An addendum to my previous post. Evolutionary theory does not predict:
progression from less to more complex organisms, commonality of microscopic biological features between species, observed changes of organisms These are common misconceptions. However, evolutionary theory does predict that genes with a higher selectivity against mutations will be more similar between species than genes with a lower selectivity, and this is in fact what we see. Your tRNA synthatase genes (an important gene which, if mutated, would almost certainly be lethal) are almost identical to that of yeast. On the other hand your proteases (less important because they exist within a redundant system) are much less well conserved.
Speaking as a geneticist, evolution as it applies to modern genetics is characterized by the change in allele frequency in a population over time. It can be observed and tested rather easily by creating a population (usually of flys or mice or some other model system) with a particular allele frequency for a gene. Evolutionary theory makes predictions as to how that populations will change over time given certain environmental conditions (ie a particular fitness and heritability attached to different gene states, with these terms being used in their rigid genetic sense rather than their more common use definitions). This very simple setup has been tested in the lab numerous times. More complicated setups (describing organisims with more complicated mating structures) have also been tested, but are too complicated to describe here. Further, models developed through these lab tests can be taken into the wild and used to predict the change a particular gene locus in natural populations (though it is more difficult, less controlled setting and more variables).
Ok, just to toss this out there, but, why do you need a theory that links gravity into the standard model when there is, as of yet, no known force that actually effects gravity. There's no battery operated anti-gravity machine, so, why unify something that isn't? Because if we don't have a theory, how will we design an experiment that tests for a force that effects gravity? Shooting in the dark only get's you so far.
I've had a lot of problems with impress. Writer and Calc are great, but Impress is really suitable only for basic presentations. Animations are difficult and buggy. Multimedia and applet support are almost nonexistent. And don't get me started on compatibility issues, especially between NeoOffice and powerpoint. Whenever I had to export my presentation to a ppt and use Office on another computer (often), I had to spend half and hour fixing formating errors before my presentations. Same thing opening files created with powerpoint in Impress. A year ago I switched to Keynote and haven't looked back. Worth every penny.
I'm not an expert in power transmission, but if I recall correctly any transmission method capable of punching through our atmosphere would have to be relatively inert with respect to actual human beings. Probably radio or low frequency microwaves. You could probably fry a city's electronics with it, but actually harming people would be difficult.
Google and the NYT are allowed to have different policies about what they do and don't allow in their adds. As long as their policies are internally consistent, what difference does it make? And does anyone know whether or not Petraeus asked that his name not be used? Has he ever made any statements to that effect?
Allow me to be the first to say: I would be totally cool with google yanking that add if Microsoft complained. Google is allowed to make their own trademark and content policies, and as long as they follow them consistently I have no problem with this.
Depends on whether you are using American or British rank. While what you said is true (and possibly taken straight out of Heinlein's "Starship Troopers") A commodore is anyone who commands more than one ship, but not a whole fleet. It was a popular rank in the 1800's British navy before communications allowed one man to actually command a fleet during combat. Also, after WWI and WWII both the American and British fleets had become glutted with more admirals than a peacetime navy could really support, so many of the rear admirals were recommissioned as "commodores" and quietly retired.
Yeah, I guess I'm not an old timer but I started following slashdot in probably 2002. Didn't register until something like 2005 when I finally realized that if I wanted anyone to take my comments seriously I needed to not post AC.
First you have to look at the carbon used to make the biofuels - some will be used for fertiliser, tractors, transport, etc. Biodiesel production is cheap, easy, spontaneous, and produces no harmful waste. If your starting source is lipids from algae (as GP was talking about) then you need no fertilizer or tractors. And to be honest, you're transporting fuel. Transport isn't carbon input, it just decreases the net yield a bit because you use some of the fuel to transport the rest.
Also if you are using plant matter that currently is being left to rot back into to the soil, (as proposed) then you are burning carbon that would otherwise be sequestrated - and stripping the soil of natural nutrients - and so on. Plant matter that rots back into the soil releases it's carbon into the aptmosphere through the rotting process. It actually takes very special circumstances (peat bogs and whatnot) to sequester the carbon long term. And what was proposed was not using plant matter, but algae. Algae do not live in the soil and do not strip it of nutrients.
You also need to use water resources which are increasingly scarce, and land which can be used for food - again world food demand is on the increase. Again, none of these things really apply to biodiesal from algae. Why does everyone trot out these arguments that apply only to corn and soy and act as if they apply broadly to all biofuels?
From what I have seen of the maths so far, biofuels only capture a few percent of Solar power net, so there is simply not enough spare arable land in the world to make enough fuel - especially as countries like India and China ramp up demand for cars. There is still plenty of sunny unused desert for Solar, or offshore sites for Wind, not to mention Tidal, Wave, etc.. Just use the power in its original Photon->Electron form, and bypass Carbon & Hydrogen altogether.. Because the infrastructure for using biofuels is already in place. It would take almost 20-40 years to replace the vehicle fleet already in place with electric cars. We need a solution that we can start to apply today. Also, all the energy sources you mention (wind, tidal, wave, etc) are ultimately driven by solar power. For the most part they are less efficient converters of solar energy into human usable forms than biofuels. Current solar panels are expensive, fragile, toxic to manufacture (they release arsenic and heavy metals into ground water), and not much more efficient than biofuels. Algae for the most part take care of their own production and upkeep and are environmentally friendly.
Did every single contributer to Samba over the years each stipulate that they have signed off on relicensing their work? Actually, yes. I think. Samba is a GNU project and doesn't the GNU have a policy of not accepting code unless the copyright for the code is donated to the FSF?
It's not rocket science, it's law. Rocket science makes sense. I've read some contracts and unless you understand legalese you're doing good to understand maybe 30% of what you're committing to.
it looks good but..
imagine yourself at a presentation in front of your bosses and network dies or google returns an error "oops our server made a booboo"
that would be fairly embarrassing/
Right, because that never happens using microsoft products. They are so stable that they never go down during big meetings.
Well, in America you have a right not to testify against yourself. They can't put you on the stand in your own trial. Of course, if you're stupid enough to take the stand voluntarily...
Re:Back when people could actually code..
on
DOS 5 Upgrade Video
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We programed in ones and in zeros! And sometimes we ran out of ones! I wrote a perfectly good program using nothing but zeros. And we were glad of it!
Back when Fortran was not even Onetran...
If I buy an empty field, do I get to complain how much it'd cost to build my 160 bedroom mansion on it? Dammit, I demand someone build me a mansion for a dollar a room! Do you think the construction company building your mansion is hiring American citizens and paying a fair market wage? Of course not. They're hiring illegals and screwing them over. This is capitalism, you only have to obey the law when someone's watching. Theft is just another word for good business practices
Gods, I've been with Mandriva since it was Mandrake 8.0. It's still the best distro out there, with the possible exception of ubuntu. Mandriva makes linux painless. It is the anti-slackware.
Admit it, wine sucks and there are lots of programs that will never be ported. I want wine to be integrated and almost invisible, like the Classic interface in OSX.
If you have a fast processor with lots of RAM this is true. But firefox starts hideously slow on an older system and is a memory hog. It all probably depends on your system configuration.
I objected to your characterization of scientists as anti-social hermits incapable of explaining things to a general audience. I continue to do so. Your average scientist has quite a bit of experience doing this and many have gotten passably good at it. I've taken a look at the site and "reality tv" is not the term I would use to describe it. Similarly, describing the NSF and the editors of PLOS as "a couple of "Scientists"" is demeaning. You make it sound like this is something a couple of undergrads cooked up in their basement.
And just FYI, the submission to publication time for the PLOS journals (the only ones currently allowed to be used in the SciVee system) is relatively short (weeks to months) because there is no paper version of the journal.
arXiv is not peer reviewed and is not a valid comparison. I could spit on a napkin and publish it in arXiv. PLOS is a real journal. PLOS Biology is widely read and has an impact factor similar to PNAS and Nature: Biotechnology.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a geneticist, evolution as it applies to modern genetics is characterized by the change in allele frequency in a population over time. It can be observed and tested rather easily by creating a population (usually of flys or mice or some other model system) with a particular allele frequency for a gene. Evolutionary theory makes predictions as to how that populations will change over time given certain environmental conditions (ie a particular fitness and heritability attached to different gene states, with these terms being used in their rigid genetic sense rather than their more common use definitions). This very simple setup has been tested in the lab numerous times. More complicated setups (describing organisims with more complicated mating structures) have also been tested, but are too complicated to describe here. Further, models developed through these lab tests can be taken into the wild and used to predict the change a particular gene locus in natural populations (though it is more difficult, less controlled setting and more variables).
In the OS market? No, it's accurate. In the search engine market google is a major, though not quite monopolistic, player.
I've had a lot of problems with impress. Writer and Calc are great, but Impress is really suitable only for basic presentations. Animations are difficult and buggy. Multimedia and applet support are almost nonexistent. And don't get me started on compatibility issues, especially between NeoOffice and powerpoint. Whenever I had to export my presentation to a ppt and use Office on another computer (often), I had to spend half and hour fixing formating errors before my presentations. Same thing opening files created with powerpoint in Impress. A year ago I switched to Keynote and haven't looked back. Worth every penny.
I'm not an expert in power transmission, but if I recall correctly any transmission method capable of punching through our atmosphere would have to be relatively inert with respect to actual human beings. Probably radio or low frequency microwaves. You could probably fry a city's electronics with it, but actually harming people would be difficult.
Google and the NYT are allowed to have different policies about what they do and don't allow in their adds. As long as their policies are internally consistent, what difference does it make? And does anyone know whether or not Petraeus asked that his name not be used? Has he ever made any statements to that effect?
Allow me to be the first to say: I would be totally cool with google yanking that add if Microsoft complained. Google is allowed to make their own trademark and content policies, and as long as they follow them consistently I have no problem with this.
Depends on whether you are using American or British rank. While what you said is true (and possibly taken straight out of Heinlein's "Starship Troopers") A commodore is anyone who commands more than one ship, but not a whole fleet. It was a popular rank in the 1800's British navy before communications allowed one man to actually command a fleet during combat. Also, after WWI and WWII both the American and British fleets had become glutted with more admirals than a peacetime navy could really support, so many of the rear admirals were recommissioned as "commodores" and quietly retired.
Yeah, I guess I'm not an old timer but I started following slashdot in probably 2002. Didn't register until something like 2005 when I finally realized that if I wanted anyone to take my comments seriously I needed to not post AC.
I'm at ASU and I haven't heard of any collaborations involving this. If it's true they're keeping it under tight wrap.
It's not rocket science, it's law. Rocket science makes sense. I've read some contracts and unless you understand legalese you're doing good to understand maybe 30% of what you're committing to.
Err... Zonk didn't mention the Nazis or the gestapo in his description. I don't see how he's responsible for how people choose to tag it.
Well, in America you have a right not to testify against yourself. They can't put you on the stand in your own trial. Of course, if you're stupid enough to take the stand voluntarily...
We programed in ones and in zeros! And sometimes we ran out of ones! I wrote a perfectly good program using nothing but zeros. And we were glad of it! Back when Fortran was not even Onetran...
Bah, if you want boat free go LISP. You can't beat a language that was originally specified in 1958 for efficiency.
Gods, I've been with Mandriva since it was Mandrake 8.0. It's still the best distro out there, with the possible exception of ubuntu. Mandriva makes linux painless. It is the anti-slackware.
Admit it, wine sucks and there are lots of programs that will never be ported. I want wine to be integrated and almost invisible, like the Classic interface in OSX.
If you have a fast processor with lots of RAM this is true. But firefox starts hideously slow on an older system and is a memory hog. It all probably depends on your system configuration.
I objected to your characterization of scientists as anti-social hermits incapable of explaining things to a general audience. I continue to do so. Your average scientist has quite a bit of experience doing this and many have gotten passably good at it. I've taken a look at the site and "reality tv" is not the term I would use to describe it. Similarly, describing the NSF and the editors of PLOS as "a couple of "Scientists"" is demeaning. You make it sound like this is something a couple of undergrads cooked up in their basement. And just FYI, the submission to publication time for the PLOS journals (the only ones currently allowed to be used in the SciVee system) is relatively short (weeks to months) because there is no paper version of the journal. arXiv is not peer reviewed and is not a valid comparison. I could spit on a napkin and publish it in arXiv. PLOS is a real journal. PLOS Biology is widely read and has an impact factor similar to PNAS and Nature: Biotechnology.
PLOS One accepts articles from any field. Plus, it's in alpha testing. They'll get some physical science journals certified eventually.