You have obviously never heard of the Genesis Rock. During the Apollo 15 mission, a rock was picked up by astronaut Scott, which he, by seeing it, felt that it was something special. It turned out that it was a very special rock. The point is, while robots are good at collecting samples and analyzing information, human beings are way ahead in the area of reasoning, an important trait when visiting unknown places.
I feel your pain. I am currently living in Germany and was stoked in 1999 when we were going to be treated to a total solar eclipse. In August, it is usually dry with clear skies. Of course, the days leading up to the eclipse were splendid, as were the days after the eclipse. I caught about a one second glimpse of the sun during totally:-(
Newton's Second Law did not undergo any changes. It was, and always will be, F=dp/dt. The problem was the Newton had no way to test a change in momentum. There were no rocket engines, for instance. Having a running horse lose mass while shitting and then comparing the results before and after would have been difficult, to say the least.
The core temperature has nothing to do with gravitational contraction. The actual cause is radioactive decay. If there were no atmosphere, the earth would still produce enough heat do to this effect to maintain the temperature at around -17C. Without the radiactive decay, the earth's temperature would mirror that of Mars.
Blue is a word used to describe how we perceive a particular wavelength. If Fred sees the sky and says that it is blue and George likewise, then they are both "seeing" the same color. To prove this, take a variety of objects of different color and have Fred and George independently describe what they are seeing. Assuming that they are not suffering from a physical deficiency, they will correctly state each time what color they are seeing and their results will match perfectly.
If I choose to name the color of they sky black, then everytime I see the color blue, I will call it black and everyone else will call it blue. It will, however, have the same wavelength, regardless of who is seeing the color. This particular wavelength has been universally called blue. Is the number one not the same for everybody, regardless of what they call it? Eins, uno, one, un, etc.... These are simply labels that we attach to the phenomenon.
This comparison is totally wrong. Most people today do not own their TV sets and their computers and their homes. All of these things have been but on credit, more than likely. It is much easier to get credit cards today than it was even 30 years ago. This has led to other problems; on papaer, however, people "own" more luxury items today.
Another factor is that the cost of the technology is cheaper today. People "own" two television sets because they cost as much as one did 30 years ago. More people can afford to buy tghese items than 30 years ago simply because they are less expensive--not because they are making more money today (with inflation taken in to account).
Social equity for me means that everyone who works should be able to afford to buy a house. It means that athletes are not paid enormous sums of money when the job of a fireman, policeman or teacher is infinitely more important. It means that poeple treat eachother with the same amount of respect--regardless of economic stature.
I have been living in Germany for 15 years now (american). The biggest gripe I have with the fee, as it stands now, is that I don't have an option. If I own a TV, or radio, I must pay, whether I use their service, or not. On top of this, the cost is exhorbitantly high when compared to the cost of cable television--which is another thing that I basically must pay for--and cable service (Premiere).
There is exactly one(!) show that I watch on the government channels, and that show is once a week, for 1/2 hour. When I listen to music, it is through Premiere--not the government endorsed channels. Basically, the money that the government collects I refer to as a privelge tax. I must pay monthly for the privelege of owning a TV and stereo system.
For what its worth, RTL is not a Germany station. It is Radio/Television Luxembourg. While the government may offer a fwe shows of any value, they are far too few to justify how much they collect in taxes every month.
As an american, I don't see the point in subsidizing bad programming. In America, the public stations rely on public support (plus some governmental cash). If you try to tell an american that he must now pay $20/month simply because he owns a television set and a stero, in order to support public channels, you will have the next civil war on your hands.
It is not up to the owner of the site to bar access to US citizens. If a US citizen knowingly breaks an american law, he is the one guilty. It is getting tiresome watching the "moral majority" building a police state. If I own a bar and someone drinks, drives and runs someone over, I could be guilty of manslaughter. Why? It is time that people took responsiblity for their own actions rather than blame society for their misguided lives.
If I travel to Amsterdam as an american citizen and am stoned for my entire vacation, should I be arrested upon my return because it is illegal in America to get stoned? Should dutch government officials be arrested when they enter the US because they sold drugs to americans who vacationed there?
Arresting the owner of the website is simply not legal and this case will be tossed. Then he will sue the US and win some money. AFAIK, it is NOT illegal to play poker online in the US. That decision is still pending and this is simply the government trying to strong arm others in to their way of thinking. Funny thing is, the government is supposed to represent the people. In this case, they are way off base. Polls show that the majority of people want online gambling--along with legal use of recreational drugs and other things. The government is ignoring the demands of the people.
Why? It is painfully obvious that the government is controlled by lobby groups. Okay, no great surprise there. The Native American Indians and the huge casinos are against online gambling, since this would cut in to their profits. What really hurts is the the government believes that americans are so stupid that they cannot see through the FUD. Can americans really be so ignorant?
Well, I, for one , hope not. The time has come that americans stand up for their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without the governmen intervening. A government that condones violence should not attempt to preach what is right and wrong. Current gun laws do not work--the right to bear arms was an attempt to protect american soil against foreign invasion, not to shoot your neighbor because his dog shit in your yard. It is okay to go to sit in front of your TV and watch dozens of people get slaughtered--sometimes in extremely gruesome ways--yet, show nudity during prime time television and you have condemned everyone to hell.
They need to let this guy go, start listening to the people and work out a constructive plan to allow online gambling (if the indians and casinos want a part of the action let them build their own sites), get the troops out of Iraq (public mandate) and stop trying to control every aspect of our lives and stop spreading FUD and preying on people's fears.
Robots can only perform a limited set of tasks. Contrary to what you may believe, the human brain is still a much better computer than today's best computers--except for pure data crunching. The ability to think abstractly gives humans a huge advantage over robots, which are programmed to take a soil sample and run a few chemical experiments to see what the soil is made of. Controlling a robot over such great distances also limits the scope of the robot's performance. Robots can only operate a little bit at a time. You don't want to set your robot on autopilot and have to wait minutes befire you can "tell" it that it is about to enter a region that it will never make it out of. The ability for a human to act, rather than react, is a great advantage. Pathfinder, while it did return some nice pictures, was woefully inadequate for the task at hand--determine if life existed at some point in time on Mars. The only way that this will ever be achieved is by sending people.
Well, you are only half correct here. While it is true that you sign a contract for one, or two years, it is also true that you can upgrade your contract anytime. For example, my girlfriend, not heeding my advice when she signed up with an ISP, originally had 56k dial-up. Well, after a long time of trying to convince her, her ISP began offering 20mbit ADSL2. All it took to upgrade the contract was a phone call. It is not as if you are locked in to the original terms of the contract--they just don't want you to change providers in that time. So, here, in Mannheim, Germany, I have 20mbps, plus unlimited phone calls nationwide. If they upgrade their service in the future, I simply upgrade the contract. Currently, that is the fastest that this ISP has to offer. The cost for this service is around $55US/month.
I agree. Amiga blew them all away. Too bad that Commodore so totally sucked at marketing:-( Ironically, the thing that did the Amiga in back then was that people believed it was a gaming computer. Today, the only thing that is keeping MS ahead is the lack of game ports to other OS's. I miss my Amiga.
I recently downloaded an installed the latest version of Ubuntu and I must say that I am thoroughly impressed with this distro. I have been using Linux since 1996 and was a huge fan of SuSE. The problem I had with SuSE, after using it for at least five years, was that the littlethings that bothered my never seemed to get fixed. On top of that, there were always packages that did not run properly.
I did try Red Hat a few years agom but for my tastes, it was not as good as SuSE was. I have since experimented with Knoppix, Debain, Fedora, and a few other distros, but could not find the one that made me really happy.
The problem is, I believe that making Linux easy to use is not something evil. Why should there not be graphical interfaces for setting up software--firewalls, webservers, database servers, etc...? Making Linux easy to use (a la, shall I sputter these words, MS Windows?) does not make it a less robust system. I use the CLI when I need to, but if I don't need to I don't want to have to.
The greatest advantage that Linux offers is choice. Do I want to run a windowing system, or do I want to use all of the computing power at my disposal and boot in to the CLI? My choice. The multitude of sfotware packages available for Linux also allow me great choice. Recompile my kernel? Again, my choice.
I find Ubuntu offers me the best of both worlds. It was very easy to set up. I was surfing the internet in about 3 seconds after setting up and I gathered a lot of useful information about Ubuntu from their support forums--some very knowledgable people there and the answers to my questions came in a matter of minutes.
Using the update system does not scare me, either. I don't feel that I have to worry about information being sent back to "mother." On Windows, I have the automatic update turned off. The updates installed seemlessly--even the kernel upgrade, which I was really too keen on doing, since the computer is running flawlessly.
I do have a slight advantage downloadign and installing packages. My ADSL2 connection provides me 20mbs download and 1mbs upload. I downloaded the distro in about 13 minutes. The updates took about 4 minutes to download and a couple of minutes for Ubuntu to automatically installt them.
I watch DVD movies (Ubuntu recognized the DVD ROM with no problems), I have Apache 2.2, PHP 5.0 and MySQL 5.0 installed (also without a hitch), along with all of the software typical of any distro. Ubuntu offers the latest software available, which is something that Debian does not, and it all works.
Ubuntu is a great Linux distro for people new to Linux. Of course, for the enterprise it is just as good as any other distro--after all, it is Linux./p>
Religious institutions have, by far, committed the most heinous war crimes in history. God-fearing people in the US have killed people who don't share their religious beliefs. I am confused, did Jesus tell them that they will walk through the pearly gates when their time comes. Is this how religious leaders (Jesus, Allah, et al) are supposed to improve the world?
In response to the second part of your post, Germany, while not banning games for being violent, does have a policy that states that you cannot see humans being mutiliated. I don't remember exactly which game, but the game manufacturers were forced to convert the graphics to represent robots getting destroyed.
It is stuipdly ironic that the US tolerates violence in the media; yet, a bare breast means the end of the world is near. In Germany, the teenie magazines run articles on sex, show nudity--sometimes of teens who are only 16 years old--, from 16 years old and onward, you are basically treated as an adult--you can legally go in to a bar and have a beer, you can have consentual sex with anyone, etc....
So, is it better for the government to allow people to amke decisions for themselves, or to try and control everything with religious right-wing rhetoric? Personally, I know whicih I prefer for myself, as well as my teenage daughters
By the way, I am an american living in Germany. If you really want to get a nice view of the direction America is headed, you need to see it from the outside looking in
Actually, by your terms the bigges object in the galaxy might be a proton. We are made of billions of atoms, yet, you would consider yourself to be an object, no? Well, there are galaxy clusters that are considered to be objects, and there are superclusters of galaxies which are considered to be larger objects. Claiming that this is an object is perfectly relevant. It happens to be composed of galaxies and plasma and other "stuff" that are bound to one another and travelling through the universe together.
Look, an event horizon is a point of no return. In the case of black holes, it has taken on a special meaning--beynod this point, nothing will ever return, not even light. Big deal. The reason that not even light can escape is because the gravitional field around the black hole is so strong that it has deformed the space surrounding it in such a way that not even light has enough energy to find its way out.
There are stars that apparently share a common orbit with black holes. There is indirect evidence of this, since you cannot see the black hole. Should the star approach the black hole to closes, i.e. enter its space, it will get ripped apart as it "falls" in to the black hole.
The sun deforms the space around it, as does the earth, or any body that has mass. Fortunately for us, the earth has a stabil orbit around the sun. If you do something to upset this balance, you will find that even the sun has an event horizon of sorts. For light, no problem--for the earth, big problem.
My comment was not meant to be an exact scientific discussion of what an event horizon is. Rather, it was simply made as and observation that the event horizon is a result of gravity interacting with the space around it--the same way that any object does.
That black holes do not, in some way, posess a magnetic field seems to be a debatable subject.
One of the articles, http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn9050/, concerns the effiency of black holes and has a representative picture of jets moving away from the black hole. The captions reads:
Jets of high-speed particles may be powered by magnetic fields and either the rotation of matter swirling around a black hole, the spin of the black hole itself, or both (Image: NASA/CXC/M Weiss).
No where does it state that a black hole is mutually exclusive of a magnetic field.
Quasars are certainly misunderstood objects. They appear to be very far away. No one can really conclude what these distances are. Strictly basing an assumption on redshifts is not, for me, conclusive.
When a star forms, there is a point before "ignition" where there appears to be nothing. We can see these globules in many photographs of nebulae. According to theory, anywhere that you see what looks to be a perfect cirlce of black is a candidate for star formation.
Now, quasars are theorized to be precursors to galaxies. Why is it not possible that we are observing the same effect on a huge scale? The matter in the center of the quasar is simply reaching the critical point and in the end we have a galaxy with a core that is burning brightly and outer arms that would be the equivalent to the planets orbiting our sun?
For a good example of what this would look like, anyone can take a look at a picture of M104-the Sombrero Galaxy. Of course, there are many other spiral galaxies that one can observe, as well. The point is, the universe is very fractal in nature. We can compare the classical view of an atom to that of the solar system. Why can we not simply extend this to a view of a galaxy?
The event horizon is something that any object with mass has, as well. Of course, not on the same scale as a black hole, yet, come to close to the sun and you are doomed. A comet slammed in to Jupiter and disappeared. It will never be seen again. Our moon is stuck to the earth. Without adding energy to the system, the moon will always be a part of the system. The event orizon of a black hole is important because light cannot ever leave the system once inside this critical boundary. That does not mean that other systems possess no event horizon.
Also, there is a lot of evidence for black holes in binary stellar systems. I don't see how these MECO's offer an alternative eplanation for events that we observe vitually in our backyard. The quasars are too far away to readily observe and coem to any conclusion (if the distances are correct).
The reason that it is so "easy" to accept the concept of a black hole is simply the fact that as the diameter of a body decreases while retaining mass, there is no choice but to have the system collapse to a singularity--given enough mass. If there is not enough "critical" mass, we end up with neutron stars, dwarves, etc.... What happens inside the black hole is anyone's guess.
I am not sureif you are kidding or not. Personally, I would not feel better about giving 15 million dollars to africa. The money is not going to solve the root problems and until those are solved, I cannot see giving my money to them.
Travelling around the world can make you a better person. Too often, people's opinions are ethnocentric based. A result of this is prejudice. You want to combat prejudice? Simply force people to live in other lands with other cultures. Not everything the church preaches to you is necessarily something good.
I would imagine it would actually be a very simple "spacewalk." The lucky person would definitely be tethered to the craft and barring any serious defect--a puncture to the suit, for example--it would not be a big deal dragging the person back in. Anyone can talk on the mike and ask for help. I would love to do this! Now, I just need to figure out how to get the cash together:-(
Care to enlighten us with your great discovery? I would have to say your physics teacher was actually a lit major who was masquerading. You've been duped.
You may, of course, sell any part of your collection. The OP. however, states that you cannot sell COPIES of your music collection. This violates copyright law. I can sell my COPY of The Da Vinci code, but not a copy of my copy of the book.
David
MS shutting down would not hurt the end user very much. There is plenty of software on the market that makes MS Windows useful. Windows, in an of itself, is technically an OS. There are replacements for all MS software--Office, compilers for programming languages, games, etc.... The really great thing about something like MS shutting down would be access to information that could benefit other OS's--file system spec's,, for example.
It is never going to happen that MS shuts down, but the dream must live on!
David
More importantly, I think, is the question, "does this mean that ask will finally be replaced with axed?" Another one that makes me cringe is changing nuclear to nucular. I guess we need to go with majority rules on this one--don't axe me no more questions about the nucular arms race:-)
david
That there are no breaks in the words when spoken is only slightly correct. There are no "hard" breaks in the words--we don't speak a word, make an obivous pause, and speak the next word. However, there are soft breaks when we move from one word to another. When we end a spoken word, we drop the pitch of the word from beginning to end. When we move from one syllable words to another word, the pitch remains high; however, we also know what the words being spoken are, in our mother tongue.
I had two years of german in college. I did very well in the course making A's and one B. I joined the army about three years after my last german course and got sent to Germany. When I got off of the plane in Frankfurt, I could read the signs; I could not, however, understand much of what was being said. It took about six months of listening to the germans and building my vocabulary for me to start becoming comfortable with the language. Now, I only get lost in the language when I travel to towns where the people speak predominantly in their "native" dialect. For me, this still sounds as if the people are speaking very quickly. Not only the vocabulary that they use, but their inunciation of words is a killer.
FWIW, when I hear people speaking, I don't realize what language they are speaking when they speak english or german. For me, it has simply become one huge language. Sometimes, I hear people speaking english and I don't even realize it.
The germans enunciate their words the same way that english speaking people do--the pitch falls off at the end of a word. The real key was increasing my vocabulary enough and improving my grammar, as well, so that I did not have to translate while listening.
BTW, if you want to know if you are getting a handle on a language, there is one huge clue--when you dream in that language. Most of my dreams these days are in german.
David
Slashdot Mirror
You have obviously never heard of the Genesis Rock. During the Apollo 15 mission, a rock was picked up by astronaut Scott, which he, by seeing it, felt that it was something special. It turned out that it was a very special rock. The point is, while robots are good at collecting samples and analyzing information, human beings are way ahead in the area of reasoning, an important trait when visiting unknown places.
I feel your pain. I am currently living in Germany and was stoked in 1999 when we were going to be treated to a total solar eclipse. In August, it is usually dry with clear skies. Of course, the days leading up to the eclipse were splendid, as were the days after the eclipse. I caught about a one second glimpse of the sun during totally :-(
David
They paid three times more in taxes than thay made in profit during the same timeframe? GWB, is that you trying to pull a fast one on us AGAIN?
David
Newton's Second Law did not undergo any changes. It was, and always will be, F=dp/dt. The problem was the Newton had no way to test a change in momentum. There were no rocket engines, for instance. Having a running horse lose mass while shitting and then comparing the results before and after would have been difficult, to say the least.
David
The core temperature has nothing to do with gravitational contraction. The actual cause is radioactive decay. If there were no atmosphere, the earth would still produce enough heat do to this effect to maintain the temperature at around -17C. Without the radiactive decay, the earth's temperature would mirror that of Mars.
David
Blue is a word used to describe how we perceive a particular wavelength. If Fred sees the sky and says that it is blue and George likewise, then they are both "seeing" the same color. To prove this, take a variety of objects of different color and have Fred and George independently describe what they are seeing. Assuming that they are not suffering from a physical deficiency, they will correctly state each time what color they are seeing and their results will match perfectly.
If I choose to name the color of they sky black, then everytime I see the color blue, I will call it black and everyone else will call it blue. It will, however, have the same wavelength, regardless of who is seeing the color. This particular wavelength has been universally called blue. Is the number one not the same for everybody, regardless of what they call it? Eins, uno, one, un, etc.... These are simply labels that we attach to the phenomenon.
David
This comparison is totally wrong. Most people today do not own their TV sets and their computers and their homes. All of these things have been but on credit, more than likely. It is much easier to get credit cards today than it was even 30 years ago. This has led to other problems; on papaer, however, people "own" more luxury items today.
Another factor is that the cost of the technology is cheaper today. People "own" two television sets because they cost as much as one did 30 years ago. More people can afford to buy tghese items than 30 years ago simply because they are less expensive--not because they are making more money today (with inflation taken in to account).
Social equity for me means that everyone who works should be able to afford to buy a house. It means that athletes are not paid enormous sums of money when the job of a fireman, policeman or teacher is infinitely more important. It means that poeple treat eachother with the same amount of respect--regardless of economic stature.
David
I have been living in Germany for 15 years now (american). The biggest gripe I have with the fee, as it stands now, is that I don't have an option. If I own a TV, or radio, I must pay, whether I use their service, or not. On top of this, the cost is exhorbitantly high when compared to the cost of cable television--which is another thing that I basically must pay for--and cable service (Premiere).
There is exactly one(!) show that I watch on the government channels, and that show is once a week, for 1/2 hour. When I listen to music, it is through Premiere--not the government endorsed channels. Basically, the money that the government collects I refer to as a privelge tax. I must pay monthly for the privelege of owning a TV and stereo system.
For what its worth, RTL is not a Germany station. It is Radio/Television Luxembourg. While the government may offer a fwe shows of any value, they are far too few to justify how much they collect in taxes every month.
As an american, I don't see the point in subsidizing bad programming. In America, the public stations rely on public support (plus some governmental cash). If you try to tell an american that he must now pay $20/month simply because he owns a television set and a stero, in order to support public channels, you will have the next civil war on your hands.
David
It is not up to the owner of the site to bar access to US citizens. If a US citizen knowingly breaks an american law, he is the one guilty. It is getting tiresome watching the "moral majority" building a police state. If I own a bar and someone drinks, drives and runs someone over, I could be guilty of manslaughter. Why? It is time that people took responsiblity for their own actions rather than blame society for their misguided lives.
If I travel to Amsterdam as an american citizen and am stoned for my entire vacation, should I be arrested upon my return because it is illegal in America to get stoned? Should dutch government officials be arrested when they enter the US because they sold drugs to americans who vacationed there?
Arresting the owner of the website is simply not legal and this case will be tossed. Then he will sue the US and win some money. AFAIK, it is NOT illegal to play poker online in the US. That decision is still pending and this is simply the government trying to strong arm others in to their way of thinking. Funny thing is, the government is supposed to represent the people. In this case, they are way off base. Polls show that the majority of people want online gambling--along with legal use of recreational drugs and other things. The government is ignoring the demands of the people.
Why? It is painfully obvious that the government is controlled by lobby groups. Okay, no great surprise there. The Native American Indians and the huge casinos are against online gambling, since this would cut in to their profits. What really hurts is the the government believes that americans are so stupid that they cannot see through the FUD. Can americans really be so ignorant?
Well, I, for one , hope not. The time has come that americans stand up for their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness without the governmen intervening. A government that condones violence should not attempt to preach what is right and wrong. Current gun laws do not work--the right to bear arms was an attempt to protect american soil against foreign invasion, not to shoot your neighbor because his dog shit in your yard. It is okay to go to sit in front of your TV and watch dozens of people get slaughtered--sometimes in extremely gruesome ways--yet, show nudity during prime time television and you have condemned everyone to hell.
They need to let this guy go, start listening to the people and work out a constructive plan to allow online gambling (if the indians and casinos want a part of the action let them build their own sites), get the troops out of Iraq (public mandate) and stop trying to control every aspect of our lives and stop spreading FUD and preying on people's fears.
David
Robots can only perform a limited set of tasks. Contrary to what you may believe, the human brain is still a much better computer than today's best computers--except for pure data crunching. The ability to think abstractly gives humans a huge advantage over robots, which are programmed to take a soil sample and run a few chemical experiments to see what the soil is made of. Controlling a robot over such great distances also limits the scope of the robot's performance. Robots can only operate a little bit at a time. You don't want to set your robot on autopilot and have to wait minutes befire you can "tell" it that it is about to enter a region that it will never make it out of. The ability for a human to act, rather than react, is a great advantage. Pathfinder, while it did return some nice pictures, was woefully inadequate for the task at hand--determine if life existed at some point in time on Mars. The only way that this will ever be achieved is by sending people.
Well, you are only half correct here. While it is true that you sign a contract for one, or two years, it is also true that you can upgrade your contract anytime. For example, my girlfriend, not heeding my advice when she signed up with an ISP, originally had 56k dial-up. Well, after a long time of trying to convince her, her ISP began offering 20mbit ADSL2. All it took to upgrade the contract was a phone call. It is not as if you are locked in to the original terms of the contract--they just don't want you to change providers in that time. So, here, in Mannheim, Germany, I have 20mbps, plus unlimited phone calls nationwide. If they upgrade their service in the future, I simply upgrade the contract. Currently, that is the fastest that this ISP has to offer. The cost for this service is around $55US/month.
David
I agree. Amiga blew them all away. Too bad that Commodore so totally sucked at marketing :-( Ironically, the thing that did the Amiga in back then was that people believed it was a gaming computer. Today, the only thing that is keeping MS ahead is the lack of game ports to other OS's. I miss my Amiga.
In Germany, the Amiga 500 was probably the most popular PC. I was surprised when I returned to the US that the Amiga was not as popular as over here.
I recently downloaded an installed the latest version of Ubuntu and I must say that I am thoroughly impressed with this distro. I have been using Linux since 1996 and was a huge fan of SuSE. The problem I had with SuSE, after using it for at least five years, was that the littlethings that bothered my never seemed to get fixed. On top of that, there were always packages that did not run properly.
I did try Red Hat a few years agom but for my tastes, it was not as good as SuSE was. I have since experimented with Knoppix, Debain, Fedora, and a few other distros, but could not find the one that made me really happy.
The problem is, I believe that making Linux easy to use is not something evil. Why should there not be graphical interfaces for setting up software--firewalls, webservers, database servers, etc...? Making Linux easy to use (a la, shall I sputter these words, MS Windows?) does not make it a less robust system. I use the CLI when I need to, but if I don't need to I don't want to have to.
The greatest advantage that Linux offers is choice. Do I want to run a windowing system, or do I want to use all of the computing power at my disposal and boot in to the CLI? My choice. The multitude of sfotware packages available for Linux also allow me great choice. Recompile my kernel? Again, my choice.
I find Ubuntu offers me the best of both worlds. It was very easy to set up. I was surfing the internet in about 3 seconds after setting up and I gathered a lot of useful information about Ubuntu from their support forums--some very knowledgable people there and the answers to my questions came in a matter of minutes.
Using the update system does not scare me, either. I don't feel that I have to worry about information being sent back to "mother." On Windows, I have the automatic update turned off. The updates installed seemlessly--even the kernel upgrade, which I was really too keen on doing, since the computer is running flawlessly.
I do have a slight advantage downloadign and installing packages. My ADSL2 connection provides me 20mbs download and 1mbs upload. I downloaded the distro in about 13 minutes. The updates took about 4 minutes to download and a couple of minutes for Ubuntu to automatically installt them.
I watch DVD movies (Ubuntu recognized the DVD ROM with no problems), I have Apache 2.2, PHP 5.0 and MySQL 5.0 installed (also without a hitch), along with all of the software typical of any distro. Ubuntu offers the latest software available, which is something that Debian does not, and it all works.
Ubuntu is a great Linux distro for people new to Linux. Of course, for the enterprise it is just as good as any other distro--after all, it is Linux./p>
Religious institutions have, by far, committed the most heinous war crimes in history. God-fearing people in the US have killed people who don't share their religious beliefs. I am confused, did Jesus tell them that they will walk through the pearly gates when their time comes. Is this how religious leaders (Jesus, Allah, et al) are supposed to improve the world?
In response to the second part of your post, Germany, while not banning games for being violent, does have a policy that states that you cannot see humans being mutiliated. I don't remember exactly which game, but the game manufacturers were forced to convert the graphics to represent robots getting destroyed.
It is stuipdly ironic that the US tolerates violence in the media; yet, a bare breast means the end of the world is near. In Germany, the teenie magazines run articles on sex, show nudity--sometimes of teens who are only 16 years old--, from 16 years old and onward, you are basically treated as an adult--you can legally go in to a bar and have a beer, you can have consentual sex with anyone, etc....
So, is it better for the government to allow people to amke decisions for themselves, or to try and control everything with religious right-wing rhetoric? Personally, I know whicih I prefer for myself, as well as my teenage daughters
By the way, I am an american living in Germany. If you really want to get a nice view of the direction America is headed, you need to see it from the outside looking in
Actually, by your terms the bigges object in the galaxy might be a proton. We are made of billions of atoms, yet, you would consider yourself to be an object, no? Well, there are galaxy clusters that are considered to be objects, and there are superclusters of galaxies which are considered to be larger objects. Claiming that this is an object is perfectly relevant. It happens to be composed of galaxies and plasma and other "stuff" that are bound to one another and travelling through the universe together.
Look, an event horizon is a point of no return. In the case of black holes, it has taken on a special meaning--beynod this point, nothing will ever return, not even light. Big deal. The reason that not even light can escape is because the gravitional field around the black hole is so strong that it has deformed the space surrounding it in such a way that not even light has enough energy to find its way out.
There are stars that apparently share a common orbit with black holes. There is indirect evidence of this, since you cannot see the black hole. Should the star approach the black hole to closes, i.e. enter its space, it will get ripped apart as it "falls" in to the black hole.
The sun deforms the space around it, as does the earth, or any body that has mass. Fortunately for us, the earth has a stabil orbit around the sun. If you do something to upset this balance, you will find that even the sun has an event horizon of sorts. For light, no problem--for the earth, big problem.
My comment was not meant to be an exact scientific discussion of what an event horizon is. Rather, it was simply made as and observation that the event horizon is a result of gravity interacting with the space around it--the same way that any object does.
That black holes do not, in some way, posess a magnetic field seems to be a debatable subject.
One of the articles, http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn9050/, concerns the effiency of black holes and has a representative picture of jets moving away from the black hole. The captions reads:
No where does it state that a black hole is mutually exclusive of a magnetic field.Quasars are certainly misunderstood objects. They appear to be very far away. No one can really conclude what these distances are. Strictly basing an assumption on redshifts is not, for me, conclusive.
When a star forms, there is a point before "ignition" where there appears to be nothing. We can see these globules in many photographs of nebulae. According to theory, anywhere that you see what looks to be a perfect cirlce of black is a candidate for star formation.
Now, quasars are theorized to be precursors to galaxies. Why is it not possible that we are observing the same effect on a huge scale? The matter in the center of the quasar is simply reaching the critical point and in the end we have a galaxy with a core that is burning brightly and outer arms that would be the equivalent to the planets orbiting our sun?
For a good example of what this would look like, anyone can take a look at a picture of M104-the Sombrero Galaxy. Of course, there are many other spiral galaxies that one can observe, as well. The point is, the universe is very fractal in nature. We can compare the classical view of an atom to that of the solar system. Why can we not simply extend this to a view of a galaxy?
The event horizon is something that any object with mass has, as well. Of course, not on the same scale as a black hole, yet, come to close to the sun and you are doomed. A comet slammed in to Jupiter and disappeared. It will never be seen again. Our moon is stuck to the earth. Without adding energy to the system, the moon will always be a part of the system. The event orizon of a black hole is important because light cannot ever leave the system once inside this critical boundary. That does not mean that other systems possess no event horizon.
Also, there is a lot of evidence for black holes in binary stellar systems. I don't see how these MECO's offer an alternative eplanation for events that we observe vitually in our backyard. The quasars are too far away to readily observe and coem to any conclusion (if the distances are correct).
The reason that it is so "easy" to accept the concept of a black hole is simply the fact that as the diameter of a body decreases while retaining mass, there is no choice but to have the system collapse to a singularity--given enough mass. If there is not enough "critical" mass, we end up with neutron stars, dwarves, etc.... What happens inside the black hole is anyone's guess.
DavidI am not sureif you are kidding or not. Personally, I would not feel better about giving 15 million dollars to africa. The money is not going to solve the root problems and until those are solved, I cannot see giving my money to them. Travelling around the world can make you a better person. Too often, people's opinions are ethnocentric based. A result of this is prejudice. You want to combat prejudice? Simply force people to live in other lands with other cultures. Not everything the church preaches to you is necessarily something good.
I would imagine it would actually be a very simple "spacewalk." The lucky person would definitely be tethered to the craft and barring any serious defect--a puncture to the suit, for example--it would not be a big deal dragging the person back in. Anyone can talk on the mike and ask for help. I would love to do this! Now, I just need to figure out how to get the cash together :-(
Care to enlighten us with your great discovery? I would have to say your physics teacher was actually a lit major who was masquerading. You've been duped.
You may, of course, sell any part of your collection. The OP. however, states that you cannot sell COPIES of your music collection. This violates copyright law. I can sell my COPY of The Da Vinci code, but not a copy of my copy of the book. David
MS shutting down would not hurt the end user very much. There is plenty of software on the market that makes MS Windows useful. Windows, in an of itself, is technically an OS. There are replacements for all MS software--Office, compilers for programming languages, games, etc.... The really great thing about something like MS shutting down would be access to information that could benefit other OS's--file system spec's,, for example. It is never going to happen that MS shuts down, but the dream must live on! David
More importantly, I think, is the question, "does this mean that ask will finally be replaced with axed?" Another one that makes me cringe is changing nuclear to nucular. I guess we need to go with majority rules on this one--don't axe me no more questions about the nucular arms race :-)
david
That there are no breaks in the words when spoken is only slightly correct. There are no "hard" breaks in the words--we don't speak a word, make an obivous pause, and speak the next word. However, there are soft breaks when we move from one word to another. When we end a spoken word, we drop the pitch of the word from beginning to end. When we move from one syllable words to another word, the pitch remains high; however, we also know what the words being spoken are, in our mother tongue. I had two years of german in college. I did very well in the course making A's and one B. I joined the army about three years after my last german course and got sent to Germany. When I got off of the plane in Frankfurt, I could read the signs; I could not, however, understand much of what was being said. It took about six months of listening to the germans and building my vocabulary for me to start becoming comfortable with the language. Now, I only get lost in the language when I travel to towns where the people speak predominantly in their "native" dialect. For me, this still sounds as if the people are speaking very quickly. Not only the vocabulary that they use, but their inunciation of words is a killer. FWIW, when I hear people speaking, I don't realize what language they are speaking when they speak english or german. For me, it has simply become one huge language. Sometimes, I hear people speaking english and I don't even realize it. The germans enunciate their words the same way that english speaking people do--the pitch falls off at the end of a word. The real key was increasing my vocabulary enough and improving my grammar, as well, so that I did not have to translate while listening. BTW, if you want to know if you are getting a handle on a language, there is one huge clue--when you dream in that language. Most of my dreams these days are in german. David