PBS routinely shows HD programming. For example, the New Hour with Jim Lehrer is broadcast in 1080i (also, some of the newer nature documentaries are being filmed in HD also). I occasionally look at the analog broadcast just to compare, and let me tell you, the news never looked so good!
Re:Didn't you learn this in Geochemistry?
on
Evolving Rocks
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· Score: 1
Yes, that the dominant minerals and rocks that form have changed over geological time has been long known. The difference is the emphasis that the Earth's biological ecosystem affects the mineralogy and rock types that form, and the rocks that form have an influence on later biological organisms. For example, soil overlying limestone makes more fertile farmland for us to grow crops and support a wider range of biological organisms. Yet, that limestone couldn't have formed without other earlier biological organisms evolving the ability to make calcium carbonate exoskeletons. It's not a breakthrough in the sense of a new experiment done or something like, although they did some of those to examine the early earth's mineralogy and found something like just twelve minerals, whereas today we have 4300. It's more a recognition that biology and geology are irrevocably intertwined, and as biology has evolved, so has the geology changed.
Re:No its worse than that
on
Evolving Rocks
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· Score: 0
If you bother to RTFA, they say that the earth's mineralogy and crustal composition has changed and is affected by biology. That is, things like the banded iron formations in Michigan (our dominant deposit of iron) could only form because the atmosphere became rich in oxygen suddenly (in geologic terms) after the evolution of photosynthetic organisms. In TFA, they also point out that limestone couldn't be created without marine organisms evolving the ability to create calcium carbonate exoskeletons e.g., coral reefs, phytoplankton, shells, etc. It's no misstatement or weasel words to say that the earth's mineralogy has been evolving over time, you all are just being willfully ignorant.
Nah, it'd probably be alright as long as you had paying attention to it and taking care of it. The animal would learn social behaviors from its keepers, the same way that dogs and cats learn behavior from each other and humans when they're brought into a social situation at a young age, only it's a little bit stranger.
Well, I think I can safely speak for all mac fans when I say...Arrr! Run up the Jolly Roger! If these lilly-livered landlubbers think they can saddle me with DRM laden crap, I'll get me multi-media from other sources besides iTunes.
I agree, that was not a very representative comment. To combat this, here's some more anecdotal evidence of my own to pile-on: I also work at a university doing research. I buy windows machines, I buy mac os x machines and I buy linux machines. I pick the operating system best suited to the task for which the computer will be used. If I have to buy a computer for a specific purpose, e.g., an instrument driver that uses some software that only runs on windows, I buy a windows machine or I run a VM, or I run an application server. There's a huge number of options for what you want to use and I have never yet actually run into a research person who is running windows through boot camp on their mac on a regular basis. Never.
So do you defend Ted Stevens because people make fun of him about the tubes comments? Or how about when John Kerry was swift-boated? Do you base your opinions and tastes completely on who is being smeared? I'm just trying to point out that sometimes one man's smear campaign is another man's campaign that points out important facts.
Apple has a serious issue here, ~90% of the world runs windows. There's no way they would ever make a dent in windows market share without actually pointing out to people who are using windows how Apple's operating system differs from Microsoft's. So, they do this is in a funny way that's gotten a lot of attention. Maybe they go over the top, but I can't think of anyone who actually says, "Well the PC guy on the Mac commercial said Vista does so-and-so, so I'm not going to buy Vista." Do they? Would Windows get a good reputation if not for the Apple commercials? I doubt it.
It's news because it's not every day that we get to be party to these discussions. We're only finding out because of a law suit. As a linux/mac fanboy, I would be just as interested if not more so if we got the read the same discussions about Steve Jobs and Co. discussing how they were going to beat windows, and I read about the GNU and linux guru discussions about this subject when they make the front page of slashdot. (See, linux is open source, so the discussions are easier to access.:) ) So it's news, I'm interested in it.
Also, there's a sense, at least to many on slashdot, that Microsoft owes its position not to good software, but to its monopoly status. Thus, if the MS execs are concerned about the competition, it means maybe the end of the windows domination is that much closer.
Hahahaha, I'm sorry, I just had to laugh at your portrayal of Microsoft as an innocent victim. Okay, we can debate about the merits of smear campaigns and if the apple ads are a smear campaign, although I find them funny (but I use linux when I have a choice, then macs, and if I have no choice I use windows). But let's forget about all that and think about who you're defending! They're a convicted monopolist. How many times in just the last decade have we sat on slashdot and read about the various e-mails because Microsoft it's in court yet again on charges of "not playing fair"? At least two. Apple is not perfect, they've done their share of dumb anti-competitive stuff (and they seem to be getting worse), but they've got a ways to go until they reach the level of Microsoft corruption and dirty tricks.
And it is possible that Poppa Bush was in the same vein, just not caught.
Go read about what Lee Atwater did to Dukakis in the 1988 election (link). I saw a frontline special about him the other day and absolutely astounded me how long these "Rove-like"* tactics have been used and have worked.
*I say Rove-like, but since Nixon the Republicans have been using similar strategies. Maybe people just haven't caught on until now?
The parent is right, and in defense of the great-grand-parent, the democratic and republicans parties are not the same ones right now as they were in the 1964.
On signing the CRA, Johnson is said to have remarked, "There goes the south for a generation." As the parent said, most of the dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond defected to the Republican side after this. The notable exception was Byrd, who repented his racism, but the majority of his electorate apparently did not. Up until 2008, if you looked at the electoral map, the south voted republican. The reason for this is that republicans became adept at playing on fears of southern whites, pioneered by Nixon in his "the southern strategy" (I'm not making this shit up, it's right there in the first sentence of the wiki). I say up until 2008, because this year majorities in Virginia and North Carolina voted democratic.
Nice troll there, but hey your account name does say PC fanboy so I suppose it's to be expected. Have you even used a Mac outside of the apple store?
I use OS X and Windows at work on a day to day basis, and I use Linux at home or if I don't need a gui (e.g. on a computing cluster). I can run every program I run in linux on my mac, including kde or e17, using the X11 server app. I can also natively run MS office and other desktop applications natively. I've used cygwin in windows, it's cool and all but you're relegated to a subdirectory for all your work there. I've also run MS office under wine in linux, but wine in general is a hit or miss proposition, maybe the app will work, maybe not. I can honestly say that OS X is a good middle ground between windows and linux. It's not perfect by any stretch, but neither is linux and windows.
It's not just construction materials. The population of Rome (the city) at its height was ~1 million (around 0 CE IIRC). After Rome, no other city equaled that until London in 1800!
Oh, come one...like that's ever stopped Microsoft or Apple from releasing an OS. Case in points: Windows Vista, OS X Leopard. Both of these had serious issues on launch, to put it mildly. The only difference is that with Debian, we can look up what the bugs are because Debian is honest. Anyway, if Debian fixed all those bugs, then they'd never release anything -- look at what those bugs are, most of them are in packages in debian, which relies on the package maintainer to fix them, which might take awhile.
Yeah no shit, I thought making the end get further away was normally called "raising the level cap in the new expansion". Hello and welcome back to the valley of the grind...
The grandparent is correct, I was mistaken and there is only one sequel to Jurassic Park, I got confused with the movies. Yet, I stand by my point that a) Lost World sucked and b) Crichton was a hack.
You talk about it being neat that studying the behavior of dinosaurs is nearly pointless because of these dinosaurs had no mothers to learn from. Do you know what how much "nature vs. nuture" was in dinosaurs, i.e., genetic vs. learned behavior? Considering we don't even know how much is even in humans, talking about it being pointless to study recreated dinosaurs for their behavior is itself pointless. If we were to do recreate dinosaurs and study them, it would be just about as good a guess as studying the long dead bones of dinosaurs to get clues about behavior, which is precisely what we do right now because we have nothing else (mostly we just infer anatomy, but sometimes we get some ideas about behavior). Writing that book, he forgot that he's supposed to be entertaining us, not getting on a soap-box about his paranoid beliefs about science.
Anyway, this is all fine until you start applying this clever, but incorrect logic to the real world instead of your private science fiction --it's called pseudoscience and the U.S. is rife with it. For State of Fear, my opinion of Crichton was only lowered a little bit when he testified, it was already low because of Lost World. I was more annoyed at Inhof and the members of congress and the administration about their denial about the possibility of climate change at first, then their stonewalling to keep from doing anything about it.
As for Crichton being a hack, let's put it this way, if I read a Jack London novel, even a not so good one, it's still pretty entertaining. If I read a lesser known Hemingway or Steinbeck I am still entertained. I was not entertained by Lost World, and I was not entertained by him again putting those idiot children in those books, and I was not entertained in the least by Westworld because I had seen that movie before, the same way that Lost World was sorry and predictable. From reading this thread, some people are entertained by his other novels, so maybe I'm wrong and he is a good author, but I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Jurassic Park won't make it into any school reading lists the way H.G. Wells stuff does or George Orwell, or some other science fiction by truly great authors.
Once, when I was younger I had great respect for Crichton. I read Jurassic Park in high school and was so amazed by it I had my mother arrange for me to go talk to a paleontologist about what was right and wrong in the book. Most of it was wrong, rather not at all probable, but the journey of discovering why it was wrong was fascinating. I also saw a talk by the T-Rex expert after who the paleontologist in the book was modeled. Those experiences along with one or two other things led me to become a geology major and 15 years later I'm still at it.
However, there were three points where I lost a massive amount of respect for Crichton. The first was when I saw the movie westworld on an airplane once, for which he wrote the screenplay. It's the exact same plot as Jurassic Park, only substitute dinosaurs with robots. Exact same plot. The second and third books after Jurassic Park were so bad that I don't think I even finished them, that's the second point, it was obvious he was writing books to get made into Spielberg movies.
The third was when he wrote State of Fear and testified before congress. I never read the book, but just to watch the kind of anti-intellectuals like Inhof invite a science fiction author to be regarded as an expect on climate change. Focusing on whether the consensus view is necessarily correct or not has nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing and the likely probability that humans are causing it completely or contributing to it.
While I have very fond memories of how cool it was to read Jurassic Park the first time (way way before Spielberg got his dirty little paws on it), my opinion is that the guy was a hack, a very very clever one, but a hack nonetheless. He won't be remembered as one of the "great authors", in my opinion.
The worst part about these kind of snipes is that two moderators considered this "insightful". Does this comment contain any insight? No, it's just a statement of preference. Where's the "agree/disagree" mods? Here's a test:
I would take Joe Biden over "Malibu Stacey" Sarah Palin any day of the week.
Let's see if that gets modded up, even though it contains just as much insight as the parent.
Get the picture? These are all NASA robots with legs. Just because they haven't used one yet doesn't mean they aren't looking at them.
Re:blah the emporer has his new clothes on again.
on
The Walking House
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· Score: 1
Jah, legs are good for traversing terrain that is uneven, e.g., NASA looks hard at walking robots for their extra-planetary adventures. So wheels are OK as long as you have roads or a relatively flat surface. Maybe someone in the U.S. is far too accustomed to lots of pavement and a sedentary lifestyle that might be lacking in less developed areas?
I dunno, I looked at the other pictures and it seemed kind of neat. I'm not sure I'd want to live in it permanently because their water storage solution seems a little ad hoc but the idea is interesting. I'd also like to know what the fuel economy on it is.
I really miss the richness in story telling that textual information gives and customizability that plain text offers. For example, I loved the complex puzzles on the quests in my favorite MUD -- it's difficult to get that kind of sophistication on a gui MMORPG where you are limited to whatever 3D models are available and what kinds of actions your characters can do. I used to DM on an NWN server which had a huge amount of community content, but it was a pain in the neck to get the administrators to add or change content. One admin also tried at one point using more text contextual clues about what's going on, e.g., "a strong breeze stars blowing" due to a change in weather, etc., but it made the server lag so much it was dropped. Overall I felt it was pretty confining in terms of story-telling ability as a DM. Far too many quests are find a monster and kill it and not enough flexibility in what you could do, it's much easier to just type something than code the 3D action.
Besides that, MUDs had all the drama of a graphical RPG: guild wars, cruel DMs, rampant PKers, it was great! I spent countless hours in college on lostsouls. I can remember three of us would go to the library to use the computer lab there so we all could play at the same time and talk to each other IRL while we were playing. This is in the days when only the university had broadband internet, the rest of us were on 2400 baud modems. Actually, lostsouls is still up, and in fact there's a DM posting there who was there when I played there, and making improvements, I think I'll go make a character.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, you can tell from the number of typos in that post I haven't had my coffee yet.
PBS routinely shows HD programming. For example, the New Hour with Jim Lehrer is broadcast in 1080i (also, some of the newer nature documentaries are being filmed in HD also). I occasionally look at the analog broadcast just to compare, and let me tell you, the news never looked so good!
Yes, that the dominant minerals and rocks that form have changed over geological time has been long known. The difference is the emphasis that the Earth's biological ecosystem affects the mineralogy and rock types that form, and the rocks that form have an influence on later biological organisms. For example, soil overlying limestone makes more fertile farmland for us to grow crops and support a wider range of biological organisms. Yet, that limestone couldn't have formed without other earlier biological organisms evolving the ability to make calcium carbonate exoskeletons. It's not a breakthrough in the sense of a new experiment done or something like, although they did some of those to examine the early earth's mineralogy and found something like just twelve minerals, whereas today we have 4300. It's more a recognition that biology and geology are irrevocably intertwined, and as biology has evolved, so has the geology changed.
If you bother to RTFA, they say that the earth's mineralogy and crustal composition has changed and is affected by biology. That is, things like the banded iron formations in Michigan (our dominant deposit of iron) could only form because the atmosphere became rich in oxygen suddenly (in geologic terms) after the evolution of photosynthetic organisms. In TFA, they also point out that limestone couldn't be created without marine organisms evolving the ability to create calcium carbonate exoskeletons e.g., coral reefs, phytoplankton, shells, etc. It's no misstatement or weasel words to say that the earth's mineralogy has been evolving over time, you all are just being willfully ignorant.
Nah, it'd probably be alright as long as you had paying attention to it and taking care of it. The animal would learn social behaviors from its keepers, the same way that dogs and cats learn behavior from each other and humans when they're brought into a social situation at a young age, only it's a little bit stranger.
Well, I think I can safely speak for all mac fans when I say...Arrr! Run up the Jolly Roger! If these lilly-livered landlubbers think they can saddle me with DRM laden crap, I'll get me multi-media from other sources besides iTunes.
I agree, that was not a very representative comment. To combat this, here's some more anecdotal evidence of my own to pile-on: I also work at a university doing research. I buy windows machines, I buy mac os x machines and I buy linux machines. I pick the operating system best suited to the task for which the computer will be used. If I have to buy a computer for a specific purpose, e.g., an instrument driver that uses some software that only runs on windows, I buy a windows machine or I run a VM, or I run an application server. There's a huge number of options for what you want to use and I have never yet actually run into a research person who is running windows through boot camp on their mac on a regular basis. Never.
So do you defend Ted Stevens because people make fun of him about the tubes comments? Or how about when John Kerry was swift-boated? Do you base your opinions and tastes completely on who is being smeared? I'm just trying to point out that sometimes one man's smear campaign is another man's campaign that points out important facts.
Apple has a serious issue here, ~90% of the world runs windows. There's no way they would ever make a dent in windows market share without actually pointing out to people who are using windows how Apple's operating system differs from Microsoft's. So, they do this is in a funny way that's gotten a lot of attention. Maybe they go over the top, but I can't think of anyone who actually says, "Well the PC guy on the Mac commercial said Vista does so-and-so, so I'm not going to buy Vista." Do they? Would Windows get a good reputation if not for the Apple commercials? I doubt it.
It's news because it's not every day that we get to be party to these discussions. We're only finding out because of a law suit. As a linux/mac fanboy, I would be just as interested if not more so if we got the read the same discussions about Steve Jobs and Co. discussing how they were going to beat windows, and I read about the GNU and linux guru discussions about this subject when they make the front page of slashdot. (See, linux is open source, so the discussions are easier to access. :) ) So it's news, I'm interested in it.
Also, there's a sense, at least to many on slashdot, that Microsoft owes its position not to good software, but to its monopoly status. Thus, if the MS execs are concerned about the competition, it means maybe the end of the windows domination is that much closer.
Hahahaha, I'm sorry, I just had to laugh at your portrayal of Microsoft as an innocent victim. Okay, we can debate about the merits of smear campaigns and if the apple ads are a smear campaign, although I find them funny (but I use linux when I have a choice, then macs, and if I have no choice I use windows). But let's forget about all that and think about who you're defending! They're a convicted monopolist. How many times in just the last decade have we sat on slashdot and read about the various e-mails because Microsoft it's in court yet again on charges of "not playing fair"? At least two. Apple is not perfect, they've done their share of dumb anti-competitive stuff (and they seem to be getting worse), but they've got a ways to go until they reach the level of Microsoft corruption and dirty tricks.
Go read about what Lee Atwater did to Dukakis in the 1988 election (link). I saw a frontline special about him the other day and absolutely astounded me how long these "Rove-like"* tactics have been used and have worked. *I say Rove-like, but since Nixon the Republicans have been using similar strategies. Maybe people just haven't caught on until now?
The parent is right, and in defense of the great-grand-parent, the democratic and republicans parties are not the same ones right now as they were in the 1964.
On signing the CRA, Johnson is said to have remarked, "There goes the south for a generation." As the parent said, most of the dixiecrats like Strom Thurmond defected to the Republican side after this. The notable exception was Byrd, who repented his racism, but the majority of his electorate apparently did not. Up until 2008, if you looked at the electoral map, the south voted republican. The reason for this is that republicans became adept at playing on fears of southern whites, pioneered by Nixon in his "the southern strategy" (I'm not making this shit up, it's right there in the first sentence of the wiki). I say up until 2008, because this year majorities in Virginia and North Carolina voted democratic.
That does help, thank you. At your rightly surmised, it's been awhile since I used cygwin.
Nice troll there, but hey your account name does say PC fanboy so I suppose it's to be expected. Have you even used a Mac outside of the apple store?
I use OS X and Windows at work on a day to day basis, and I use Linux at home or if I don't need a gui (e.g. on a computing cluster). I can run every program I run in linux on my mac, including kde or e17, using the X11 server app. I can also natively run MS office and other desktop applications natively. I've used cygwin in windows, it's cool and all but you're relegated to a subdirectory for all your work there. I've also run MS office under wine in linux, but wine in general is a hit or miss proposition, maybe the app will work, maybe not. I can honestly say that OS X is a good middle ground between windows and linux. It's not perfect by any stretch, but neither is linux and windows.
It's not just construction materials. The population of Rome (the city) at its height was ~1 million (around 0 CE IIRC). After Rome, no other city equaled that until London in 1800!
...I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "I drank what?"
Oh, come one...like that's ever stopped Microsoft or Apple from releasing an OS. Case in points: Windows Vista, OS X Leopard. Both of these had serious issues on launch, to put it mildly. The only difference is that with Debian, we can look up what the bugs are because Debian is honest. Anyway, if Debian fixed all those bugs, then they'd never release anything -- look at what those bugs are, most of them are in packages in debian, which relies on the package maintainer to fix them, which might take awhile.
Yeah no shit, I thought making the end get further away was normally called "raising the level cap in the new expansion". Hello and welcome back to the valley of the grind...
The grandparent is correct, I was mistaken and there is only one sequel to Jurassic Park, I got confused with the movies. Yet, I stand by my point that a) Lost World sucked and b) Crichton was a hack.
You talk about it being neat that studying the behavior of dinosaurs is nearly pointless because of these dinosaurs had no mothers to learn from. Do you know what how much "nature vs. nuture" was in dinosaurs, i.e., genetic vs. learned behavior? Considering we don't even know how much is even in humans, talking about it being pointless to study recreated dinosaurs for their behavior is itself pointless. If we were to do recreate dinosaurs and study them, it would be just about as good a guess as studying the long dead bones of dinosaurs to get clues about behavior, which is precisely what we do right now because we have nothing else (mostly we just infer anatomy, but sometimes we get some ideas about behavior). Writing that book, he forgot that he's supposed to be entertaining us, not getting on a soap-box about his paranoid beliefs about science.
Anyway, this is all fine until you start applying this clever, but incorrect logic to the real world instead of your private science fiction --it's called pseudoscience and the U.S. is rife with it. For State of Fear, my opinion of Crichton was only lowered a little bit when he testified, it was already low because of Lost World. I was more annoyed at Inhof and the members of congress and the administration about their denial about the possibility of climate change at first, then their stonewalling to keep from doing anything about it.
As for Crichton being a hack, let's put it this way, if I read a Jack London novel, even a not so good one, it's still pretty entertaining. If I read a lesser known Hemingway or Steinbeck I am still entertained. I was not entertained by Lost World, and I was not entertained by him again putting those idiot children in those books, and I was not entertained in the least by Westworld because I had seen that movie before, the same way that Lost World was sorry and predictable. From reading this thread, some people are entertained by his other novels, so maybe I'm wrong and he is a good author, but I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Jurassic Park won't make it into any school reading lists the way H.G. Wells stuff does or George Orwell, or some other science fiction by truly great authors.
Once, when I was younger I had great respect for Crichton. I read Jurassic Park in high school and was so amazed by it I had my mother arrange for me to go talk to a paleontologist about what was right and wrong in the book. Most of it was wrong, rather not at all probable, but the journey of discovering why it was wrong was fascinating. I also saw a talk by the T-Rex expert after who the paleontologist in the book was modeled. Those experiences along with one or two other things led me to become a geology major and 15 years later I'm still at it.
However, there were three points where I lost a massive amount of respect for Crichton. The first was when I saw the movie westworld on an airplane once, for which he wrote the screenplay. It's the exact same plot as Jurassic Park, only substitute dinosaurs with robots. Exact same plot. The second and third books after Jurassic Park were so bad that I don't think I even finished them, that's the second point, it was obvious he was writing books to get made into Spielberg movies.
The third was when he wrote State of Fear and testified before congress. I never read the book, but just to watch the kind of anti-intellectuals like Inhof invite a science fiction author to be regarded as an expect on climate change. Focusing on whether the consensus view is necessarily correct or not has nothing to do with the irrefutable evidence that the climate is changing and the likely probability that humans are causing it completely or contributing to it.
While I have very fond memories of how cool it was to read Jurassic Park the first time (way way before Spielberg got his dirty little paws on it), my opinion is that the guy was a hack, a very very clever one, but a hack nonetheless. He won't be remembered as one of the "great authors", in my opinion.
The worst part about these kind of snipes is that two moderators considered this "insightful". Does this comment contain any insight? No, it's just a statement of preference. Where's the "agree/disagree" mods? Here's a test:
I would take Joe Biden over "Malibu Stacey" Sarah Palin any day of the week.
Let's see if that gets modded up, even though it contains just as much insight as the parent.
Look again. The rapid rise in debt started in 2001, after Bush took office. The thick black line is only showing where the Iraq was started in 2003.
What the hell is this? Or this? Or this? Or this?
Get the picture? These are all NASA robots with legs. Just because they haven't used one yet doesn't mean they aren't looking at them.
Jah, legs are good for traversing terrain that is uneven, e.g., NASA looks hard at walking robots for their extra-planetary adventures. So wheels are OK as long as you have roads or a relatively flat surface. Maybe someone in the U.S. is far too accustomed to lots of pavement and a sedentary lifestyle that might be lacking in less developed areas?
I dunno, I looked at the other pictures and it seemed kind of neat. I'm not sure I'd want to live in it permanently because their water storage solution seems a little ad hoc but the idea is interesting. I'd also like to know what the fuel economy on it is.
I really miss the richness in story telling that textual information gives and customizability that plain text offers. For example, I loved the complex puzzles on the quests in my favorite MUD -- it's difficult to get that kind of sophistication on a gui MMORPG where you are limited to whatever 3D models are available and what kinds of actions your characters can do. I used to DM on an NWN server which had a huge amount of community content, but it was a pain in the neck to get the administrators to add or change content. One admin also tried at one point using more text contextual clues about what's going on, e.g., "a strong breeze stars blowing" due to a change in weather, etc., but it made the server lag so much it was dropped. Overall I felt it was pretty confining in terms of story-telling ability as a DM. Far too many quests are find a monster and kill it and not enough flexibility in what you could do, it's much easier to just type something than code the 3D action.
Besides that, MUDs had all the drama of a graphical RPG: guild wars, cruel DMs, rampant PKers, it was great! I spent countless hours in college on lostsouls. I can remember three of us would go to the library to use the computer lab there so we all could play at the same time and talk to each other IRL while we were playing. This is in the days when only the university had broadband internet, the rest of us were on 2400 baud modems. Actually, lostsouls is still up, and in fact there's a DM posting there who was there when I played there, and making improvements, I think I'll go make a character.