law, not civil law.
Yes, but while you have a light saber for the first 3 feet, the lasers are still burning holes in people's flesh at 50 and 100 feet. "A more elegant weapon for a more civilized time" my butt.
Some of the ideas of what this technology would be doing are pretty off-the-wall. This isn't "24"... think more of "Patriot Games." These are satellites that have to be pointed at a single target, and have the ability to track that piece of land, and can then give real-time images in either visible light or different infra-red spectra for night time and for heat detection, along with laser and radar technology for penetrating structures. Depending on where the target is, they sometimes even have to adjust the orbit to get a decent shot. I don't know how many sats there are, but this is obviously not something for community use. There's got to be a queue of agencies with various priorities to decide what they get to point the suckers at. If you think they're going to be looking for you smoking pot in your back yard, just extend the tin foil down into a wide bell shape, and you'll be covered.
As a bonus, once these are over our cities, the deadly laser beams will protect us from any terrorist-controlled aircraft that don't know the special route navigate through them without bursting into flames. We'll probably have fewer pigeon problems as well.
You might want to turn that history book right-side-up and try again.
Well, it's not the kinetic energy of the projectile, it's the amount of kinetic energy that is transferred from the projectile to the tiles, which means things like hardness and elasticity play a part as well. Also, a whole lot depends on the size and shape of the ice. A thin sheet of ice is likely to get accelerated by air speed nearly as much as foam.
I think you might be on to something. While we're at it, how about requiring real names for posting on /.? I see a new golden age of reasoned discussion as the paranoid run for the hills.
If a virus is a form of life, it is only such in conjunction with a host organism. It's only by means of the complexity of a host organism that it can reproduce or evolve. So the complexity (or lack thereof) of a virus says nothing more about the complexity needed for replication or evolution. If I write a simple computer program which evolves into something more complex, that may be even simpler than a virus, but it's equally beside the point because it's not evolving on its own, but through the agency of something far more complex (namely me).
I'm aware of the theory, and it's interesting work. However, it comes nowhere close to actually modeling an organism that could grow, reproduce and evolve indenfinitely. Hopefully somewhere down the road there will be more to it.
First of all, it was my point that a bacterium is far more complex than a jumbo jet. Second, if you can point me to a colony of virueses which reproduce and evolve without the aid of more complex systems, or any other complete system that can reproduce and evolve that is significantly less complex than a bacterium, (or a jumbo jet, for that matter) please do.
I think you mean it's bad and therefore a pollutant.
In the absence of pre-existing organic life, none of those things are self-replicating. Ideas evolve as well, even simple ones, but that is again not helpful in determining the simplest thing which can (without help from another organism) replicate. To my knowledge, bacteria, or the bacteria-like organisms thought to precede them, are the simplest such things currently known, or in any meaningful way theorized. It's been speculated that maybe there was an RNA-based life form that was simpler, but I don't believe any actual model for such has ever been suggested.
Off-topic, maybe. Flame-bait??? Wow.
Such as?
If you think that your own innate sense of decency is superior guide to goodness than what can be achieved by humility before God, and instruction from Him, you might want to reflect on the fact that you have sectioned off vast parts of humanity as deserving to be mocked, apparently without any objections from your lofty sense of decency. If you are looking for the source of evil in this world, I suggest that it is precisely this lust for a sense of superiority over our fellow man, and the actions that proceed from it. Though this lust can infect the religious as well as the non-religious, humility before God leads also to humility before one's fellow man, and wisdom from God commands love of one's fellow man. Your stated positions imply that your innate decency has somehow failed to bestow these lessons upon you.
I couldn't help noticing the following parallel:
Theory of the Article: We developed inside a radioactive ball of clay, water and organic molecules and were stuck there for millions of years until we crashed into the earth, after which we developed into terrestrial creatures.
Psalm 40:1-2: "I waited patiently for the LORD, and He turned to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a tumultuous pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."
I just looked at your website. 1) If you really are trying to promote tolerance, you shouldn't mock other people's beliefs like you did in your original post. 2) You should probably define what you mean by "fundamentalist" on your page. I generally consider myself to qualify as a "fundamentalist," yet as such, none of your assumptions about me (in the first few paragraphs anyway) are true.
The tornado analogy is not meant to be an analogy for evolution; it's meant to be an analogy for the origin of life. Evolution may work as a gradual ratcheting up, but it only works amongst reproducing organisms. The simplest thing we have that is theorized to be capable of evolving is a bacterium, which is orders of magnitude more complex than a 747. While it is hypothesized that in the past there may have been simpler forms capable of reproduction and evolution, we would need to have a full-blown theory -- a workable model -- of such, to see whether such a thing would be more or less complex than a 747.
No, there's nothing in ID that argues for instantaneous creation, or against creation by evolution.
I couldn't help but notice a parallel to one of my favorite psalms. And as there is obviously no one on /. antagonistic toward religion, I thought I would share... ;-)
Theory of the Article: We developed inside a radioactive ball of clay, water and organic molecules and were stuck there for millions of years until we crashed into the earth, after which we developed into terrestrial creatures.
Psalm 40:1-2: "I waited patiently for the LORD, and He turned to me and heard my cry, and He brought me up out of a tumultuous pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."
Minor correction: CO2 concentrations are strongly linked to planetary temperatures, but as an effect rather than a cause. CO2 changes lag temperatures by 400-1200 years. Some people attribute this to CO2 absorption by the oceans, but it seems to me that it's more likely linked to the increase in animal and fungus life as the temperatures, ice-free surface areas, and amount of plant life increases.
3. sailing to lancaster county to escape the violence, like they did before.
That's a good point... but what's with the rough estimates? Couldn't you give us some numbers to 50 or 60 significant figures, so we have a clearer idea?
So carbon-neutral seems like a bad idea -- as our total capacity for food production is limited to the carbon content of the atmosphere, if we're storing some of that carbon as fuel, we should replace at least that much of it from elsewhere. Anyway, by your reasoning, isn't burning fossil fuels "carbon neutral" as well, over the long term, as that carbon content originally came from the atmosphere as well?
While you can call truth "unattainable" it is also infinitely approachable. Truth does not rely on anyone's perception of it; only our understanding relies on perception. If you convince yourself that truth does not exist, you have given up on the approach to truth and the gradual perfection of your own understanding. "Accepted truth" has very little value. Raw experience has very little value. The gradual eternal approach to Truth through reason, perception, revelation and humility has great value. And Truth itself has infinite value.
What are you talking about? Bush is one of the few men in Washington willing to stand up for the Constitution and defend it.
Bush risked many things for what he believed in. Some of those things he lost. He lost a great deal of political capital by insisting on reforming Social Security, because it was the right thing to do, despite the entire political establishment of both parties being against it. He lost a lot of credibility which greatly undermined his power, by taking a lone and unpopular position on Iraq, in front of the whole world, based on the intelligence available to him, because he believed it was the right thing to do for the country and for the world. Bush is the closest thing we've had to another Lincoln, and in time history will remember him that way. And so will Iraq.
Bush has done no such thing. Bush has insisted on maintaining our ability to spy on our military adversaries, to protect the country, as is his duty under the Constitution. I have a hard time believing you honestly can't tell the difference between insisting on the good of protecting the country, with intimidating people into submission. What person has been intimidated by him, or is afraid of him, other than Osama and his cohorts?
I'm familiar with the executive orders, and there is no such executive order.