On what did youbase this assumption? Facts, personal experience, anything?
Fact, personal experience, take your pick. Got a 20 euro note in my wallet I took a real close look at a few nights ago when another discussion of banknotes came up. Here in sweden we still use the crown, which uses some nicer feeling paper, but I had these 20 euros left after my last vacation I forgot to change... the cheap feel of the paper is very striking compared to either a crown or a US note.
You probably didn't realise that I happen to live in Sweden, and the shipping might be more than the purchase price. Not all of us live in San Jose you know.;)
If I watched the classifieds closely for a few months I could probably find such a deal, but I can walk down to the store and get the xbox, a more powerful machine with ethernet and USB already installed, without the wait.
You'll notice the article is from a UK source, I think this is mostly a European problem. Not all countries use the special paper found in US currency - in fact Euros in particular seem to use some damn cheap paper. And, of course, if you are dealing with US currency, the trick is to bleach out a bunch of $1s and reprint them as $20s, that's the only easy way to get the paper. There are plenty of tricks in the US currency to keep that from being anywhere near undetectable, but a bartender in a busy club probably doesn't have time to examine the notes too closely.
I've got a hardware router, but I'm not happy with it. Limited programmability, and seems to have a problem dealing with thousands of simultaneous low-bandwidth connections as well. An Xbox or even an old 486 with a custom kernel and firewall would probably be more satisfactory - but it's hard to find an old 486 for the same price as an Xbox.
Plus making MS eat a little loss would feel good too.
Sure he has a point. And they're within their rights to try to detect modified XBox consoles and prevent them from playing on their service.
But the point doesn't go any further, however much they would like it to. It certainly doesn't give them any right to interfere with me using an Xbox for a routher, for instance. Speaking of which, can anyone point me to a good how-to on converting an Xbox into a decent *nix router?
The Hardware may be sold, but having their own system booted on a machine provides the mindshare that's more important long term.
I'm sure it is important to them, but that doesn't give them a right to coerce it. Once you own the hardware, you have the right to do whatever you want with it.
This isn't piracy, in any sense. Of course it doesn't involve boarding ships at sea and stealing cargo/kidnapping passengers, which is actual piracy. But it's not copyright infringement, which sometimes gets called piracy, either.
There's no "intellectual property" issue here at all, however much MS wishes they could find one. This is hardware. You buy it, it's yours. Period.
Of course we can all understand that they'd prefer to have people only buying their loss-leaders in order to run the games that they make heaps on. And most people do. But those who don't are perfectly within their rights. If MS really doesn't like it, they can start pricing the boxes more reasonably. It's their choice. But of course they want to have their cake and eat it too, and the sad thing is they have enough money to buy politicians with that they may yet get it.
Re:stun guns are not that effective
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
Absolutely true.
Those towboaters are a real tough bunch I've heard. Not that I know firsthand, I'm from a bit east of the river.
Anyway, back in my rowdy days, I had a similar thing happen - clubbed a guy real good, in just the right place, he should have been out cold. He sank to his knees... and then in the blink of an eye he put a shiv in my overconfident side. I got a pretty little scar to go with that story... sheer luck he didn't kill me.
Oh yeah, I forgot. That's why all of us Canadians are constantly getting shot, killed, and robbed.
Umm there are a lot of armed canadians. A lot of them. Canada is nothing like NYC - I've lived in Canada, and by the way I like it very much. Gun ownership is a lot less restricted in many areas of Canada than in many areas of the US. And of course gun ownership is only one of many factors in violence - culture is a big part of it, and so are the many other conditions that encourage criminality in general.
There was a song made by the Arrogant Worms, about guns, and they had a great line in it: "No one would get shot, if everyone had a gun!" Putting your argument that way just makes it seem laughable.
What's laughable is the cheap straw man. I never said anything of the kind.
It's a simple relative proposition - situation A criminals are the only ones that have weapons, situation B everyone has weapons - which situation is going to see more violence?
Sounds a lot like my old toshiba, only it had... dammit a 286 or maybe something less, it had 2 megs of ram but the only thing you could do with the memory in excess of 640 was make a ramdisk... old DOS embedded on ROM, maybe 3.1 or so... just a floppy. That was actually quite a nice machine, great for writing in the park.
The problem is definitly NOT that not enough people have guns.
No, that's not THE problem, it's one of many. It's a pretty big one though.
Us 'backwards rednecks' aren't the ones with a crime problem. The counties with the most guns per person are the safest ones in the country. Places like NYC where law abiding citizens are disarmed are the most dangerous. There's tons of empirical data from all over the world to show this relationship, but anyone with the slightest bit of street smarts could predict it. If you're a criminal and you know the chances are very high that your potential victim is armed, you're much more likely to be cautious and avoid confrontation, but if you know your victim is probably disarmed, confrontation and violence is much more likely.
I'll just say it's a really good publicity stunt if you're selling the kevlar...;)
Re:stun guns are not that effective
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
I've been hit by them multiple times. Part of any good self defense education... hit with stun gun, hit with pepper spray, hit with CS, shot with a pistol while wearing kevlar...
The pistol shot is by far the most effective, even with the kevlar.:P The stungun can knock you out, sure but it usually requires a lot more time than 'instantly'. People react differently, so of course it might have that effect on the right person at the right time, but don't count on it.
My reaction seems to be more typical. Felt like a whole nest of hornets hit me. I was hit on the arm, 'extra strength' stungun, sure didn't feel good, and I was a little woozy afterwards even, but fall down and flop like a fish? Hardly.
Stun guns are cool, but you better know how to defend yourself already before you use one, they aren't a panacea, just a little extra edge.
If someone comes into my house stealing stuff I have no way of knowing if he's armed or not, and I have no way of knowing if he intends to off me before or after he gets the TV. I can, must, and will destroy him where he stands to protect my own life. Bleeding heart morons and lawyers can argue about it afterwards all they want.
Re:Get one for your wife??!
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not.
The only possible use I could see is if your wife is such a flake she couldn't be trusted with a handgun... then I guess it might be ok.
Re:considered the father of Linux?
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 1
Well let's try a hypothetical. Suppose Microsoft turned out to be using someone elses code without permission in XP. They would be guilty of copyright infringement. Would the end users who innocently bought XP and used it without any knowledge of the problem have any liability?
Of course not. And similarly, even if there were any amount of proprietary code somehow inserted into Linux, that wouldn't make end users liable either.
Nice troll. Lots of truth in the stuff about the compiler needing improvement. But my 667 tiBook runs itunes, mozilla with a dozen tabs open, two or three emacs windows, apache with php/mysql (not a lot of action on it, just for development of course), calculator, mail, and a game or two simultaneously and I've never seen the load get much above.3 for a peak. The difference between it and my athlonxp 1700 machine is negligible - it's there, but hardly ever apparent. iPhoto and iMovie work much better for me than the PC equivelants, and do their work quite quickly. You're obviously just making crap up.
How does linux freshen the mainframe labor pool, and not the Unix/Windows NT pool?
Real simple. You can run linux on IBM mainframes. They've done an excellent port and made it clear that they're committed to supporting it.
Now you still need a minimum old-school crew to run the actual mainframe stuff, but you can migrate your applications to Linux-in-a-VM instead of using Cobol JCL and all the other arcane mainframe stuff. So you get the best of both worlds - the incredible IO power of the mainframe can be harnessed to linux virtual machines, programmed maintained and administered by guys that don't need to know squat about the mainframe itself.
Places that are already using mainframes can continue to support all their legacy apps, but implement new systems in the linux environment with *nix people to run them. Eventually over the years the old systems are retired and the new ones are *nix, until there isn't really any need for anyone with what we think of as mainframe specific skills, except the service personel at IBM. And new buyers can get a clean start, never needing any real mainframe knowledge in house at all.
Well, presumably someone needs to learn enough to set up new VMs, but that's about it. Mainframes are incredibly resiliant and fault tolerant, you can blow out processors, hard drives and probably whole banks of memory without any interruption in service, even while the techs are installing new parts...
Let's see a mini or microcomputer where you can do that. Show me a mini/microcomputer that can push 20gig/second between memory and storage, and show it to me before the new mainframe comes out too, I understand it will be capable of 40gig/second.
These aren't supercomputers that can be replaced with beowulf clusters. They aren't computational giants at all - you definately can find minicomputers that can beat them in that arena. But there are many tasks where simply being able to do calculations quickly is not important. How many *nix database servers ever max their CPU? Most will run out of IO bandwidth before their CPU sees much load.
Mainframes are simply the pinnacle of reliability and IO power - these things can run huge mission-critical databases like nothing else. And thanks to the Linux porting, those databases can be run by anyone that could do the job on any other linux system, instead of being the sole preserve of dedicated mainframe people that are intimately familiar with dozens of ancient technologies most of us have never heard of.
So I can see a genus consisting or merely humans, of humans and chimps, or of humans, chimps, and gorillas. Once you get past that, you are basically including all primates (what's the sense of including oragutangs but not gibbons?).
Umm no. If you put humans, bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs, and gibbons in one genus, you most assuredly have NOT included all primates or even close. The vast majority of primates are old world monkeys, new world monkeys, and lemurs. The word you were looking for here was apes, not primates.
What? I don't have any timber wolves in the area, but I have watched my female husky mate with coyotes several times. Yes she has been bitten a few times, and my male mutt has damn near been killed.
Also I remember reading about Arizona or some place they were having a hell of a time protecting the local variety of wolf as they often breed with coyotes. They have a bounty on coyotes, but the two flavors of dogs and thier hybrids are not as easy to distiguish as say a pug and a great dane...
Well of course you would have to bring up the coyotes and make the whole thing complicated.;)
Coyotes are a very interesting case, because physically they can mate with both domesticated dogs and with wolves, although there are major behavioural issues that prevent it from happening except under extraordinary circumstances.
If you've really witnessed this happening "in the wild" you may well be the only person alive that can say that. You should really be talking to a biologist that specialises in canines, any of them would be very interested, again presuming what you claim is true. But you're almost certainly mistaken, keep reading and I'll tell you why.
A few coyote-dog crosses have been produced by human action, just as some wolf-dog crosses have been. And I think it's probably uncontroversial to say that it may, very rarely, happen in the wild, but to the best of my knowledge it's rare enough it's never been solidly documented.
Coyote dog crosses as occur in nature have a very rough life with little chance of survival.
OK, a few basic facts of canine life:
Wolves and coyotes of either sex will mate only during their mating season, in late winter. Domesticated female dogs, on the other hand, have a variable breeding cycle that varies anywhere from 6-12 months and is not so predictable. Consequently, male domesticated dogs are ready to breed at any time.
Also, coyotes of course don't like dogs, are more likely to be interested in killing them than having sex with them, and to top it off, coyotes also pair-bond and share parental responsibilities while domesticated dogs do not. For a male coyote to have even the tiniest chance of mating with a female dog, her period would have to line up just perfectly with his - quite unlikely. And if it did happen, he'd be sticking around to take care of the pups, or more likely trying to do that until someone shot him... all of which makes me think your observation must be confused or invented. It's possible that you've mistaken a dominance display for an actual mating, although that may not be very likely either. Barring that my best guess would be that your 'coyotes' in this case are just wild dogs, or possibly even coy-dogs, coyote-dog hybrids themselves. Timing is everything here, if we assume that it's absolutely definately a real mating for the moment at least. Coyotes, wolves, and coy-dogs all have very strict mating times, even the males, so if this happens outside of those timings then they have to be wild dogs. Many wild dogs do look and act enough like coyotes to fool even people who are quite familiar with both.
To the best of my knowledge, all known coy-dogs are the result of controlled breeding by humans, and involve a female coyote and a male dog. Since dog males are ready to mate any time, this is far less problematic, and they do produce fertile offspring. If this happened in the wild, of course, the pups would be effectively "fatherless" (the male dog is assuredly not going to stick around and share the parental responsibilities as a coyote male would) and their chances of survival very low. But it is possible, and presumably does happen occasionally. Ready for the next hitch?
Coy-dogs have their own estrus cycle, unlike either parent. Like the coyote, it happens only once a year, but not the same time of year as a coyote or a wolf - so they can't possible breed with coyotes or wolves, but only with domesticated d
Re:Probably it will always stay...
on
BitTorrent Guide
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· Score: 1
It actually sounds an awful lot like the donkey network. I understand mldonkey is working on a plugin for it too. But I wonder what advantages it has over the donkey/overnet protocol?
15,000 years is a very conservative number, but yes, regardless, it's been an extraordinarily short time of separation in evolutionary terms. But intelligence-driven selective breeding is not normal evolution either.
Re: Your future scenario, "It seems possible that wolves and dogs could, 15,000 years from now, interbreed regularly and be solidly within the same species." I suppose it is, in principle, possible, but again it would never happen without massive intelligence-directed intervention.
What's important to understand in terms of speciation is it isn't the about of time that's important, but the sharing of a gene pool.
I know everyone has seen or read about "wolf-dog hybrids" but have any of you ever tried to make one? It really requires a HUGE amount of work, and describing it graphically would probably get me arrested. I don't think any of the posters I've read here have the faintest clue just how much intervention is required and how bloody impossible it would be for this to ever happen in the wild.
And, as others have pointed out, Ass/Horse hybrids are not always hybrid, they do in fact produce fertile offspring occasionally, but they're still clearly different species.
Slashdot Mirror
Fact, personal experience, take your pick. Got a 20 euro note in my wallet I took a real close look at a few nights ago when another discussion of banknotes came up. Here in sweden we still use the crown, which uses some nicer feeling paper, but I had these 20 euros left after my last vacation I forgot to change... the cheap feel of the paper is very striking compared to either a crown or a US note.
Really? That would be wonderful.
You probably didn't realise that I happen to live in Sweden, and the shipping might be more than the purchase price. Not all of us live in San Jose you know. ;)
If I watched the classifieds closely for a few months I could probably find such a deal, but I can walk down to the store and get the xbox, a more powerful machine with ethernet and USB already installed, without the wait.
Like so:c oins/counterfeit200kr.html'>Security features on the 200-krone note</a>
<a href='http://www.norgesbank.no/english/notes_and_
Only without the annoying space slashcode insists on mangling the post with.
Your links:
Some Norwegian Banknotes
Security features on the 200-krone note
You'll notice the article is from a UK source, I think this is mostly a European problem. Not all countries use the special paper found in US currency - in fact Euros in particular seem to use some damn cheap paper. And, of course, if you are dealing with US currency, the trick is to bleach out a bunch of $1s and reprint them as $20s, that's the only easy way to get the paper. There are plenty of tricks in the US currency to keep that from being anywhere near undetectable, but a bartender in a busy club probably doesn't have time to examine the notes too closely.
I've got a hardware router, but I'm not happy with it. Limited programmability, and seems to have a problem dealing with thousands of simultaneous low-bandwidth connections as well. An Xbox or even an old 486 with a custom kernel and firewall would probably be more satisfactory - but it's hard to find an old 486 for the same price as an Xbox.
Plus making MS eat a little loss would feel good too.
Sure he has a point. And they're within their rights to try to detect modified XBox consoles and prevent them from playing on their service.
But the point doesn't go any further, however much they would like it to. It certainly doesn't give them any right to interfere with me using an Xbox for a routher, for instance. Speaking of which, can anyone point me to a good how-to on converting an Xbox into a decent *nix router?
I'm sure it is important to them, but that doesn't give them a right to coerce it. Once you own the hardware, you have the right to do whatever you want with it.
How?
This isn't piracy, in any sense. Of course it doesn't involve boarding ships at sea and stealing cargo/kidnapping passengers, which is actual piracy. But it's not copyright infringement, which sometimes gets called piracy, either.
There's no "intellectual property" issue here at all, however much MS wishes they could find one. This is hardware. You buy it, it's yours. Period.
Of course we can all understand that they'd prefer to have people only buying their loss-leaders in order to run the games that they make heaps on. And most people do. But those who don't are perfectly within their rights. If MS really doesn't like it, they can start pricing the boxes more reasonably. It's their choice. But of course they want to have their cake and eat it too, and the sad thing is they have enough money to buy politicians with that they may yet get it.
Absolutely true.
Those towboaters are a real tough bunch I've heard. Not that I know firsthand, I'm from a bit east of the river.
Anyway, back in my rowdy days, I had a similar thing happen - clubbed a guy real good, in just the right place, he should have been out cold. He sank to his knees... and then in the blink of an eye he put a shiv in my overconfident side. I got a pretty little scar to go with that story... sheer luck he didn't kill me.
Umm there are a lot of armed canadians. A lot of them. Canada is nothing like NYC - I've lived in Canada, and by the way I like it very much. Gun ownership is a lot less restricted in many areas of Canada than in many areas of the US. And of course gun ownership is only one of many factors in violence - culture is a big part of it, and so are the many other conditions that encourage criminality in general.
What's laughable is the cheap straw man. I never said anything of the kind.
It's a simple relative proposition - situation A criminals are the only ones that have weapons, situation B everyone has weapons - which situation is going to see more violence?
Sounds a lot like my old toshiba, only it had... dammit a 286 or maybe something less, it had 2 megs of ram but the only thing you could do with the memory in excess of 640 was make a ramdisk... old DOS embedded on ROM, maybe 3.1 or so... just a floppy. That was actually quite a nice machine, great for writing in the park.
Why don't you move?
No, that's not THE problem, it's one of many. It's a pretty big one though.
Us 'backwards rednecks' aren't the ones with a crime problem. The counties with the most guns per person are the safest ones in the country. Places like NYC where law abiding citizens are disarmed are the most dangerous. There's tons of empirical data from all over the world to show this relationship, but anyone with the slightest bit of street smarts could predict it. If you're a criminal and you know the chances are very high that your potential victim is armed, you're much more likely to be cautious and avoid confrontation, but if you know your victim is probably disarmed, confrontation and violence is much more likely.
I'll just say it's a really good publicity stunt if you're selling the kevlar... ;)
I've been hit by them multiple times. Part of any good self defense education... hit with stun gun, hit with pepper spray, hit with CS, shot with a pistol while wearing kevlar...
The pistol shot is by far the most effective, even with the kevlar. :P The stungun can knock you out, sure but it usually requires a lot more time than 'instantly'. People react differently, so of course it might have that effect on the right person at the right time, but don't count on it.
My reaction seems to be more typical. Felt like a whole nest of hornets hit me. I was hit on the arm, 'extra strength' stungun, sure didn't feel good, and I was a little woozy afterwards even, but fall down and flop like a fish? Hardly.
Stun guns are cool, but you better know how to defend yourself already before you use one, they aren't a panacea, just a little extra edge.
Yeah, NYC is very big on victim disarmament. No wonder there is so much crime there.
If someone comes into my house stealing stuff I have no way of knowing if he's armed or not, and I have no way of knowing if he intends to off me before or after he gets the TV. I can, must, and will destroy him where he stands to protect my own life. Bleeding heart morons and lawyers can argue about it afterwards all they want.
It's not.
The only possible use I could see is if your wife is such a flake she couldn't be trusted with a handgun... then I guess it might be ok.
Well let's try a hypothetical. Suppose Microsoft turned out to be using someone elses code without permission in XP. They would be guilty of copyright infringement. Would the end users who innocently bought XP and used it without any knowledge of the problem have any liability?
Of course not. And similarly, even if there were any amount of proprietary code somehow inserted into Linux, that wouldn't make end users liable either.
Nice troll. Lots of truth in the stuff about the compiler needing improvement. But my 667 tiBook runs itunes, mozilla with a dozen tabs open, two or three emacs windows, apache with php/mysql (not a lot of action on it, just for development of course), calculator, mail, and a game or two simultaneously and I've never seen the load get much above .3 for a peak. The difference between it and my athlonxp 1700 machine is negligible - it's there, but hardly ever apparent. iPhoto and iMovie work much better for me than the PC equivelants, and do their work quite quickly. You're obviously just making crap up.
Real simple. You can run linux on IBM mainframes. They've done an excellent port and made it clear that they're committed to supporting it.
Now you still need a minimum old-school crew to run the actual mainframe stuff, but you can migrate your applications to Linux-in-a-VM instead of using Cobol JCL and all the other arcane mainframe stuff. So you get the best of both worlds - the incredible IO power of the mainframe can be harnessed to linux virtual machines, programmed maintained and administered by guys that don't need to know squat about the mainframe itself.
Places that are already using mainframes can continue to support all their legacy apps, but implement new systems in the linux environment with *nix people to run them. Eventually over the years the old systems are retired and the new ones are *nix, until there isn't really any need for anyone with what we think of as mainframe specific skills, except the service personel at IBM. And new buyers can get a clean start, never needing any real mainframe knowledge in house at all.
Well, presumably someone needs to learn enough to set up new VMs, but that's about it. Mainframes are incredibly resiliant and fault tolerant, you can blow out processors, hard drives and probably whole banks of memory without any interruption in service, even while the techs are installing new parts...
Let's see a mini or microcomputer where you can do that. Show me a mini/microcomputer that can push 20gig/second between memory and storage, and show it to me before the new mainframe comes out too, I understand it will be capable of 40gig/second.
These aren't supercomputers that can be replaced with beowulf clusters. They aren't computational giants at all - you definately can find minicomputers that can beat them in that arena. But there are many tasks where simply being able to do calculations quickly is not important. How many *nix database servers ever max their CPU? Most will run out of IO bandwidth before their CPU sees much load.
Mainframes are simply the pinnacle of reliability and IO power - these things can run huge mission-critical databases like nothing else. And thanks to the Linux porting, those databases can be run by anyone that could do the job on any other linux system, instead of being the sole preserve of dedicated mainframe people that are intimately familiar with dozens of ancient technologies most of us have never heard of.
Umm no. If you put humans, bonobos, chimps, gorillas, orangs, and gibbons in one genus, you most assuredly have NOT included all primates or even close. The vast majority of primates are old world monkeys, new world monkeys, and lemurs. The word you were looking for here was apes, not primates.
Well of course you would have to bring up the coyotes and make the whole thing complicated. ;)
Coyotes are a very interesting case, because physically they can mate with both domesticated dogs and with wolves, although there are major behavioural issues that prevent it from happening except under extraordinary circumstances.
If you've really witnessed this happening "in the wild" you may well be the only person alive that can say that. You should really be talking to a biologist that specialises in canines, any of them would be very interested, again presuming what you claim is true. But you're almost certainly mistaken, keep reading and I'll tell you why.
A few coyote-dog crosses have been produced by human action, just as some wolf-dog crosses have been. And I think it's probably uncontroversial to say that it may, very rarely, happen in the wild, but to the best of my knowledge it's rare enough it's never been solidly documented.
Coyote dog crosses as occur in nature have a very rough life with little chance of survival.
OK, a few basic facts of canine life:
Wolves and coyotes of either sex will mate only during their mating season, in late winter. Domesticated female dogs, on the other hand, have a variable breeding cycle that varies anywhere from 6-12 months and is not so predictable. Consequently, male domesticated dogs are ready to breed at any time.
Also, coyotes of course don't like dogs, are more likely to be interested in killing them than having sex with them, and to top it off, coyotes also pair-bond and share parental responsibilities while domesticated dogs do not. For a male coyote to have even the tiniest chance of mating with a female dog, her period would have to line up just perfectly with his - quite unlikely. And if it did happen, he'd be sticking around to take care of the pups, or more likely trying to do that until someone shot him... all of which makes me think your observation must be confused or invented. It's possible that you've mistaken a dominance display for an actual mating, although that may not be very likely either. Barring that my best guess would be that your 'coyotes' in this case are just wild dogs, or possibly even coy-dogs, coyote-dog hybrids themselves. Timing is everything here, if we assume that it's absolutely definately a real mating for the moment at least. Coyotes, wolves, and coy-dogs all have very strict mating times, even the males, so if this happens outside of those timings then they have to be wild dogs. Many wild dogs do look and act enough like coyotes to fool even people who are quite familiar with both.
To the best of my knowledge, all known coy-dogs are the result of controlled breeding by humans, and involve a female coyote and a male dog. Since dog males are ready to mate any time, this is far less problematic, and they do produce fertile offspring. If this happened in the wild, of course, the pups would be effectively "fatherless" (the male dog is assuredly not going to stick around and share the parental responsibilities as a coyote male would) and their chances of survival very low. But it is possible, and presumably does happen occasionally. Ready for the next hitch?
Coy-dogs have their own estrus cycle, unlike either parent. Like the coyote, it happens only once a year, but not the same time of year as a coyote or a wolf - so they can't possible breed with coyotes or wolves, but only with domesticated d
It actually sounds an awful lot like the donkey network. I understand mldonkey is working on a plugin for it too. But I wonder what advantages it has over the donkey/overnet protocol?
15,000 years is a very conservative number, but yes, regardless, it's been an extraordinarily short time of separation in evolutionary terms. But intelligence-driven selective breeding is not normal evolution either.
Re: Your future scenario, "It seems possible that wolves and dogs could, 15,000 years from now, interbreed regularly and be solidly within the same species." I suppose it is, in principle, possible, but again it would never happen without massive intelligence-directed intervention.
What's important to understand in terms of speciation is it isn't the about of time that's important, but the sharing of a gene pool.
I know everyone has seen or read about "wolf-dog hybrids" but have any of you ever tried to make one? It really requires a HUGE amount of work, and describing it graphically would probably get me arrested. I don't think any of the posters I've read here have the faintest clue just how much intervention is required and how bloody impossible it would be for this to ever happen in the wild.
And, as others have pointed out, Ass/Horse hybrids are not always hybrid, they do in fact produce fertile offspring occasionally, but they're still clearly different species.