The nice simple definition "if it can interbreed, its the same species" doesn't always work, and there is no reasonable definition that covers all cases and removes ambiguity.
Cute example (from Stephen Jay Gould): On the coast of Australia there are species of eucalyptus that go from sea level up to the top of the mountains. Adjacent species can interbreed all the way up to the top of the mountains, but the alpine and sea-level species can not interbreed.
Infinity isn't a number at all. It is a symbol for continuousness.
Um, no. Infinity is a catchall name for the transfinite cardinals, and at least one of them (aleph-null) is smaller than the cardinality of the real numbers (c). The latter is sometimes called "the power of the continuum" because it captures our notion of continuousness.
My preferred analogy is to automobile accidents (roughly 30,000 people a year
At least most of the victims are in cars so it is more of a fair fight. My preferred analogy is 3000+ people a year die as pedestrians in crosswalks. So it's not OK for foreigners to kill 3000 defenseless americans with heavy machinery, but it is OK for americans to kill a comparable number in roughly the same way?
The Russians beat the US a very large number of firsts in space. First satellite, first animals in space, first human in space, first safe landings from orbit, first spacewalk, first to the land a probe on Mars, first probe to Venus, first orbital station, first flight around the moon.
My schools didn't give me the tools I needed to find things out.
My ex-girlfriend grew up in Pensacola FL. She told me about reading Hamlet in English class. Seems the local school board objected to so much of the content, that they provided an "edited" version of it. Because of all the sexual innuendo in all her scenes, the only time she showed up in the edited version was after she was dead!
So yes, public schooling in the US of A is pretty uneven.
Those people left Europe to experience religious freedom -- and paradoxically denying it once they got to the U.S.
In fact, they were trying to impose it on everyone else before they left.
England in the 1600s was a three way fight between the Puritans, the Catholics and the Anglicans/Monarchy, each convinced that they had God on their side. There was plenty of brutality and terrorism on all sides (Cromwell, Guy Fawkes and star chamber policies). Some of the Puritans left and started places like the Massachusetts Bay Colony which were ironically more oppressive than what they left: You could be a non-Anglican in England and just pay an annoying tax, but in Salem you were likely to be burned alive.
This is why Roger Williams fled to found Rhode Island (which is predominantly Catholic these days).
I went back and reread that post and found about one comma per sentence. If you have trouble reading things that aren't a sequence of declarative sentences, then you need find the time to read something more complex than a technical manual.
That said, I was appalled the other day to walk into an elementary school and see a sign asking the students to "line up strait". And this was in Redmond, WA, home of Microsoft, not exactly a poor neighborhood with no history of valuing education! My wife pointed out that it was probably a spell-check error, and I'm sure they have lots of "free" software there, but there is still no excuse: If a teacher can't use a spell checker effectively, how can they teach kids to do so?
In 20 years or so of renting videotapes, I have never needed to return a VHS tape in the middle of viewing because it would not play any further. This has already happened to me twice with DVDs from the Hollywood Video down the street. And I believe that my total DVD rental count is about 20 for a 10% failure rate. And even if a VHS tape did die on me, a few minutes with a razor blade and some scotch tape world put me back in business.
Plus it remains to be seen how long these DVDs will last. Wired had this hillarious chart a few years back comparing media lifetimes, and there was this strong trend correlating life with how old the format was. Cuniform tablets were waaay ahead. I have a set of DVDs of a 1960s TV series (Thunderbirds!) that I am considering transferring to another media to make sure they last longer than a few years.
Now that would actually encourage people to mix and match character sets just to create multicolored text in the address bar.
Heh, heh!
But seriously, all you need to do to avoid that particular bit of marketing droid dumbness is to make it only one color for all non-standard codepages, preferably something unappealing like brown. You could even make it user-customizable with that as the default.
So, is there anybody out there that can name a change or two that they actually considered a major let-down?
I loved the movies, but there were of course a few things that I didn't like...
Gimli's (lack of a) relationship with Galadriel;
The ambivalence of the small Orc in Minas Morgul towards Sauron's war;
Similarly, Frodo's musings on the conscription of Southron men (although they put it in Faramir's mouth in the extended edition);
The courtship of Faramir and Eowen. If they are going to devote all that time to her character's romantic frustration, they should at least show some resolution of it.
Seriously, the Amish are not anti-technology, they just want to be in control of how it affects their life and relationships. Amish have phones, just not in the house where they will disrupt family life. I have also heard it said that the Amish can be fairly positive about some things (like gas barbecue grills) that enhance family or community life.
I am also offended as an Englishman. As a nation we were appalled with the attacks on the Twin Towers (Note, not the Two Towers) and we have suffered enough terrorist attacks ourselves (although admittedly, not on this scale) over the years to be extremely sensitive to the victims of ANY terrorist attack (bali, etc).
I'd like to point out that the total body count from the IRA is actually about the same as from the 9/11 bombings (c. 3000), although they took about 40 years to get to the same level.
Considering that the IRA got most of their funding from the US (specifically from the greater Boston area, where I used to live), I think that the PP is being quite compassionate. And to the credit of the US people, IRA funding from the US dried up within days of the attacks.
Given the limited $500/fax fines, and the admitted total of $6000 over three years of work earned by Livingston
I don't know where the reporter gets his figures from, but I was a party to a class-action junk fax lawsuit a few years back that had a settlement of around USD500K. Among other things, the assholes tied up the fax lines of three different hospitals, which carries heavy penalties because it interferes with the ability to provide care (and may endanger lives). The hospitals got the bulk of the money (about USD100K each IIRC), but we got USD130 and some good karma out of the deal (and if the tools at Forbes think this is a Bad Thing, then it is almost certainly major karma points).
This was a public suit brought by the Washington AG's office (yay Christine Gregiore!) so I doubt any lawyers got rich, but these people are such fools that I'm sure there are all sorts of ways to make them pay for their selfishness.
As a married man, I have learned the correct answer to all these questions is to not be in the room when your sweetie turns around. If she can't see you, she can't use the glasses;-)
Is there anything left in the UK that isn't being monitored?
This is a cautionary tale for the USians here. A large part of the impetus for widespread monitoring in the UK over the last 40 years came from fear of...IRA terrorism. So be careful what you do with that Patriot Act.
(Then there is the small matter that most of the IRAs funding came from the US, but we will leave that for another day.)
Slashdot Mirror
First woman in space.
So yes, public schooling in the US of A is pretty uneven.
England in the 1600s was a three way fight between the Puritans, the Catholics and the Anglicans/Monarchy, each convinced that they had God on their side. There was plenty of brutality and terrorism on all sides (Cromwell, Guy Fawkes and star chamber policies). Some of the Puritans left and started places like the Massachusetts Bay Colony which were ironically more oppressive than what they left: You could be a non-Anglican in England and just pay an annoying tax, but in Salem you were likely to be burned alive.
This is why Roger Williams fled to found Rhode Island (which is predominantly Catholic these days).
This is the most intelligent posting on this subject I have seen in months. Mod up please.
(I know, don't feed the trolls.)
I went back and reread that post and found about one comma per sentence. If you have trouble reading things that aren't a sequence of declarative sentences, then you need find the time to read something more complex than a technical manual.
That said, I was appalled the other day to walk into an elementary school and see a sign asking the students to "line up strait". And this was in Redmond, WA, home of Microsoft, not exactly a poor neighborhood with no history of valuing education! My wife pointed out that it was probably a spell-check error, and I'm sure they have lots of "free" software there, but there is still no excuse: If a teacher can't use a spell checker effectively, how can they teach kids to do so?
In 20 years or so of renting videotapes, I have never needed to return a VHS tape in the middle of viewing because it would not play any further. This has already happened to me twice with DVDs from the Hollywood Video down the street. And I believe that my total DVD rental count is about 20 for a 10% failure rate. And even if a VHS tape did die on me, a few minutes with a razor blade and some scotch tape world put me back in business.
Plus it remains to be seen how long these DVDs will last. Wired had this hillarious chart a few years back comparing media lifetimes, and there was this strong trend correlating life with how old the format was. Cuniform tablets were waaay ahead. I have a set of DVDs of a 1960s TV series (Thunderbirds!) that I am considering transferring to another media to make sure they last longer than a few years.
But seriously, all you need to do to avoid that particular bit of marketing droid dumbness is to make it only one color for all non-standard codepages, preferably something unappealing like brown. You could even make it user-customizable with that as the default.
Just these guys...
Seriously, the Amish are not anti-technology, they just want to be in control of how it affects their life and relationships. Amish have phones, just not in the house where they will disrupt family life. I have also heard it said that the Amish can be fairly positive about some things (like gas barbecue grills) that enhance family or community life.
Considering that the IRA got most of their funding from the US (specifically from the greater Boston area, where I used to live), I think that the PP is being quite compassionate. And to the credit of the US people, IRA funding from the US dried up within days of the attacks.
WRT panpsychism, yes indeed: Penrose is postulating that the spacetime quanta have properties of traditional experiential qualia.
What I find interesting/disturbing are the ethical implications. Jainism is looking a lot more reasonable in light of this stuff.
If one thinks of quantum computing as a kind of parallelism, then maybe so.
(Ducks!)
This was a public suit brought by the Washington AG's office (yay Christine Gregiore!) so I doubt any lawyers got rich, but these people are such fools that I'm sure there are all sorts of ways to make them pay for their selfishness.
As a married man, I have learned the correct answer to all these questions is to not be in the room when your sweetie turns around. If she can't see you, she can't use the glasses ;-)
(Then there is the small matter that most of the IRAs funding came from the US, but we will leave that for another day.)