Using some fairly basic math, it's pretty easy to show that a species only marginally more advanced than ourselves could easily colonize the entire galaxy in 5-10 million years. That's all sub-light travel and provides a hundred years or so for each colony to develop the necessary technologies and industries to send out further colonies. 5 million years is NOTHING in terms of how long our galaxy has been around.
Obviously this would only apply to adventurous, explorative type species like ourselves, but it's a fairly obvious thing to do for any species capable of doing it and wishing to avoid becoming extinct because of a natural (or self-made) disaster.
Now, given the incredibly short period of time required to colonize the entire galaxy, probability says, the one that arrives at that technological level first. Now, it's possible some species has already done it and hidden themselves from view, in which case, it's unlikely we'll find them anytime in any of our lifetimes. The other possibility is that we're that species and nothing else in our galaxy has come close, so the only other potential we'd have to find other species is in other galaxies which is way too distant for any sort of communication to be viable. I mean, we might be able to detect an incredibly powerful transmission, but the reply time would be so incredibly long no sort of conversation could happen (unless, of course, we figure out a faster than light travel and/or communications method).
My point being, I don't think we'll find anything in our galaxy. I'm afraid we're very likely alone. But that doesn't mean searching is a bad idea. I was wrong once before.
Everyone keeps on with the bridge building metaphors as if software development/engineering is actually engineering. It isn't. We're not engineers. Software hasn't been around long enough to be engineering, it's barely a science and largely an art. That's the problem right there in a nutshell.
There are really a number of related issues, but when it comes down to it, it's not engineering. How much code will it take to do XYZ? I don't know. I can guess and give a rough estimate. How much cement and how much steel will it take to build bridge ABC? A good bridge engineer could tell you with a great deal of accuracy without building the bridge first.
Software Engineering is such a bad name for it. Knuth had it right in the early days: The Art of Computer Programming.
Corn flakes are a "potential" cure for cancer. This stuff hasn't even been tested on mice. We can already cure cancer in mice 1000 times over. Curing cancer in people is a COMPLETELY different thing. There are a gazillion "potential" cures for cancer and have been for decades now. Please save the big headlines for when something actually works on people...
Where are the numbers? How much heat does it dissipate? Everything is vague: "it can cool modern cpus" okay, well, I can run a modern CPU at 100MHZ if I want and then it won't require any cooling. An article like this without any specifics is hardly Slashdot material. This is regular news material, if that.
What scares me about this is that in a few years, they'll probably declare prion-free, genetically engineered cattle safe to eat, and then 20 years from now half the population is going to develop something worse than CJD. I'm fine with them doing this stuff for research, but I don't like the idea that we're feeding livestock genetically engineered food because the next step is going to be feeding people genetically engineered food. Our understanding of biochemistry is still so full of holes and we're so short-sighted, we end up killing ourselves and our planet without proper forethought and consideration.
When I was in high school, a rat got into the house. My cousin, a neighbor and I had it pinned behind a piece of furniture. I was beating it from above with a broom handle, my neighbor was wacking it from underneath with a shovel and my cousin was hitting it from the side with something else. I thought the damn thing would never die. SCO reminds me of that rat.
The article is short and for the most part is discussing physiological problems. These are covered, as someone else mentioned, by an insanity defense.
I'm a strong believer that people have free will, at least to a large degree. There are compulsions that some or all of us have, but we also know (at least the majority do), the difference between right and wrong. We choose to do the right thing or the wrong thing. That's free will. I would like to have a lot of money, but I choose not to rob a bank. Others choose to rob banks. That's a simple matter of free will.
Robbing a bank isn't just an issue I pulled out of thin air. I have a relative who has once been convicted of theft and once for armed robbery of a bank. He has "mental issues", there's no doubt. He has, his whole life. And the family tends to forgive him his behavior because of this. That said, he's not mentally retarded. He has a fairly high IQ, actually. He knows the difference between right and wrong and he knew the difference when he chose to do these things. There's no doubt in my mind. Because of that, I'm one of the few in the family who doesn't forgive his behavior. He has a son who has had a father in prison most of his life and there's no telling what effect that's had on his son, and for that, I don't forgive him.
So this is an issue hits pretty close to home for me. There are exceptions. People do have illnesses that can be treated and some that can't be treated, and the insanity defense was created for these people.
It's tough to say where you draw the line, but you have to. Serial killers, with very few exceptions, where abused as children and more often than not, sexually abused as children. So does that qualify as an insanity defense? I'm not really qualified to say, but should society be protected from these people? Without a doubt! Serial killers aren't curable, at least not currently. Even if it were determined they're not responsible for their actions, society still needs to protect itself by placing them under maximum possible security.
But I think there's very little question that free will is alive and well. With a few exceptions, people choose to do good or bad.
we have some serious problems going on right here at home that need tending first.
If the economy was in the condition it was before Bush went into office, I might be for something like this, but at the moment, we're sinking into debt up to our noses and the last thing we need to do is spend a fortune going back to the moon. We ought to get a little fiscal responsibility in place first. I know these things take years to work out, and had Clinton pushed it, I would have been all for it because I would have thought, "How could this enormous surplus possibly be squandered so quickly?" And yet, Bush pulled it off in record time.
I do think, however, if you take the economics out of it, that a moon colony is a much better next step than another orbital station, for various reasons, not least of which is, a station just isn't really a step forward. It's a step sideways. We need to move forward and we need to take grander steps. There will be failures (and sadly, some will probably cost lives), but it's the steps forward that make the big impact on the public and help build further support for the program.
The public was excited early in the Apollo program. They wanted to see us go to the moon and they watched it every step of the way. But then we just kept going back, picking up a few rocks and coming back (this is from a public perception point of view), and quickly support diminished. When NASA isn't moving forward, they don't get support, and people simply won't support another station, especially after the disaster that ISS has been from a PR point of view. It's been a money pit and as far as the public is concerned, it's not much more, fascination-wise, than a big, expensive Skylab.
Funny you should mentioned that. Over the summer, I took a chemistry class and found out that hydrochloric acid will react with zinc and not copper. So I took a penny, made a small cut in the side of it, and dropped it in hydrochloric acid. Pennies are zinc with a thin film of copper on top. After a couple of days of bubbling away (it was a tiny hole), I was left with a hollow penny that I crushed with the tweezers trying to recover.
Glad I did that before this law was passed. Otherwise they woulda called me an enemy combatant and shipped me off to Guantanamo.
There's a been a lot of good advice posted. I learned a lot on my own about programming, but I didn't really learn software engineering until I worked with people on cool projects who knew a lot more than I did. Then I really learned how to write the big applications. How to write modular code, how to do good testing. The whole lifecycle process. And it took several jobs with different approaches, but eventually, I developed the way I write software and it works for me.
My first job was a suck-ass boring job too. I wrote simple, boring apps for Army logistics. My second job was a little more interesting and as time went on, the jobs got progressively more interesting and eventually I ended up working with really amazing programmers. In fact, two of the guy that were my mentors about 11 years ago, I'm working with again now. One of them I brought in to a company I worked at about 6 years ago, and then about 2 1/2 years ago, they both hired me to work for the company they were at. One has gone management (and manages the current project), but he still has his chops and they're both still teaching me stuff. And I'd like to think from time to time, I teach them a thing or two.
If you want to really get better at programming, try to find mentors like that, and if you do, consider yourself very lucky. It's hard to find jobs with the really bright ones because they're usually looking for the really bright ones to work with themselves. You'll have to cut your teeth on some of the crap projects for a while and build up your resume, but if you want it, you'll find it.
Though it doesn't specify, it's highly unlikely that albumin or porphyrin is used up in the reaction. Instead, it likely cleaves the water molecules (the substrate). Not quite physically tearing it apart, but that probably isn't an entirely inaccurate description either. Many proteins perform functions like this on other molecules. They'll attach to part of the substrate and remove, say an -OH hydroxyl group, or some other piece of the molecule. This is how liver enzymes breaks down certain drugs so that the byproducts (called metabolites) can be removed from the blood by the kidneys. As someone else mentioned catalase from yeast, it works in a similar way and removes an oxygen molecule off of hydrogen peroxide, leaving water and oxygen, but the catalase isn't "used up" in the process.
That said, proteins don't usually last forever and how long they last largely depends on how hostile their environment is, and what constitutes a hostile environment for a protein varies from protein to protein.
To you and the others that responded: I said, "a 10-fold increase". Can I get some increase? Yes. Do I spend 100% of my time coding? No, but I spend about 90% of my work-time coding or testing. I'm a contractor. I'm contracted to write code. I don't do meetings I don't spend time dealing with customers. I write code. That's what I'm paid to do.
"If I was all noble and I made a movie I genuinely felt people needed to see to save the earth, wouldn't I just give it to PBS on day 1?"
Did it occur to you that: A, PBS doesn't exactly have the biggest audience of all the networks. Second of all, the people that generally watch PBS are probably educated enough to have a pretty good idea that Global Warming is for real and that man is causing it.
So, let's assume for the moment, that the target audience isn't the people who already know this stuff, but perhaps the people that don't. So, putting it in the theater will help give it a wider audience than it might otherwise get on PBS.
And you're bitching about this not being noble, but they're trying to GIVE AWAY tens of thousands of copies to schools FOR FREE and the schools won't take them.
Look, you say what you want, but Gore truly cares about this issue. He spent about 20 years of his life in congress and the senate doing everything he could to bring it to peoples attention. This has been his #1 issue for just about his entire career. Show me anyone in politics who's tried to do something more noble!
Sure, for most people, productivity isn't going to increase 10-fold. Hell, as a software engineer, I can't imagine getting 10 times as much stuff done in the same period of time anytime soon. Faster computers wont' help and about the only thing that would speed up my productivity as a programmer is software that would write the code for me, putting me out of a job.
There are a lot of people working in the sciences who think differently, though. Chemists, biologists, physicists, could all do well with, not just smarter programs, but faster computers. As a couple of simple examples: Molecular mechanics modeling for chemists and protein folding modeling for biologist (particularly the latter, and both are related), are insanely computationally intensive and if computers were able to provide the results in 1/10th or 1/100th of the time, it would make a big difference in their ability to get things done. So I think it kind of depends what you do. I mean, let's face it, if you're a secretary, a faster word processor isn't going to make you 10 times more productive. Maybe a faster copier would help...
I have two types of passwords: The ones for fluff sites, like Slashdot, Wikipedia, hotmail (a.k.a. Spam box), and so forth, which usually get 1 of 2 passwords. Then for banks and credit cards and what have you, I use real passwords with different ones for each site.
I could care less if someone hacks my Slashdot account or my wikipedia account. The worst thing they can do is vandalize under my name. And as for hotmail, they can have my spam. And were I to have a myspace account, I could care less if someone got that too.
Fortunately, my bank and credit card companies don't allow others to create their own pages, so I'm not too concerned. I suspect this will get fixed long before it becomes a concern for me.
It works like this: According to a 1998 survey of scientists by the science publication Nature, roughly 95% of scientists believe in evolution. But in the U.S., according to a study by Jon Miller at the University of Michigan, around 60% (and other reports say closer to 75%) of Americans don't believe in evolution.
To be a scientists, you need to believe in the scientific method. Otherwise you simply can't be a scientist. Science is based on it. If you can't believe in evolution, then you're flatly rejecting science. That's the point.
I'm not saying don't believe in God. Personally, I don't see how the two are incompatible at all. If we want to create a country of scientists and engineers, then we need to start by convincing them that science is real and not based on faith and evolution is the center of it right now.
But since he thinks the problem is that "there are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets", surely the long-term solution is to adjust your training and education regime so that there are enough such engineers?
Step 1: Educate the 70+% of the population that don't believe in evolution that it's more or less fact and that ID is NOT science. You can't educate a population of scientists and engineers if you can't get them to believe in the most fundamental aspects of science. But when your country is run by soemone who, let's face it, ain't no rocket scientists, and probably doesn't believe in evolution himself, you're pretty much on the downhill stretch. Until we can get the government to separate church and state and church and science, we're pretty much screwed. Meanwhile, the Indians, who don't seem to have problems reconciling religion and science are taking over the IT world. Good for them! At least they have some common sense.
Their "success" in the voting sector is selling more ATMs to bank chains such as 5th/3rd.
Ah, this is the bank that keeps e-mailing me asking me to update my account information. I keep updating the info, but my money keeps disappearing. They're not a very good bank.
So basically what you are saying is that middle class people who vote Republican are stupid and that middle class people who vote Democrat are smart. It is particularly interesting that you respond to a post describing over-generalizations by making an even larger one.
If you equate education with intelligence, and I'm not implying the two things are the same, you will find that populations with better education tend to vote Democrat. Go figure.
The way to break it down is to look at states in terms of per-capita graduate degrees and per capita undergraduate degrees. If I remember correctly, of the top 15 states in per-capita graduate degrees category, only 2 voted Republican in the last presidential election. The trend was very similar for undergraduate degrees as well. This trend has held of for a few decades, though it varies a bit here and there. I'm not positive, but I think the 2 states that Bush got that were in the top 15 on education were Colorado and Virginia. Interestingly, the bottom 15 states all voted Republican.
I collected the education data from the 2000 Census Datasets for a paper I wrote after the last election. I admit, I did steal the idea. Someone passed around something like it on the internet after the election. I don't recall if it was accurate or not, but it was what gave me the idea for the paper in the first place.
Make the decision yourself. If I were with one of the companies that made you the offer and knew you made this post, I'd probably rescind the offer. I'd want an employee who's confident enough to make his/her own decisions about where he/she wants to work.
Choosing a job is a personal choice and I'd NEVER consult a bunch of anonymous people I don't know for advice. You're the one that has to live with the consequences of the choice. "Should I take a job where I'd be happy or should I take a job with lots of money?" Figure out which is most important to you and make the decision.
First of all, they don't know why it has the extra fins. Could be a mutation. It could simply be problems during fetal development. Dolphins have hind fins as fetuses and then they're "removed" before birth, much like human fetuses have webbed fingers before birth, but the webbing is removed. It could simply be that the the removal of the fins didn't happen much as, some children are born with webbed fingers.
Rare? Sure. Newsworthy? I'm not so sure. There are more animals than people and birth defects aren't that uncommon among people, so do the math. I suspect there are quite a few more dolphins out there with extra sets of fins. Our exposure has been to a very small percentage of the dolphin population, however.
You see, it's a generational gap. You need to explain things to your parents in terms they can understand. Explain that leaving your home computer logged in is like allowing the Soviets (don't worry, they'll know who the Soviets are) to put missiles in Cuba.
Then explain to them that you're kind of like Joseph McCarthy and you're just trying to protect them. I think that'll get them to pay proper attention to your important message of salvation.
tells why modern industrialized agricultural methods, including factory farming, antibiotics misuse, and the use of animal refuse as a food source (!) for chickens and other livestock, have led to a staggering increase in the number of 'zoonotic' diseases
Staggering increase? Due to modern industrialized agricultural methods?
The fact is, pandemics have increased in the past couple hundred years because people are able to travel further, faster. That's the only reason pandemic are relatively modern. Epidemics of diseases, including influenza epidemics have been happening since the first influenza viruses evolved into existence.
Most of the deadlier influenza epidemics and pandemics both modern and going back, at least, hundreds of years in history, were the result of animal to human crossover. And the only reason this isn't confirmed further back is likely as lack of samples with which we can test with modern technology (we do have samples of some of the viruses from epidemics and pandemics of the past few hundred years, preserved in various ways, sometimes by accident.)
This isn't a result of modern agricultural methods. It's the result of the ease with which say, an avian flu, can genetically mix with a human based flu, when a person contracts both at the same time, providing the deadlier avian version of the flu with a method to easily spread from human to human.
I in no way want to downplay the danger that H5N1 or future flu viruses may pose. But the fact is, this is simply normal and has been normal for at least hundreds of years. Very deadly strains of flu rear their ugly heads every few decades. Ease of travel has simply made it more likely to turn them into pandemics instead of localized epidemics.
the article is likely to change before anyone goes back to check the references.
Okay, I hate to state the obvious, but have you heard of printers? -CLICK- Hardcopy. Isn't going to change. Granted, if you cite Wikipedia a lot, your appendix might be thicker than the work itself, but c'est la vie.
I don't cite Wikipedia for papers, but I often use it and sometimes go to the sources it cites. It does have a phenomenal amount of good information. And if I found a compelling enough reason to cite Wikipedia, I'd certainly print the article and add it to the appendix of my paper.
That said, maybe a versioning system on Wikipedia wouldn't be such a bad idea, such that you could cite the article and version and someone could go to the page and put in a version number to retrieve the specific version. That might alleviate some of the issues with citations.
Slashdot Mirror
Using some fairly basic math, it's pretty easy to show that a species only marginally more advanced than ourselves could easily colonize the entire galaxy in 5-10 million years. That's all sub-light travel and provides a hundred years or so for each colony to develop the necessary technologies and industries to send out further colonies. 5 million years is NOTHING in terms of how long our galaxy has been around.
Obviously this would only apply to adventurous, explorative type species like ourselves, but it's a fairly obvious thing to do for any species capable of doing it and wishing to avoid becoming extinct because of a natural (or self-made) disaster.
Now, given the incredibly short period of time required to colonize the entire galaxy, probability says, the one that arrives at that technological level first. Now, it's possible some species has already done it and hidden themselves from view, in which case, it's unlikely we'll find them anytime in any of our lifetimes. The other possibility is that we're that species and nothing else in our galaxy has come close, so the only other potential we'd have to find other species is in other galaxies which is way too distant for any sort of communication to be viable. I mean, we might be able to detect an incredibly powerful transmission, but the reply time would be so incredibly long no sort of conversation could happen (unless, of course, we figure out a faster than light travel and/or communications method).
My point being, I don't think we'll find anything in our galaxy. I'm afraid we're very likely alone. But that doesn't mean searching is a bad idea. I was wrong once before.
Everyone keeps on with the bridge building metaphors as if software development/engineering is actually engineering. It isn't. We're not engineers. Software hasn't been around long enough to be engineering, it's barely a science and largely an art. That's the problem right there in a nutshell.
There are really a number of related issues, but when it comes down to it, it's not engineering. How much code will it take to do XYZ? I don't know. I can guess and give a rough estimate. How much cement and how much steel will it take to build bridge ABC? A good bridge engineer could tell you with a great deal of accuracy without building the bridge first.
Software Engineering is such a bad name for it. Knuth had it right in the early days: The Art of Computer Programming.
Corn flakes are a "potential" cure for cancer. This stuff hasn't even been tested on mice. We can already cure cancer in mice 1000 times over. Curing cancer in people is a COMPLETELY different thing. There are a gazillion "potential" cures for cancer and have been for decades now. Please save the big headlines for when something actually works on people...
Where are the numbers? How much heat does it dissipate? Everything is vague: "it can cool modern cpus" okay, well, I can run a modern CPU at 100MHZ if I want and then it won't require any cooling. An article like this without any specifics is hardly Slashdot material. This is regular news material, if that.
What scares me about this is that in a few years, they'll probably declare prion-free, genetically engineered cattle safe to eat, and then 20 years from now half the population is going to develop something worse than CJD. I'm fine with them doing this stuff for research, but I don't like the idea that we're feeding livestock genetically engineered food because the next step is going to be feeding people genetically engineered food. Our understanding of biochemistry is still so full of holes and we're so short-sighted, we end up killing ourselves and our planet without proper forethought and consideration.
Fortunately, I'm not from Qatar, so I CAN edit wikipedia. Give me a few minutes and Qatar WILL be part of the UAE.
When I was in high school, a rat got into the house. My cousin, a neighbor and I had it pinned behind a piece of furniture. I was beating it from above with a broom handle, my neighbor was wacking it from underneath with a shovel and my cousin was hitting it from the side with something else. I thought the damn thing would never die. SCO reminds me of that rat.
The article is short and for the most part is discussing physiological problems. These are covered, as someone else mentioned, by an insanity defense.
I'm a strong believer that people have free will, at least to a large degree. There are compulsions that some or all of us have, but we also know (at least the majority do), the difference between right and wrong. We choose to do the right thing or the wrong thing. That's free will. I would like to have a lot of money, but I choose not to rob a bank. Others choose to rob banks. That's a simple matter of free will.
Robbing a bank isn't just an issue I pulled out of thin air. I have a relative who has once been convicted of theft and once for armed robbery of a bank. He has "mental issues", there's no doubt. He has, his whole life. And the family tends to forgive him his behavior because of this. That said, he's not mentally retarded. He has a fairly high IQ, actually. He knows the difference between right and wrong and he knew the difference when he chose to do these things. There's no doubt in my mind. Because of that, I'm one of the few in the family who doesn't forgive his behavior. He has a son who has had a father in prison most of his life and there's no telling what effect that's had on his son, and for that, I don't forgive him.
So this is an issue hits pretty close to home for me. There are exceptions. People do have illnesses that can be treated and some that can't be treated, and the insanity defense was created for these people.
It's tough to say where you draw the line, but you have to. Serial killers, with very few exceptions, where abused as children and more often than not, sexually abused as children. So does that qualify as an insanity defense? I'm not really qualified to say, but should society be protected from these people? Without a doubt! Serial killers aren't curable, at least not currently. Even if it were determined they're not responsible for their actions, society still needs to protect itself by placing them under maximum possible security.
But I think there's very little question that free will is alive and well. With a few exceptions, people choose to do good or bad.
we have some serious problems going on right here at home that need tending first.
If the economy was in the condition it was before Bush went into office, I might be for something like this, but at the moment, we're sinking into debt up to our noses and the last thing we need to do is spend a fortune going back to the moon. We ought to get a little fiscal responsibility in place first. I know these things take years to work out, and had Clinton pushed it, I would have been all for it because I would have thought, "How could this enormous surplus possibly be squandered so quickly?" And yet, Bush pulled it off in record time.
I do think, however, if you take the economics out of it, that a moon colony is a much better next step than another orbital station, for various reasons, not least of which is, a station just isn't really a step forward. It's a step sideways. We need to move forward and we need to take grander steps. There will be failures (and sadly, some will probably cost lives), but it's the steps forward that make the big impact on the public and help build further support for the program.
The public was excited early in the Apollo program. They wanted to see us go to the moon and they watched it every step of the way. But then we just kept going back, picking up a few rocks and coming back (this is from a public perception point of view), and quickly support diminished. When NASA isn't moving forward, they don't get support, and people simply won't support another station, especially after the disaster that ISS has been from a PR point of view. It's been a money pit and as far as the public is concerned, it's not much more, fascination-wise, than a big, expensive Skylab.
dissolving a penny in acid isn't.
Funny you should mentioned that. Over the summer, I took a chemistry class and found out that hydrochloric acid will react with zinc and not copper. So I took a penny, made a small cut in the side of it, and dropped it in hydrochloric acid. Pennies are zinc with a thin film of copper on top. After a couple of days of bubbling away (it was a tiny hole), I was left with a hollow penny that I crushed with the tweezers trying to recover.
Glad I did that before this law was passed. Otherwise they woulda called me an enemy combatant and shipped me off to Guantanamo.
There's a been a lot of good advice posted. I learned a lot on my own about programming, but I didn't really learn software engineering until I worked with people on cool projects who knew a lot more than I did. Then I really learned how to write the big applications. How to write modular code, how to do good testing. The whole lifecycle process. And it took several jobs with different approaches, but eventually, I developed the way I write software and it works for me.
My first job was a suck-ass boring job too. I wrote simple, boring apps for Army logistics. My second job was a little more interesting and as time went on, the jobs got progressively more interesting and eventually I ended up working with really amazing programmers. In fact, two of the guy that were my mentors about 11 years ago, I'm working with again now. One of them I brought in to a company I worked at about 6 years ago, and then about 2 1/2 years ago, they both hired me to work for the company they were at. One has gone management (and manages the current project), but he still has his chops and they're both still teaching me stuff. And I'd like to think from time to time, I teach them a thing or two.
If you want to really get better at programming, try to find mentors like that, and if you do, consider yourself very lucky. It's hard to find jobs with the really bright ones because they're usually looking for the really bright ones to work with themselves. You'll have to cut your teeth on some of the crap projects for a while and build up your resume, but if you want it, you'll find it.
Though it doesn't specify, it's highly unlikely that albumin or porphyrin is used up in the reaction. Instead, it likely cleaves the water molecules (the substrate). Not quite physically tearing it apart, but that probably isn't an entirely inaccurate description either. Many proteins perform functions like this on other molecules. They'll attach to part of the substrate and remove, say an -OH hydroxyl group, or some other piece of the molecule. This is how liver enzymes breaks down certain drugs so that the byproducts (called metabolites) can be removed from the blood by the kidneys. As someone else mentioned catalase from yeast, it works in a similar way and removes an oxygen molecule off of hydrogen peroxide, leaving water and oxygen, but the catalase isn't "used up" in the process.
That said, proteins don't usually last forever and how long they last largely depends on how hostile their environment is, and what constitutes a hostile environment for a protein varies from protein to protein.
To you and the others that responded: I said, "a 10-fold increase". Can I get some increase? Yes. Do I spend 100% of my time coding? No, but I spend about 90% of my work-time coding or testing. I'm a contractor. I'm contracted to write code. I don't do meetings I don't spend time dealing with customers. I write code. That's what I'm paid to do.
"If I was all noble and I made a movie I genuinely felt people needed to see to save the earth, wouldn't I just give it to PBS on day 1?"
Did it occur to you that: A, PBS doesn't exactly have the biggest audience of all the networks. Second of all, the people that generally watch PBS are probably educated enough to have a pretty good idea that Global Warming is for real and that man is causing it.
So, let's assume for the moment, that the target audience isn't the people who already know this stuff, but perhaps the people that don't. So, putting it in the theater will help give it a wider audience than it might otherwise get on PBS.
And you're bitching about this not being noble, but they're trying to GIVE AWAY tens of thousands of copies to schools FOR FREE and the schools won't take them.
Look, you say what you want, but Gore truly cares about this issue. He spent about 20 years of his life in congress and the senate doing everything he could to bring it to peoples attention. This has been his #1 issue for just about his entire career. Show me anyone in politics who's tried to do something more noble!
Sure, for most people, productivity isn't going to increase 10-fold. Hell, as a software engineer, I can't imagine getting 10 times as much stuff done in the same period of time anytime soon. Faster computers wont' help and about the only thing that would speed up my productivity as a programmer is software that would write the code for me, putting me out of a job.
There are a lot of people working in the sciences who think differently, though. Chemists, biologists, physicists, could all do well with, not just smarter programs, but faster computers. As a couple of simple examples: Molecular mechanics modeling for chemists and protein folding modeling for biologist (particularly the latter, and both are related), are insanely computationally intensive and if computers were able to provide the results in 1/10th or 1/100th of the time, it would make a big difference in their ability to get things done. So I think it kind of depends what you do. I mean, let's face it, if you're a secretary, a faster word processor isn't going to make you 10 times more productive. Maybe a faster copier would help...
I have two types of passwords: The ones for fluff sites, like Slashdot, Wikipedia, hotmail (a.k.a. Spam box), and so forth, which usually get 1 of 2 passwords. Then for banks and credit cards and what have you, I use real passwords with different ones for each site.
I could care less if someone hacks my Slashdot account or my wikipedia account. The worst thing they can do is vandalize under my name. And as for hotmail, they can have my spam. And were I to have a myspace account, I could care less if someone got that too.
Fortunately, my bank and credit card companies don't allow others to create their own pages, so I'm not too concerned. I suspect this will get fixed long before it becomes a concern for me.
It works like this: According to a 1998 survey of scientists by the science publication Nature, roughly 95% of scientists believe in evolution. But in the U.S., according to a study by Jon Miller at the University of Michigan, around 60% (and other reports say closer to 75%) of Americans don't believe in evolution.
To be a scientists, you need to believe in the scientific method. Otherwise you simply can't be a scientist. Science is based on it. If you can't believe in evolution, then you're flatly rejecting science. That's the point.
I'm not saying don't believe in God. Personally, I don't see how the two are incompatible at all. If we want to create a country of scientists and engineers, then we need to start by convincing them that science is real and not based on faith and evolution is the center of it right now.
But since he thinks the problem is that "there are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets", surely the long-term solution is to adjust your training and education regime so that there are enough such engineers?
Step 1: Educate the 70+% of the population that don't believe in evolution that it's more or less fact and that ID is NOT science. You can't educate a population of scientists and engineers if you can't get them to believe in the most fundamental aspects of science. But when your country is run by soemone who, let's face it, ain't no rocket scientists, and probably doesn't believe in evolution himself, you're pretty much on the downhill stretch. Until we can get the government to separate church and state and church and science, we're pretty much screwed. Meanwhile, the Indians, who don't seem to have problems reconciling religion and science are taking over the IT world. Good for them! At least they have some common sense.
Their "success" in the voting sector is selling more ATMs to bank chains such as 5th/3rd.
Ah, this is the bank that keeps e-mailing me asking me to update my account information. I keep updating the info, but my money keeps disappearing. They're not a very good bank.
So basically what you are saying is that middle class people who vote Republican are stupid and that middle class people who vote Democrat are smart. It is particularly interesting that you respond to a post describing over-generalizations by making an even larger one.
If you equate education with intelligence, and I'm not implying the two things are the same, you will find that populations with better education tend to vote Democrat. Go figure.
The way to break it down is to look at states in terms of per-capita graduate degrees and per capita undergraduate degrees. If I remember correctly, of the top 15 states in per-capita graduate degrees category, only 2 voted Republican in the last presidential election. The trend was very similar for undergraduate degrees as well. This trend has held of for a few decades, though it varies a bit here and there. I'm not positive, but I think the 2 states that Bush got that were in the top 15 on education were Colorado and Virginia. Interestingly, the bottom 15 states all voted Republican.
I collected the education data from the 2000 Census Datasets for a paper I wrote after the last election. I admit, I did steal the idea. Someone passed around something like it on the internet after the election. I don't recall if it was accurate or not, but it was what gave me the idea for the paper in the first place.
Make the decision yourself. If I were with one of the companies that made you the offer and knew you made this post, I'd probably rescind the offer. I'd want an employee who's confident enough to make his/her own decisions about where he/she wants to work.
Choosing a job is a personal choice and I'd NEVER consult a bunch of anonymous people I don't know for advice. You're the one that has to live with the consequences of the choice. "Should I take a job where I'd be happy or should I take a job with lots of money?" Figure out which is most important to you and make the decision.
First of all, they don't know why it has the extra fins. Could be a mutation. It could simply be problems during fetal development. Dolphins have hind fins as fetuses and then they're "removed" before birth, much like human fetuses have webbed fingers before birth, but the webbing is removed. It could simply be that the the removal of the fins didn't happen much as, some children are born with webbed fingers.
Rare? Sure. Newsworthy? I'm not so sure. There are more animals than people and birth defects aren't that uncommon among people, so do the math. I suspect there are quite a few more dolphins out there with extra sets of fins. Our exposure has been to a very small percentage of the dolphin population, however.
You see, it's a generational gap. You need to explain things to your parents in terms they can understand. Explain that leaving your home computer logged in is like allowing the Soviets (don't worry, they'll know who the Soviets are) to put missiles in Cuba.
Then explain to them that you're kind of like Joseph McCarthy and you're just trying to protect them. I think that'll get them to pay proper attention to your important message of salvation.
tells why modern industrialized agricultural methods, including factory farming, antibiotics misuse, and the use of animal refuse as a food source (!) for chickens and other livestock, have led to a staggering increase in the number of 'zoonotic' diseases
Staggering increase? Due to modern industrialized agricultural methods?
The fact is, pandemics have increased in the past couple hundred years because people are able to travel further, faster. That's the only reason pandemic are relatively modern. Epidemics of diseases, including influenza epidemics have been happening since the first influenza viruses evolved into existence.
Most of the deadlier influenza epidemics and pandemics both modern and going back, at least, hundreds of years in history, were the result of animal to human crossover. And the only reason this isn't confirmed further back is likely as lack of samples with which we can test with modern technology (we do have samples of some of the viruses from epidemics and pandemics of the past few hundred years, preserved in various ways, sometimes by accident.)
This isn't a result of modern agricultural methods. It's the result of the ease with which say, an avian flu, can genetically mix with a human based flu, when a person contracts both at the same time, providing the deadlier avian version of the flu with a method to easily spread from human to human.
I in no way want to downplay the danger that H5N1 or future flu viruses may pose. But the fact is, this is simply normal and has been normal for at least hundreds of years. Very deadly strains of flu rear their ugly heads every few decades. Ease of travel has simply made it more likely to turn them into pandemics instead of localized epidemics.
the article is likely to change before anyone goes back to check the references.
Okay, I hate to state the obvious, but have you heard of printers? -CLICK- Hardcopy. Isn't going to change. Granted, if you cite Wikipedia a lot, your appendix might be thicker than the work itself, but c'est la vie.
I don't cite Wikipedia for papers, but I often use it and sometimes go to the sources it cites. It does have a phenomenal amount of good information. And if I found a compelling enough reason to cite Wikipedia, I'd certainly print the article and add it to the appendix of my paper.
That said, maybe a versioning system on Wikipedia wouldn't be such a bad idea, such that you could cite the article and version and someone could go to the page and put in a version number to retrieve the specific version. That might alleviate some of the issues with citations.