The reason that scientists don't attempt to disparage evolution is that the personal cost is quite high.
I don't think you mean "disparage", meaning "To speak of in a slighting or disrespectful way; belittle", because disparaging a theory is not part of doing science. You probably mean "disconfirm" or "disprove". The reason scientists don't try to disprove evolution - by which I mean the common descent of all life on earth from a small set of ancestral organisms over about three billion years - is that there is an immense quantitiy of interconnected evidence that supports it. DNA, fossil evidence, biogeography, etcetera. Trying to claim that life isn't the product of evolution is like claiming that ordinary matter isn't made of atoms. Scientists do attempt to explain particular facets and processes within evolutionary history, and in doing so they necessarily argue over particular theories. This leads to...
There is no way to definitively prove one that either evolution has occured or that God created everything. Both sides rest on circumstantial evidence
Not at all. Evolution rests on evidence, yes. The evidence is widely available, can be examined by many, many people, and is agreed on by people with widely varying religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs. As a theory, it makes predictions about things we haven't seen yet (such as the fossil skull in the article) and more importantly, predicts things we will not see, such as Precambrian reptile fossils, or mammals with feathers.
By contrast, the idea that "God created everything" rests on no evidence at all. It makes no predictions about things that we will see or not see in the world. There is no conceivable evidence that would weigh against it. In short, it's not science.
The macro I've wanted for years, as an end user, is one that kicks in when I detach a file. All it would do is leave a link telling me where I put the file. Of course I might delete or move the file afterward, but this alone would help keep my.pst file down to size, and has the added benefit that I don't lose so much if the.pst gets corrupted.
My mother worked in their payphone operation division. They were so incompetent, that that division went under in 2003. BellSouth couldn't even keep their own damn payphones working. According to my mother, at one time in her area over 40% of the BellSouth payphones were inoperable due to BellSouth problems. Payphones were first made in 1891, and BellSouth couldn't even keep that 100+ year-old technology working. Because of that my mother now works as a cashier in a grocery store.
Not to excuse the various errors and incompetence on BellSouth's part, but even if they had run the payphone division perfectly, your mother would still be out of work by now. Ubiquitous cell phone service has killed the payphone business. Sure, you can still find some payphones, but the amount of revenue they generate is a small fraction of what they got ten years ago.
Payphone operators got caught between a rock (rapidly declining revenues) and a hard place (high maintenance costs). Payphones out in public areas are subject to vandalism, which is ironically worst in the neighborhoods where a public payphone is most needed. Repairs that require a dispatch are the most expensive, since the repairman has to be compensated for travel time.
Getting caught with a declining business is a nasty situation. The best you can do is try to stem the bleeding, or try to cut costs as fast as the revenue drops off. There is really no good way to do it. The worst thing is that while the trends look absolutely inevitable in retrospect, it's hard for everyone involved to understand and admit what's going on at the time. So the business keeps limping along for a while, with endless rounds of layoffs, horrible morale, and generally everything getting worse until someone finally shuts the whole operation down. Or maybe the Big Bosses decide to bail out early, and they sell off while the revenue stream is still sort of viable. This is also miserable for the workers, as the new management has the same situation but no commitment to (or from) the troops.
Bottom line: Being in a dying business sucks. I know. I worked for AT&T for almost 20 years. Saw it drop from over 200,000 people to less than 50,000. The lucky ones took early retirement, or had decent skills and/or severance packages. There were still plenty of people in the 'last-hired, first-fired' category.
if you consider that we are the aliens, and our species has simply invaded and conquered this planet an aen ago. We adapted, survived, and destroyed our own history.
It's a fun idea, and as others pointed out, Larry Niven did some interesting work with it. But it doesn't hold up in light of the facts of biology and paleontology. Our physical features and our genes both say we're closely related to the other great apes, which are related to the other primates, which are related to other mammals, and so forth. The fossil record, fragmented as it is, shows that our predecessors were increasingly 'ape-like' as you go back in time. If we were aliens, we'd expect the evidence to be very, very different. Our genetic code - the translation mechanism, not just the genes - would probably be different. We might share some gross features with some native species, but the deeper into the details you get, the less likely it is that we'd be the same.
And as for destroying our own history - there are far more traces of civilization than written materials. Technology leaves evidence. We have found tools and weapons and such from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Anything more complex would not only survive in and of itself, but the infrastructure to create it would leave parts laying around. Don't bother talking about wars and catastrophes. Besides the fact that they don't erase everything, they leave their own evidence behind.
Sorry for the fun story, but we're natives. Our ancestors have been here on earth for over three billion years.
[To restore a 900GB database]
Around 2-4 hours for the restoration itself, plus an hour to shut down the applications that are using the database during the restore and to restart them afterward
I think you underestimate the restore time. I've been involved in some Oracle restore tests recently, and there are some twists you're not considering. First, what's the backup strategy? Many databases are not backed up 100% every day; more typical is a full backup every 14 days with incremental backups in between. On average, a restore will require six or seven days of incrementals. Those backups, being smaller, will be on tapes that have other backup material mixed in. Oh, and unless you're terribly cheap and/or overconfident, you should have most of the tapes except the latest stored off-site. So the sequence goes more like this:
1) Discover problem and determine when it hit and what the restore point is. 2) Identify tapes needed. 3) Call off-site storage to get tapes delivered. 4) Add tapes to library. 5) Restore from tape. I would not be surprised to see this process taking 24 hours, even if everything works properly.
Additionally, I recently encountered a situation where the DB was backed up using archive files rather than the "live" directories. This can be convenient for backup, but the restore requires additional steps to rebuild the DB from the archives. That procedure can run several hours by itself.
Now consider that the attack, if it's a worm, is probably hitting many databases in your shop. The problem gets gets insanely complicated very fast. If you have a big datacenter with many, many Oracle databases, you'd better deal with this threat pronto.
The thing that bugs me about articles like this, and about the whole 'falling bullet' story in general, is that they don't give you a couple of pieces of critical information.
What was the angle of the strike? Was it nearly vertical, or closer to horizontal? If the unfortunate Mr. McDaniel had an entry wound just above his collarbone, I'd agree we're talking about a falling bullet. If it struck his chest level with his heart, then the speed of the bullet is from the muzzle velocity, not from gravity. We tend to think firing a gun "into the air" means close to vertical. But remember, plenty of the shooters are drunk, so "into the air" could mean pretty much anything higher than horizontal.
What kind of gun was it? I don't know much about firearms, but it seems unlikely that a handgun would be able to kill at a mile range. A large-caliber rifle would be more likely.
...Firefly had one of the sexiest casts in any SciFi/Fantasy show-- the women were hot, and being strong made them even hotter....The men were hot (Even according to my feminist woman friends)....
My wife and her online friends regularly refer to Mal as Captain Tightpants. The episode that ended with Mal buck nekkid out in the desert (and oddly pleased with himself) was a real crowd-pleaser with the ladies.
What a beautiful concept. It reminds me of the kinds of things that I sometimes come across in fantasy and sci-fi stories. They don't have to be integral to the plot, but they illustrate the world the author has conceived - think of the statues at the Falls of Rauros in LoTR.
The references in other comments to atomic clocks miss the point entirely. Atomic clocks are about precision and accuracy. This clock is concerned with accuracy, but only at long scales. A mechanism to re-set to local noon, as described in the article, is plenty to catch the daily drift and would probably compensate for running fast/slow for many days if the sky were cloudy. For the kind of astronomical time this clock is concerned with, being a few seconds behind or ahead is irrelevant.
Re:Perfect Outsourcing Opportunity...
on
Meet The Life Hackers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
With high speed internet, VPNs, and so forth, the Remote (Outsourced) Secretary could be an intermediate solution to the attention defecit problem.
It's happening. Heard it on some public radio show within the last six months, but I can't find it right now. The story was a direct report from a freelancer (writer, I think) who arranged for someone in India to screen phone calls and email. On the whole it seemed to work very well. The secretary was even able to compose replies to some of the email, and rather took offense at correspondents who seemed to be against her client's best interests. Fascinating story, I apologize for being unable to find it.
...ptero"saurs" - they were warm-blooded furry and laid eggs. That is a monotreme, like the spiny echidna and duck-bill platypus.
Not really. You've picked two of the defining features of monotremes, but it takes much more than that to group creatures together. And the "fur" from pterosaurs is almost certainly very different from mammalian hair.
Pterosaurs are a group related to dinosaurs. They're both part of the Archosaurs - a group that contains modern crocodiles and birds and their extinct relatives. Archosaurs in turn are part of the Diapsids, which brings in modern lizards.
Monotremes are a subset of Mammals, which are Synapsids. You can look this stuff up at the Tree of Life web page.
I don't mean to be rude here, but your statement is a bit like saying that two people at a family reunion must be brother and sister because they're both of medium build with blond hair.
Wasn't the Times one of the biggest cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion and the WMD nonsense?
I'm not as familiar with their editorial position on the invasion, but the Times' Judith Miller (who just got out of prison in the Plame investigation) is routinely vilified in the lefty blogosphere for her uncritical reporting of the administration's now-discredited pre-war intelligence.
there is very little selective pressure in today's society....I'm one of those people that considers human evolution to be nearly frozen.
Relaxed selection speeds up evolution. Mutations that are mildly deleterious can stay in the gene pool and participate in the genetic mix'n'match. Eventually you get much more genetic variation than you do under heavy selection.
Further, evolution is sloooowwww by human standards. It goes in generations, lots of them. Nothing short of a catastrophic selection event - think Black Plague, only worse and worldwide - is going to have a significant influence on the relative frequency of specific genes in just a few generations. We're only a couple of hundred generations from the Late Bronze Age. So don't try to extrapolate from conditions in your own neighborhood during your lifetime to actual evolution of our species. It's silly.
In my work environment, (the planning/engineering department of a very large company) there was a shift away from paper documents starting in the late 1990s. In 1997, I was printing, copying, and mailing a 20+ page document to several dozen people each month. By 2000, anything equivalent would have been completely electronic. I bet I got my last printed memo in 1999 or so, and any news piece smaller than a corporate-wide 4-color glossy went to the web by 2002.
PCs had been ubiquitous for several years, but it took a while for the everyone to get sufficiently comfortable with the tools (mainly MS Office) that we could be sure that all the recipients would be able to open and read whatever we sent out.
For the last several years, most of what I printed were long documents that needed careful review, anything that was easier to scrawl on with pen or pencil (often marking up for revision) or short bits that I needed for quick access.
Eighteen-wheelers full of temporary land-line and cellular switching equipment with satellite linkup capability and generators that they would roll out to disaster areas. I'm not sure whether they made any money off of it.
I used to work for AT&T's Network Disaster Recovery organization. As you can see at http://www.att.com/ndr they've got about 100 of those trailers. The catch, with respect to the current disaster, is that they're mostly for recovering long distance, not local service. And without the local infrastructure, there's not much traffic to get in or out of the area.
Some of my former co-workers are trying to recover one metro New Orleans location even now, but there's not much they can do for the city proper. They're probably operating the Emergency Communications Vans at some shelters (see picture at http://www.att.com/ndr/humanitarian_relief.html/) to allow people to call out, but the need is so great that even at max capacity, they aren't going to have a huge impact.
(Personal boast: I led the design and installation for the Frame Relay, ATM, and IP trailers.)
It's reached the point where you can have a series like Firefly which has been so denuded of Science Fiction that it doesn't have aliens and the characters use regular firearms.
I see nothing wrong with leaving aliens out of SF, especially on TV. "Aliens" on television are almost invariably a subset of humanity. Yes, I realize that constraints like the cost of CGI, the limitations of makeup and prosthetics, and the need for understandable characters pretty much require that Vulcans and Klingons and their ilk define what "alien" means on television. But dammit, aliens should not be readily understood. They are the product of billions of years of independent evolution - compared to any real alien, black widow spiders are our cousins and aardvarks and armadillos are our brothers and sisters. The idea that viewers should be able to 'relate' to aliens, or even firmly understand their motivations, is just wrong.
Even if you posit that intelligent aliens must have similar biological needs and drives to ours and that this provides a basis for mutual understanding, won't the aliens likely be as complex as humans? Won't there be as broad a range of motivation, culture, and temperament within an alien species as there is in humans? How often do you see that in TV aliens? Heck, most writers can't get the idea that a habitable planet should have multiple environments - even a 'desert world' or 'ice world' will have noticeable variations in climate, geology/geography, etc.
Joss Whedon & co. made the right decision in leaving aliens out of Firefly. Humans are fully capable of being more weird than anything alleged to be from another planet.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you mean "disparage", meaning "To speak of in a slighting or disrespectful way; belittle", because disparaging a theory is not part of doing science. You probably mean "disconfirm" or "disprove". The reason scientists don't try to disprove evolution - by which I mean the common descent of all life on earth from a small set of ancestral organisms over about three billion years - is that there is an immense quantitiy of interconnected evidence that supports it. DNA, fossil evidence, biogeography, etcetera. Trying to claim that life isn't the product of evolution is like claiming that ordinary matter isn't made of atoms. Scientists do attempt to explain particular facets and processes within evolutionary history, and in doing so they necessarily argue over particular theories. This leads to...
There is no way to definitively prove one that either evolution has occured or that God created everything. Both sides rest on circumstantial evidence
Not at all. Evolution rests on evidence, yes. The evidence is widely available, can be examined by many, many people, and is agreed on by people with widely varying religious, philosophical, and cultural beliefs. As a theory, it makes predictions about things we haven't seen yet (such as the fossil skull in the article) and more importantly, predicts things we will not see, such as Precambrian reptile fossils, or mammals with feathers.
By contrast, the idea that "God created everything" rests on no evidence at all. It makes no predictions about things that we will see or not see in the world. There is no conceivable evidence that would weigh against it. In short, it's not science.
The macro I've wanted for years, as an end user, is one that kicks in when I detach a file. All it would do is leave a link telling me where I put the file. Of course I might delete or move the file afterward, but this alone would help keep my .pst file down to size, and has the added benefit that I don't lose so much if the .pst gets corrupted.
Not to excuse the various errors and incompetence on BellSouth's part, but even if they had run the payphone division perfectly, your mother would still be out of work by now. Ubiquitous cell phone service has killed the payphone business. Sure, you can still find some payphones, but the amount of revenue they generate is a small fraction of what they got ten years ago.
Payphone operators got caught between a rock (rapidly declining revenues) and a hard place (high maintenance costs). Payphones out in public areas are subject to vandalism, which is ironically worst in the neighborhoods where a public payphone is most needed. Repairs that require a dispatch are the most expensive, since the repairman has to be compensated for travel time.
Getting caught with a declining business is a nasty situation. The best you can do is try to stem the bleeding, or try to cut costs as fast as the revenue drops off. There is really no good way to do it. The worst thing is that while the trends look absolutely inevitable in retrospect, it's hard for everyone involved to understand and admit what's going on at the time. So the business keeps limping along for a while, with endless rounds of layoffs, horrible morale, and generally everything getting worse until someone finally shuts the whole operation down. Or maybe the Big Bosses decide to bail out early, and they sell off while the revenue stream is still sort of viable. This is also miserable for the workers, as the new management has the same situation but no commitment to (or from) the troops.
Bottom line: Being in a dying business sucks. I know. I worked for AT&T for almost 20 years. Saw it drop from over 200,000 people to less than 50,000. The lucky ones took early retirement, or had decent skills and/or severance packages. There were still plenty of people in the 'last-hired, first-fired' category.
Correction: No one deliberately clicks on goatse.cx twice.
And as for destroying our own history - there are far more traces of civilization than written materials. Technology leaves evidence. We have found tools and weapons and such from hundreds of thousands of years ago. Anything more complex would not only survive in and of itself, but the infrastructure to create it would leave parts laying around. Don't bother talking about wars and catastrophes. Besides the fact that they don't erase everything, they leave their own evidence behind.
Sorry for the fun story, but we're natives. Our ancestors have been here on earth for over three billion years.
I think you underestimate the restore time. I've been involved in some Oracle restore tests recently, and there are some twists you're not considering. First, what's the backup strategy? Many databases are not backed up 100% every day; more typical is a full backup every 14 days with incremental backups in between. On average, a restore will require six or seven days of incrementals. Those backups, being smaller, will be on tapes that have other backup material mixed in. Oh, and unless you're terribly cheap and/or overconfident, you should have most of the tapes except the latest stored off-site. So the sequence goes more like this:
1) Discover problem and determine when it hit and what the restore point is. 2) Identify tapes needed. 3) Call off-site storage to get tapes delivered. 4) Add tapes to library. 5) Restore from tape. I would not be surprised to see this process taking 24 hours, even if everything works properly.
Additionally, I recently encountered a situation where the DB was backed up using archive files rather than the "live" directories. This can be convenient for backup, but the restore requires additional steps to rebuild the DB from the archives. That procedure can run several hours by itself.
Now consider that the attack, if it's a worm, is probably hitting many databases in your shop. The problem gets gets insanely complicated very fast. If you have a big datacenter with many, many Oracle databases, you'd better deal with this threat pronto.
The thing that bugs me about articles like this, and about the whole 'falling bullet' story in general, is that they don't give you a couple of pieces of critical information.
What was the angle of the strike? Was it nearly vertical, or closer to horizontal? If the unfortunate Mr. McDaniel had an entry wound just above his collarbone, I'd agree we're talking about a falling bullet. If it struck his chest level with his heart, then the speed of the bullet is from the muzzle velocity, not from gravity. We tend to think firing a gun "into the air" means close to vertical. But remember, plenty of the shooters are drunk, so "into the air" could mean pretty much anything higher than horizontal.
What kind of gun was it? I don't know much about firearms, but it seems unlikely that a handgun would be able to kill at a mile range. A large-caliber rifle would be more likely.
My wife and her online friends regularly refer to Mal as Captain Tightpants. The episode that ended with Mal buck nekkid out in the desert (and oddly pleased with himself) was a real crowd-pleaser with the ladies.
The references in other comments to atomic clocks miss the point entirely. Atomic clocks are about precision and accuracy. This clock is concerned with accuracy, but only at long scales. A mechanism to re-set to local noon, as described in the article, is plenty to catch the daily drift and would probably compensate for running fast/slow for many days if the sky were cloudy. For the kind of astronomical time this clock is concerned with, being a few seconds behind or ahead is irrelevant.
It's happening. Heard it on some public radio show within the last six months, but I can't find it right now. The story was a direct report from a freelancer (writer, I think) who arranged for someone in India to screen phone calls and email. On the whole it seemed to work very well. The secretary was even able to compose replies to some of the email, and rather took offense at correspondents who seemed to be against her client's best interests. Fascinating story, I apologize for being unable to find it.
Not really. You've picked two of the defining features of monotremes, but it takes much more than that to group creatures together. And the "fur" from pterosaurs is almost certainly very different from mammalian hair.
Pterosaurs are a group related to dinosaurs. They're both part of the Archosaurs - a group that contains modern crocodiles and birds and their extinct relatives. Archosaurs in turn are part of the Diapsids, which brings in modern lizards.
Monotremes are a subset of Mammals, which are Synapsids. You can look this stuff up at the Tree of Life web page.
I don't mean to be rude here, but your statement is a bit like saying that two people at a family reunion must be brother and sister because they're both of medium build with blond hair.
Relaxed selection speeds up evolution. Mutations that are mildly deleterious can stay in the gene pool and participate in the genetic mix'n'match. Eventually you get much more genetic variation than you do under heavy selection.
Further, evolution is sloooowwww by human standards. It goes in generations, lots of them. Nothing short of a catastrophic selection event - think Black Plague, only worse and worldwide - is going to have a significant influence on the relative frequency of specific genes in just a few generations. We're only a couple of hundred generations from the Late Bronze Age. So don't try to extrapolate from conditions in your own neighborhood during your lifetime to actual evolution of our species. It's silly.
PCs had been ubiquitous for several years, but it took a while for the everyone to get sufficiently comfortable with the tools (mainly MS Office) that we could be sure that all the recipients would be able to open and read whatever we sent out.
For the last several years, most of what I printed were long documents that needed careful review, anything that was easier to scrawl on with pen or pencil (often marking up for revision) or short bits that I needed for quick access.
I used to work for AT&T's Network Disaster Recovery organization. As you can see at http://www.att.com/ndr they've got about 100 of those trailers. The catch, with respect to the current disaster, is that they're mostly for recovering long distance, not local service. And without the local infrastructure, there's not much traffic to get in or out of the area.
Some of my former co-workers are trying to recover one metro New Orleans location even now, but there's not much they can do for the city proper. They're probably operating the Emergency Communications Vans at some shelters (see picture at http://www.att.com/ndr/humanitarian_relief.html/) to allow people to call out, but the need is so great that even at max capacity, they aren't going to have a huge impact.
(Personal boast: I led the design and installation for the Frame Relay, ATM, and IP trailers.)
Ah! I guess you missed the following blog entry then:
Hi everybody, it's Sunday today and I'm bored. So I guess I'll get on with my homemade engine that runs on water....
So the filter works on trolls and scammers as well as lamers? Sweet!
I see nothing wrong with leaving aliens out of SF, especially on TV. "Aliens" on television are almost invariably a subset of humanity. Yes, I realize that constraints like the cost of CGI, the limitations of makeup and prosthetics, and the need for understandable characters pretty much require that Vulcans and Klingons and their ilk define what "alien" means on television. But dammit, aliens should not be readily understood. They are the product of billions of years of independent evolution - compared to any real alien, black widow spiders are our cousins and aardvarks and armadillos are our brothers and sisters. The idea that viewers should be able to 'relate' to aliens, or even firmly understand their motivations, is just wrong.
Even if you posit that intelligent aliens must have similar biological needs and drives to ours and that this provides a basis for mutual understanding, won't the aliens likely be as complex as humans? Won't there be as broad a range of motivation, culture, and temperament within an alien species as there is in humans? How often do you see that in TV aliens? Heck, most writers can't get the idea that a habitable planet should have multiple environments - even a 'desert world' or 'ice world' will have noticeable variations in climate, geology/geography, etc.
Joss Whedon & co. made the right decision in leaving aliens out of Firefly. Humans are fully capable of being more weird than anything alleged to be from another planet.