Before we start in, remember the origins of the FSF and RMS's buggy, proprietary printer driver.
The core problem the Free Software solves is that you have the opportunity to fix or improve software that is running on YOUR hardware. You *PAID* for that printer; you should have the ability to muck around with whatever software is needed to make it work.
So with that in mind, I'll grant you signed binaries. I have the printer, I have the source code to the drivers, but without the right crypto key, my printer won't work with my self-modified drivers. That's a loophole, and worth fixing.
But Google? No way.
Google may be using GPL-licenced code, but NOBODY using Google is in danger of having their hardware become unusable because Google keeps their source code locked up.
Web services are just that: SERVICES. If Google or anybody else wants to keep their service code secret, they are FULLY within their rights to do so - just as I am fully within my rights to take ANY GPLed software, modify it for my own internal use, and never release it to anybody.
Attempting to force the Googles of the world to unlock their private code is more than just wrongheaded; it is morally WRONG - and the FSF has always prided itself on taking the moral high ground.
Maybe it's time to fork the FSF. Start with GPLV2, and fix the real problems without going down the road that the GPLV3 has chosen.
My wife got me a Palm LifeDrive for our 10th wedding anniversary. Comes with 4Gb of native storage, and built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
With a wireless access point in the house, this had actually proven to be pretty useful - the web in the palm of your hand!
But the number of sites that provide any sort of mobile-device support is minescule. Slashdot itself renders in Blazer (the Palm browser) as a single 1 character wide column of text.
If Slashdot can't do it, do you expect the rest of the world to get it right?
At least with a.mobi domain, you know the page will render correctly.
How many people actually develop sites for the.mobi domain is an other kettle of fish entirely.
Personally, having grown up with the C64 and the Apple][ and all the rest... man, I HATED BASIC.
It was way, way, WAY too limiting and tedious, even for my neophyte 13-year-old self.
I really didn't discover the joy of programming until I discovered Turbo Pascal. It was like somebody unshackling me - even with the crappy PC XT CGA graphics.
Pascal is a *great* learning language. It teaches all the good habits that will be needed for a C/C++/Perl hacker later in life, without all the administrivia involved with C, or the sheer horsepower (with all the syntactic complexity) of Perl.
Go with Pascal as a first language, and you can't go wrong.
Getting agents in contact with targets in sufficient volume to cause target effects - even given the insane levels of lethality that agents have i this day and age - is a nontrivial problem, the solution to which is the distribution of very large volumes of agent.
A litre of VX, although technically capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people, based on the volume of the minimum lethal dose, is FUNCTIONALLY only good for a very small number of people, given the difficulty of exposing people to the volume of agent on hand.
And that's not even counting other technical matters, such as the rate of absorbsion vs the rate of evaporation (many agents degrade faster than they are absorbed, so short of encountering a direct path into the bloodstream, it takes a larger volume of exposure than the theoretical minimum lethal volume in order to ensure a lethal dose before the agent is rendered inert.)
Now don't get me wrong, this shit is seriously lethal. Dump a litre of VX on somebody, and he's dead. Even the antidotes (like atropine) are so dangerous that there's a nonzero probability that the antidote - assuming you can get to it in time - might kill you instead. If you have access to large volumes of agent, and you have a delivery system capable of distributing it, you most certainly can kill large numbers of people - Saddam and the Kurds is a prime example.
But note that Saddam had access to the required tanker-truck volumes of agent, and he had access to the artillery units needed to deliver it. That's because he had the resources of A STATE ARMY, and it was his territory so he had freedom of manouvre; specifically freedom of logistical manouvre so he could stockpile his agent in preparation of the strike.
But here's the rub - he could have just as easily used plain old high explosive shells in his artillery and achieved the same effect. Once you allow an opponent the opportunity to field a large, properly-supplied artillery unit, does it really matter what the shells contain?
No terrorist is ever going to get his hands on the volume of agent it takes to make a successful strike. No terrorist, even if he somehow managed to locate the agent, is going to have access to the delivery system needed to get that volume of agent on target. The amount of damage that a terrorist can do with any reasonable volume of even the nastiest agent is roughly equivelant to the damage he could do with plain old, easily accessable, high explosives.
The two worst terrorist attacks in American history were carried out with 1) a couple of hijacked airliners (full of jet fuel) that were forced to crash into buildings and 2) a truck load of fertilizer.
As far as the various bad guys planning chemical attacks.. well, they ain't the sharpest sticks in the pile. And the experiments found in Afghanistan were FAILED experiments. Hell, if you were my enemy I'd be ENCOURAGING you to chase the chemical red herring, 'cause you'd be wasting time, energy, and money following up a dead-end course of action.
A few years ago, the US Dept of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal their houses against chemical weapons.
I'm a Canadian who works in the US. I'm also a former Regular Force soldier who is now a Reservist. Part of my baliwick at one point was unit Chemical Warfare Officer.
So I come to work the day after that particular announcement was made, and I find a group of my co-workers discussing a plan for the one guy who owns a pickup truck to stop off at Home Depot and stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape. The plan was to buy in bulk, and they were working out the details for how much to buy, how to deliver it, etc etc.
I wound up delivering a little ad-hoc class on the properties of chemical weapons to about 30 people, the high points of which were:
1) Yes, modern chemical weapons are ludicrously lethal. Exposure to as little as a pinhead-sized drop of certain nerve agents can kill you, which means that a litre of agent has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
2) The *reason* that these agents are so stupidly toxic is that **DELIVERY** of agent is really serious problem. It is so difficult to arrange exposure of soldiers to agent AT ALL that you need tiny exposures to be incapacitiating or the stuff just doesn't work. If you have (say) 300,000 lethal doses in a litre of agent, try getting a lethal dose of that agent to 300,000 people - it's a nontrivial problem.
3) The people who invested most heavily in this equipment (the USSR and the USA) had access to MONSTER delivery systems, and the targets were expected to be densely packed. We're talking hundreds of tubes of artillery, and aircraft-based delivery systems that for all intents and purposes were giant crop dusters. We're not talking a couple of litres of agent here; we're talking about tanker-truck quantities.
4) The primary military objective of chemical weapons isn't to kill the enemy; they are a nucience and area denial weapon. As soon as you deliver a chemical strike, you force everybody in the area to get into their protective gear - bunny suit, gas mask, "Boots, Rubber, Clumsy" which is a serious pain in the ass and interferes with combat effectiveness. A chemical strike can channel the enemy, slow him down, induce fatigue and stress, forces him to take time to decomtaminate - but it rarely inflicts serious casulties.
5) The golden example of this is the Sarin attack on the Japanese subway a few years ago. Of all the places in the world to do a chemical strike, that's the best - stupid high population density maximizes the exposure pur unit volume of agent, limited ventallation reduces the amount of agent burned off, few exits maximizes the time the target is spent exposed to agent, and the agent itself was reasonably modern.
It SHOULD have been a slaughterhouse, according to conventional wisdom. But in reality, the amount of casulties due to agent was tiny; they inflicted more casulties through panic and stampeding than due to agent exposure.
Chemical weapons JUST DON'T WORK unless delivered in huge volumes - and the ability to deliver in huge volumes is limited to large, well-equipped state armies. A chemical strike is well down the list of potential threats to the civillian populace.
A skilled and motivated sniper is far, far more dangerous than a dozen nutballs with a litre of VX.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting to protect themselves against chemical attack is completely ludicrous... and while I have a hard time buying into anybodies' tinfoil-hat conspriracy theories (never assume malevolance where stupidity will serve) that sure looks like fear-mongering to me.
Oh so many moons ago, myself and my buddies were pretty heavily into FASA's Star Trek Starship Combat Simulator, a boardgame/wargame similar to Star Fleet Battles. (this is paper, dice, and lead figure stuff kids)
FASA also had a Star Trek RPG that tied into the wargame, so I picked it up to see what it was like. We tried playing it a few times, using mostly FASA's own modules.
For those used to D&D style hack'n'slash, it was a real adjustment adapting to the Star Trek universe. Combat encounters were invariably quick and *lethal* - a phaser (or similar weapon) set to kill - well, it KILLS. Zap, dead, done. Getting into firefights with the bad guys was a sure road to terminal casulties.
The FASA module designers were cognisant of this, and their modules tried very hard to provide a myriad of non-combat resoulutions to problems and puzzles. But that placed demands on players to do a lot more thinking, follow the story with much more attention to detail, and role-play very intensely.
In the end, it was just too much of a commitment to be successful, and we reverted back to pure starship combat.
While well done and well thought out, it just didn't support casual gameplay very well. Anybody can join in on a dungeon crawl at a moment's notice and with little preparation. Attempting to solve a murder mystery wrapped in a diplomatic puzzle takes a whole lot more work.
I'm curious to see how the game designers intend to handle this problem - and I sure hope it isn't via "5 shots to kill a tribble".
DG
Re:An awesome life full of adventure
on
Steve Irwin Dead
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· Score: 1
I agree with you about RMS being a hero, but you're completely off base about the UN.
The UN isn't evil. It isn't about world domination or any other such tin-foil-hattery.
It is, however, a HUMAN institution, run by real people - which means that it is far from perfect, and not everything it does is optimal.
There is much room for reform in the UN, but "evil"? No way.
DG
Talent may not be what you think it is
on
The Expert Mind
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· Score: 1
OK, so I spent some time as a professional race car driver, and managed to (against the odds) win a couple of championships.
I know for a fact that I had no special innate talent - at least not for driving. My successes came as a product of a ton of hard work, a dedicated training and practice routine, and no small amount of technical innovation. I consider myself living proof that if you want something bad enough and are willing to work hard enough, it is possible to succeed.
But I know a couple of guys who fit the description of "innate talent". These are guys who are always fast, no matter what they drive, and who are *immediately* fast, and who are *consistantly* fast. I had a lot of peaks and valleys in my performances, where these guys are always consistant.
At first, I cursed the genetic lottery and my lot in it. But after I got to know some of these individuals, I realized that they were no more talented than I was. The difference was that they *never got nervous*.
At any given race, my attitude would be anything between "Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill! Kill!" and "Christ, why am I here?" Needless to say, when my morale was up and my nerves down, I'd do well. The best couple of runs of my life were done in a state of almost supernatural calm and confidence, when the world seemed to slow down and nothing seemed important. But when morale was down and nerves up - man, I couldn't drive sheep.
But these superhuman talents, they never got nervous, and so they never hit the valleys that us mere mortals did - so their average level of performance was better, which makes them look more talented in comparison.
I'm utterly convinced that when I was having an A day that I was the equal of any other driver in the sport. The problem was that I never learned to be able to go to my A game at will, where these guys could.
Maybe the problem with your underachiever is nerves?
Although I'm a huge Linux fan, and I've been using it on my primary home desktop since 1997, I doubt that end-of-life on Win95 will push Linux adoption at all.
The issue here isn't keeping old machines running (which Linux does spectacularly) but keeping old APPLICATIONS running - those specialized applications that are in some sense mission-critical, but which won't run on newer hardware or under XP.
I've got a pair of P150 Win95 Toughbooks that I use to talk to the ECU on the race car. I'd love to use my fancy-schmancy HP ZD7280 instead, but it has no serial port, and the ECU doesn't like USB->Serial converters. Yes, I could buy a PCMCIA serial card, but the laptops were cheaper - and they work.
There are a lot of businesses out there with hardware controllers, bespoke business process software etc running on Win95 because their specific application won't run on XP. Linux doesn't help these folks.
Unless WINE is 100% functional for their application and is pre-installed (setting up WINE used to be a real bitch) such that the application can be loaded onto a Linux box and "just works", there's no reason to move to Linux.
At the tender age of 17, I signed up to go to military college in St Jean, Quebec, just south of Montreal.
I had the opportunity to go to Royal Roads, in my native province, or to go to RMC, in Ontario, but I was talked into going to CMR by a recruiter with a quota to fill.
Anyway, I had been taking French for upwards of 6 years and had always received good marks. I could understand the typical spoken examples on language tapes, and figured I was in good shape.
Ha!
It took a good six months before I could even hear the breaks between words; everything sounded like one long, unbroken stream of syllables. I wound up memorizing what individual streams meant and working out the constituant words after the fact: "Revvyayvoozmusurgransackrifiss!" which meant "Mr Grant, I am very unhappy with you!" was in fact, "Reveillez-vous, Monseuir Grant! Sacrifice!" (Wake up, Mr Grant, goddammit!)
Even more suprising was the day I met my first Bayman Newfie, ostensibly an English speaker, with whom I had the same problem: "Wharsyatdarebuy?" was, in fact "Where's you at there b'y?" (Where are you/what are you doing?)
I had an extended, 10-min long smile-and-nod session with one Neuf, and I don't have the foggiest clue of a single word that he said.
Incidentally, while I departed CMR officially fluent, I have a light Anglo accent on top of a Quebecois accent. Imagine someone from China learning to speak English in Kentucky, and that's what I sound like to a francias pur laine.:)
I love how you (and a number of other people) immediately jump to conclusions based on political motivations - that anyone who puts gun use/ownership in a negative light is automatically a "fearmongering, hippy liberal".
For your information, I've used firearms since I was 14 (so 22 years) the majority of which occurred during my (ongoing) military service. Atlantic Area Pistol Team, unit shooting coach, range safety officer, and several years where my personal weapon was belt-fed.
So let's not go making assumptions based on stereotypes, OK?
Same deal with suicides and accidental shootings of family members/bystanders. If you are not sure of your target and you pull the trigger anyway... that's no different from willingly running a red light.
So we are left with the cases where somebody other than you uses *your* gun to shoot somebody - possibly YOU. We can agree, I think, that these are situations that should be avoided, right?
Like car crashes, the easy way to avoid them is to either not own a gun at all, or to keep it safely locked up whenever it is not in your possession. But let's take as a given that, much the same way that not owning a car (or keeping it forever locked away) makes it tough to drive, not owning a gun (or keeping it locked up) makes it tough to shoot.
So there is a good deal of utility in a mechanism that makes it impossible for anybody other than you to fire YOUR gun. We do the same for cars - cars have locks on the doors and have a key to start them. That doesn't defeat the determined thief, but it does make casual use of YOUR car a whole lot more difficult. Shouldn't a gun have the same level of safety precautions on it as a car?
Incidentally, the whole "cars kill more people than guns" analogy is DEEPLY flawed. Cars have a use other than killing people, to the point where car-as-weapon is a pretty rare use. (Car-as-suicide is much more prevelant) Excepting the relatively small portion of recreational target shooters, the purpose of a gun is to kill. If you own a gun for "personal protection", that gun is intended to kill people. That, to mee, suggests a need for a MUCH higher level of training, accountability, and safety than a car - whose primary purpose is to move you from one place to another.
I personally feel that the presence of a gun is a situation escalator; that having a gun handy changes what would be a minor dust-up into a deadly force encounter. But let's assume that there exists a class of people who are bound and determined to invade your home and do you violent harm, and that the threat level is such that there is a legitimate case for having access to a weapon of last resort. Should you not require training before you can use it, a licence to use it, registration that you have it, and some sort of tracking system that allows it to be tracked back to you, if necessary?
We do that with cars - why not guns?
A gun that ONLY YOU can fire (under most circumstances) and whose effects identify you as the shooter is a realy good idea, and actually goes a long way to legitimizing the home defense weapon.
Statistically, the gun most likely to shoot you is the one you own/carry, so there is some value in some sort of authentication mechanism in a firearm.
But putting the mechanism into the ammunition is the wrong way to go about this. The fire/no fire algorithm should be in the weapon itself, such that it is inert unless an authorized user is holding it. I can imagine a simple mechanism that simultaniously blocks the firing pin and locks the slide (can't fire, can't even load) unless the proper user is holding it.
How THAT mechanism works... wow, that's not a simple problem. It has to be automatic and take no operator action to enable. Maybe something like an embedded RFID tag would work.. but those can be spoofed... this is not an easy fix.
What would be a good idea though would be a mechanism whereby some sort of write-once memory device was implanted in the BULLET, and the act of firing the round wrote the user's ID to the bullet for later retrieval (assuming the memory survived the impact). This isn't a universal panacea, and it too can be spoofed, and it is impossible to retrofit to existing guns - but I like the idea that bullets carry the ID of the shooter in them.
1) The "only one intersection rule" doesn't apply to even-leader 3-digit highways, because they are loops/bypasses, and so must have two intersections.
2) There is only one intersection between I-65 and I-70 in Indy - the catch is that it is a few miles long. For a stretch, I65 and I70 run along the same route, so for that section of road, the route is simultationsly I65 AND I70.
I-76, I-270, and I-25 all intersect at one point north of Denver.
Ah, but that's allowed. The rule isn't "any given intersection must join only two routes" but rather "any two routes (excepting bypasses) may only have one intersection"
You won't find another intersection between I-76 and I-25 anythwere else.
3) Laws prohibiting passing on the right-hand side of another car, or driving a truck in the left lane. This prevents dangerous weaving and those scary moments when you suddenly realize the truck in front of you is traveling at 1/3 your speed.
With a few exceptions (Michigan being one of them) there are similar laws on the US Interstate. Trucks are only allowed to use the rightmost two lanes (on a three-laner) and it is supposed to be illegal to pass on the right. Sadly, this isn't enforced much, and Americans are nowhere near as law-abiding as Germans when it comes to traffic laws.
A prime example is that Germans tend to view speed limits as absolutes, where North Americans view them more as guidelines. When a speed limit changes down, a North American will (might) lift throttle and coast down to the lower speed, where a German will wait as long as possible, then nail the brakes to enter the speed zone at exactly the proscribed speed. Scared the crap out of me the first time I encountered this - in North America, a wall of lit brake lights means "something bad has happened; prepare to test how good your brakes are".
I DO wish Americans respected the "don't pass on the right" rule. The blind spot on the right side of a rig is enormous; you can be tucked up in there and I'll *never* see you. Because I'm on your left, I'm expecting to be moving faster than you, so I'll see you enter the blind spot and I won't move over until I see you come out of it. If you enter that right side blind spot from behind, I probably didn't see you go in there, and I may move over on you.
As a rig (and a fast mover rig) I'll keep the leftmost lane open for fast car traffic if there are three lanes. The rightmost lane is dangerous for rigs because of merging traffic; if somebody pops out ahead of us, we can't stop, we have a hard time speeding up to get out of the way of a merger, and we're long so we block a good sized chuck of the merge lane - it is WAY safer for everybody if we stay out of the rightmost lane as much as possible. But you take your life into your hands if you pass on the right.
If it is a two-laner and I'm in the left lane (which normally happens in urban areas with a lot of exits so I can't do the rural practice of staying right and moving left when approaching exits) all you need to do is give me a quick flash of the brights and I'll move over at first opportunity to let you by. "Flash to pass" is good manners and I'll respect it if I can do so safely.
But my safety trumps your impatience. "Left side == passing side, Right side == suicide".
Concrete roadways. Virtually every mile of Autobahn is thick concrete. No asphalt, no potholes, washes, biannual resurfacing, grading, etc
All the Interstate referb work that has been going on in the last few years has been concrete whenever possible. Blacktop is being phased out.
I've driven the Autobahn, and I've done tens of thousands of km driving on the US Interstate highway system (running a SCCA race team means a lot of long-haul driving going from event to event)
The only thing the Autobahn has going for it are the occasional unlimited speed sections, most of which seemed absent on my drives from Stuttgart->Nurburg and Stuttgart->Munich - there were speed limits on most of the distance (either 120 km/h or 140 km/h)
Incidentally, posted speed limits notwithstanding,average car traffic speed on Interstates in the Midwest is between 120-140 km/h.
So what has the US system got on the Autobahn?
1) Interstates are numbered odd numbers North/South and even numbers East/West. Main routes have 2 digits, and connectors and bypasses have 3 digits, where the last two digits are the ID of the MSR that it connects to. This makes it very easy to tell (in most cases) which Interstate you need to be on, even if you don't know local geography that well. If you are West of Detroit, and you want to go to Toledo (south of Detroit) and you are on I-96 approaching the the I-275 interchange, you can tell that:
a) you are travelling E/W
b) 275 runs N/S
c) 275 links up with 75, also N/S
d) So taking 275 to 75 is moving you in the right direction.
2) There is only one allowed intersection between any two Interstates. The intersection of I-69 and I-94 is unique. That is NOT the case with Autobahns, which can loop back on each other and cross in multiple places. This very nearly got me lost on the way to Stuttgart from the Nurburgring, and the only reason I caught it was that the sun was in the wrong place after the interchange....
3) On/off ramps onto Interstates are labelled with the name of the nearest major city AND the direction of travel - so you might see "I-70 West - Topeka" and "I-70 East - Kansas City". Autobahns are labelled with the name of SOME city in that direction, but I never discovered the pattern; and with the city density in Germany, trying to find the city on the map (in one of two directions) while rapidly approching the exit, without the aid of a dedicated navigatrix, can be daunting.
4) Exits are numbered with the current mile marker value, and the mile marker value itself is the distance along the Interstate within that state. Working out time, distance, and fuel problems in your head become VERY simple. If I am at mile marker 20, and I need to take exit 140, and I am travelling at 60 MPH, then I have 2 hours of travel before my exit. Note that this wasn't always true - Florida and Georgia held out on sequential exit numbering for a long time - but as far as I know, everything is mile marked now.
5) I refute the claim to "highway hypnosis" being a problem; having done multiple all-night driving stints trying to make it to events on time, the general straightness of the Interstate makes the road network safer (especially in bad weather) gives you much better sightlines, and saves fuel, especially with big rigs. The few exceptions to this rule can really stand your hair on end imagine coming around a corner at 70 MPH with 14,000 lbs of car hauler to find that traffic has stopped dead... yikes!
Seriously, the US Interstate system is a wonder of design and is transportation networking done nearly perfectly. It takes almost all the best features of the Autobahn and then improves on them.
We all know Al Gore is all about Global Warming (See Here), and we also know there is a direct link between the number of pirates and the average temperature of the earth! (See Here)
I've never played WoW, but I see where you're going with the concept, and I can work within that framework.
You've got one major hole in your analogy, and the same hole drops back into the "real" world.
There exist people in your analogy who live outside the "universe" and yet can still act on it. In your case, the "God" of WoW (represented by "Blizzard") actually exists, and while the actors of God may not be corpeal inside the universe (ie, no Blizzard employee can physically manifest himself in the WoW universe) the ACTIONS of God CAN - and those actions are not bound by the laws of that universe.
So if we take the point of view of a WoW person, everything that goes on in that world is logically consistant with the "physical" laws that govern that universe. That person could, via the scientific method, eventually derive all the laws of his universe. But if God (via a Blizzard employee) mucks with that universe in a way that is inconsistant with the laws of that universe, then the WoW inhabitant who observes the consequences now has incontrivertible proof that some form of "God" exists. He may never be able to derive the true form and nature of that "God", but he CAN prove the existance of SOME God.
Still with me? If I'm sitting here, minding my own business, and suddenly the +10 Ultra Sword of Power pops into my hands, and there is no mechanism within the laws of the universe that would allow a +10 Ultra Sword of Power to pop into my hands, then I have proof that God exists.
Now here's the thing - there is no observable action within our universe that can *only* be explained via a supernatural act of God.There are many things that could POTENTIALLY only be acts of God (because we don't understand the physical mechanism yet) but the set of Potential Acts of God get smaller and smaller every day, as our understanding of the physical nature of the universe grows. Every time we discover a new physical truth, the amount of space that God has to work in gets smaller.
So far, it appears that EVERYTHING may have a physical explanation, and once that day is reached (assuming it will) then at that point, you've reduced the potential action space for God to a single point - the creation of the universe. And as that cannot be proven or disproven, and as that means that God, best case, created the Universe and then went away... well then, that pretty much wraps up God's utility, doesn't it?
Let me put it this way - 2000 years ago, God was responsible for everything - weather, seasons, birth, death, love... you name it. Slowly but surely over the years, science has chewed away at God's areas of action, such that now we're pretty well reduced to "God created it, but otherwise does nothing". That's a pretty good argument for the probability of the nonexistance of God, isn't it?
Take a song on CD. That's a stream of binary numbers that represent a song when played back through the appropriate hardware - but that's really just by convention. If you take the entire bytestream, and ignore the word boundaries, that song is really just one great big binary number.
A single number.
Take any random number of a similar order, break it up into chunks typical of a CD bitstream, and play it back through the proper hardware, and you will get sound. Odds are that it will just be static, but there is a nonzero probability that you might just hit a number that resolves into actual music.
So at the end of the day, all this RIAA and MPAA stuff really works out to protecting NUMBERS.
The mechanism for evolution has been proven out so completely and so thouroughly now that there is no room for doubt that It Actually Happened. So far, WITHOUT FAIL, *every* argument brought forward by the ID/Creationist camp has been conclusively refuted by science.
But Science is also honest to a fault, and the truth of it is that determining the exact chain of species to species as a matter of HISTORY is patently impossible, as most of the evidence of each link in the chain is long rotted away.
We are utterly dependant on the happy accidents of fossils to provide examples of links - and fossils preserve, at best, the outlines of form and some structural anatomy. Without a matching DNA sample from each fossil, we are left to infer decendancy from form only - and form can (and has been proven to actually DO) evolve separately in unrelated species.
So Archaeopteryx might very well be the ancestor of all birds, or it might be a side branch of a family of birdlike dinosaurs, or it might be an independantly-evolved spur with no more relation to birds than a common reptile ancestor millions of years in the past.
But here's the point - the structure of the actual chain from microbe to man (or whatever species you choose) is UTTERLY UNIMPORTANT. It's a complete and total red herring. All you need to do is understand the mechanism of evolution, and then note that we share almost all of our DNA with great apes, to understand that we share a recent ancestor with apes. If fossils never ever happened, that alone is sufficiant evidence to prove that evolution is "correct".
The fact that we DO have fossil evidence for evolution in action over the course of millions of years only serves to underscore and reinforce an already rock (heh) solid argument.
Why are there no "transitional forms"? EVERYTHING is a "transitional form". Each species is a point on a smooth continum, not a discrete island. (Dr Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" speaks to the distance in TIME from ancestor to descendant, not in delta DNA)
BTW, typifying Dr Gould as a "marxist" does nothing to reinforce your argument, and instead outs you as Yet Another Close Minded Creationist who, in the face of an overwhelmingly strong factual argument, is forced to sling mud in ad hominum attacks. You destroyed what little credibility you might have been extended the second you made that choice.
I think we are in perfect agreement on the core concepts, but we seem to differ on the terminology.
And maybe on this - yes, maybe you really are an arrogant asshole who NEEDS to change in order to become a better person. But that is YOUR responsibility, and you will have to realize the necessity and then actualize the change more or less on your own, or it'll never take.
Because if your girlfriend is attempting to change you away from that sort of behaviour... flip it around to her perspective. Now SHE is breaking the "I can change him!" rule and SHE is in danger of having it end in tears.
You cannot force major changes in behavioral philosophy in the context of a relationship. You can help someone who *wants* to change themself, and you can make minor changes (for example, I'm a lot better about leaving dirty socks lying around than I once was:) but life is too short to try and make major changes to somebody else's personality, and the attempt almost NEVER works.
You time is much better spent finding the person who is a match for your personality - or if it is YOU who are the problem, making the changes to your personality yourself.
Big agreement on "deep mutual respect and completely honest communication" though. If that respect and honesty are not there, LEAVE.
I know a lot of guys who got into horrible relationships because they convinced themselves that the girl was their last chance, and they made sacrifice after sacrifice after sacrifice to try and keep her around - and then one day the boom gets lowered and they are heartbroken ON TOP OF all those months/years of suffering. There's no such thing as a "last chance" or "only hope" - learn to walk away! It's not personal failure to realize that the relationship isn't working.
While I'm at it, the phrase "she's out of my league" needs to be stricken from the language: the concept is fundamentally bogus. Why be self-limiting? Chase the one you want. And if she isn't interested, shrug and move on.
Slashdot Mirror
Before we start in, remember the origins of the FSF and RMS's buggy, proprietary printer driver.
The core problem the Free Software solves is that you have the opportunity to fix or improve software that is running on YOUR hardware. You *PAID* for that printer; you should have the ability to muck around with whatever software is needed to make it work.
So with that in mind, I'll grant you signed binaries. I have the printer, I have the source code to the drivers, but without the right crypto key, my printer won't work with my self-modified drivers. That's a loophole, and worth fixing.
But Google? No way.
Google may be using GPL-licenced code, but NOBODY using Google is in danger of having their hardware become unusable because Google keeps their source code locked up.
Web services are just that: SERVICES. If Google or anybody else wants to keep their service code secret, they are FULLY within their rights to do so - just as I am fully within my rights to take ANY GPLed software, modify it for my own internal use, and never release it to anybody.
Attempting to force the Googles of the world to unlock their private code is more than just wrongheaded; it is morally WRONG - and the FSF has always prided itself on taking the moral high ground.
Maybe it's time to fork the FSF. Start with GPLV2, and fix the real problems without going down the road that the GPLV3 has chosen.
DG
My wife got me a Palm LifeDrive for our 10th wedding anniversary. Comes with 4Gb of native storage, and built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
.mobi domain, you know the page will render correctly.
.mobi domain is an other kettle of fish entirely.
With a wireless access point in the house, this had actually proven to be pretty useful - the web in the palm of your hand!
But the number of sites that provide any sort of mobile-device support is minescule. Slashdot itself renders in Blazer (the Palm browser) as a single 1 character wide column of text.
If Slashdot can't do it, do you expect the rest of the world to get it right?
At least with a
How many people actually develop sites for the
DG
Personally, having grown up with the C64 and the Apple][ and all the rest... man, I HATED BASIC.
It was way, way, WAY too limiting and tedious, even for my neophyte 13-year-old self.
I really didn't discover the joy of programming until I discovered Turbo Pascal. It was like somebody unshackling me - even with the crappy PC XT CGA graphics.
Pascal is a *great* learning language. It teaches all the good habits that will be needed for a C/C++/Perl hacker later in life, without all the administrivia involved with C, or the sheer horsepower (with all the syntactic complexity) of Perl.
Go with Pascal as a first language, and you can't go wrong.
DG
You've completely missed the point here.
Getting agents in contact with targets in sufficient volume to cause target effects - even given the insane levels of lethality that agents have i this day and age - is a nontrivial problem, the solution to which is the distribution of very large volumes of agent.
A litre of VX, although technically capable of killing hundreds of thousands of people, based on the volume of the minimum lethal dose, is FUNCTIONALLY only good for a very small number of people, given the difficulty of exposing people to the volume of agent on hand.
And that's not even counting other technical matters, such as the rate of absorbsion vs the rate of evaporation (many agents degrade faster than they are absorbed, so short of encountering a direct path into the bloodstream, it takes a larger volume of exposure than the theoretical minimum lethal volume in order to ensure a lethal dose before the agent is rendered inert.)
Now don't get me wrong, this shit is seriously lethal. Dump a litre of VX on somebody, and he's dead. Even the antidotes (like atropine) are so dangerous that there's a nonzero probability that the antidote - assuming you can get to it in time - might kill you instead. If you have access to large volumes of agent, and you have a delivery system capable of distributing it, you most certainly can kill large numbers of people - Saddam and the Kurds is a prime example.
But note that Saddam had access to the required tanker-truck volumes of agent, and he had access to the artillery units needed to deliver it. That's because he had the resources of A STATE ARMY, and it was his territory so he had freedom of manouvre; specifically freedom of logistical manouvre so he could stockpile his agent in preparation of the strike.
But here's the rub - he could have just as easily used plain old high explosive shells in his artillery and achieved the same effect. Once you allow an opponent the opportunity to field a large, properly-supplied artillery unit, does it really matter what the shells contain?
No terrorist is ever going to get his hands on the volume of agent it takes to make a successful strike. No terrorist, even if he somehow managed to locate the agent, is going to have access to the delivery system needed to get that volume of agent on target. The amount of damage that a terrorist can do with any reasonable volume of even the nastiest agent is roughly equivelant to the damage he could do with plain old, easily accessable, high explosives.
The two worst terrorist attacks in American history were carried out with 1) a couple of hijacked airliners (full of jet fuel) that were forced to crash into buildings and 2) a truck load of fertilizer.
As far as the various bad guys planning chemical attacks.. well, they ain't the sharpest sticks in the pile. And the experiments found in Afghanistan were FAILED experiments. Hell, if you were my enemy I'd be ENCOURAGING you to chase the chemical red herring, 'cause you'd be wasting time, energy, and money following up a dead-end course of action.
DG
A few years ago, the US Dept of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal their houses against chemical weapons.
I'm a Canadian who works in the US. I'm also a former Regular Force soldier who is now a Reservist. Part of my baliwick at one point was unit Chemical Warfare Officer.
So I come to work the day after that particular announcement was made, and I find a group of my co-workers discussing a plan for the one guy who owns a pickup truck to stop off at Home Depot and stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape. The plan was to buy in bulk, and they were working out the details for how much to buy, how to deliver it, etc etc.
I wound up delivering a little ad-hoc class on the properties of chemical weapons to about 30 people, the high points of which were:
1) Yes, modern chemical weapons are ludicrously lethal. Exposure to as little as a pinhead-sized drop of certain nerve agents can kill you, which means that a litre of agent has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
2) The *reason* that these agents are so stupidly toxic is that **DELIVERY** of agent is really serious problem. It is so difficult to arrange exposure of soldiers to agent AT ALL that you need tiny exposures to be incapacitiating or the stuff just doesn't work. If you have (say) 300,000 lethal doses in a litre of agent, try getting a lethal dose of that agent to 300,000 people - it's a nontrivial problem.
3) The people who invested most heavily in this equipment (the USSR and the USA) had access to MONSTER delivery systems, and the targets were expected to be densely packed. We're talking hundreds of tubes of artillery, and aircraft-based delivery systems that for all intents and purposes were giant crop dusters. We're not talking a couple of litres of agent here; we're talking about tanker-truck quantities.
4) The primary military objective of chemical weapons isn't to kill the enemy; they are a nucience and area denial weapon. As soon as you deliver a chemical strike, you force everybody in the area to get into their protective gear - bunny suit, gas mask, "Boots, Rubber, Clumsy" which is a serious pain in the ass and interferes with combat effectiveness. A chemical strike can channel the enemy, slow him down, induce fatigue and stress, forces him to take time to decomtaminate - but it rarely inflicts serious casulties.
5) The golden example of this is the Sarin attack on the Japanese subway a few years ago. Of all the places in the world to do a chemical strike, that's the best - stupid high population density maximizes the exposure pur unit volume of agent, limited ventallation reduces the amount of agent burned off, few exits maximizes the time the target is spent exposed to agent, and the agent itself was reasonably modern.
It SHOULD have been a slaughterhouse, according to conventional wisdom. But in reality, the amount of casulties due to agent was tiny; they inflicted more casulties through panic and stampeding than due to agent exposure.
Chemical weapons JUST DON'T WORK unless delivered in huge volumes - and the ability to deliver in huge volumes is limited to large, well-equipped state armies. A chemical strike is well down the list of potential threats to the civillian populace.
A skilled and motivated sniper is far, far more dangerous than a dozen nutballs with a litre of VX.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting to protect themselves against chemical attack is completely ludicrous... and while I have a hard time buying into anybodies' tinfoil-hat conspriracy theories (never assume malevolance where stupidity will serve) that sure looks like fear-mongering to me.
DG
Oh so many moons ago, myself and my buddies were pretty heavily into FASA's Star Trek Starship Combat Simulator, a boardgame/wargame similar to Star Fleet Battles. (this is paper, dice, and lead figure stuff kids)
FASA also had a Star Trek RPG that tied into the wargame, so I picked it up to see what it was like. We tried playing it a few times, using mostly FASA's own modules.
For those used to D&D style hack'n'slash, it was a real adjustment adapting to the Star Trek universe. Combat encounters were invariably quick and *lethal* - a phaser (or similar weapon) set to kill - well, it KILLS. Zap, dead, done. Getting into firefights with the bad guys was a sure road to terminal casulties.
The FASA module designers were cognisant of this, and their modules tried very hard to provide a myriad of non-combat resoulutions to problems and puzzles. But that placed demands on players to do a lot more thinking, follow the story with much more attention to detail, and role-play very intensely.
In the end, it was just too much of a commitment to be successful, and we reverted back to pure starship combat.
While well done and well thought out, it just didn't support casual gameplay very well. Anybody can join in on a dungeon crawl at a moment's notice and with little preparation. Attempting to solve a murder mystery wrapped in a diplomatic puzzle takes a whole lot more work.
I'm curious to see how the game designers intend to handle this problem - and I sure hope it isn't via "5 shots to kill a tribble".
DG
What's this "we" Kemosabe?
I plan on living forever.
Hey, so far it's working.
DG
Those box office numbers (and, I assume, the Madden sales numbers) are revenue, not profit.
What was the cost of production of Madden '07?
What was the cost to make PotC-DMC?
Those would be interesting numbers to see.
DG
I agree with you about RMS being a hero, but you're completely off base about the UN.
The UN isn't evil. It isn't about world domination or any other such tin-foil-hattery.
It is, however, a HUMAN institution, run by real people - which means that it is far from perfect, and not everything it does is optimal.
There is much room for reform in the UN, but "evil"? No way.
DG
OK, so I spent some time as a professional race car driver, and managed to (against the odds) win a couple of championships.
I know for a fact that I had no special innate talent - at least not for driving. My successes came as a product of a ton of hard work, a dedicated training and practice routine, and no small amount of technical innovation. I consider myself living proof that if you want something bad enough and are willing to work hard enough, it is possible to succeed.
But I know a couple of guys who fit the description of "innate talent". These are guys who are always fast, no matter what they drive, and who are *immediately* fast, and who are *consistantly* fast. I had a lot of peaks and valleys in my performances, where these guys are always consistant.
At first, I cursed the genetic lottery and my lot in it. But after I got to know some of these individuals, I realized that they were no more talented than I was. The difference was that they *never got nervous*.
At any given race, my attitude would be anything between "Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill! Kill!" and "Christ, why am I here?" Needless to say, when my morale was up and my nerves down, I'd do well. The best couple of runs of my life were done in a state of almost supernatural calm and confidence, when the world seemed to slow down and nothing seemed important. But when morale was down and nerves up - man, I couldn't drive sheep.
But these superhuman talents, they never got nervous, and so they never hit the valleys that us mere mortals did - so their average level of performance was better, which makes them look more talented in comparison.
I'm utterly convinced that when I was having an A day that I was the equal of any other driver in the sport. The problem was that I never learned to be able to go to my A game at will, where these guys could.
Maybe the problem with your underachiever is nerves?
DG
Although I'm a huge Linux fan, and I've been using it on my primary home desktop since 1997, I doubt that end-of-life on Win95 will push Linux adoption at all.
The issue here isn't keeping old machines running (which Linux does spectacularly) but keeping old APPLICATIONS running - those specialized applications that are in some sense mission-critical, but which won't run on newer hardware or under XP.
I've got a pair of P150 Win95 Toughbooks that I use to talk to the ECU on the race car. I'd love to use my fancy-schmancy HP ZD7280 instead, but it has no serial port, and the ECU doesn't like USB->Serial converters. Yes, I could buy a PCMCIA serial card, but the laptops were cheaper - and they work.
There are a lot of businesses out there with hardware controllers, bespoke business process software etc running on Win95 because their specific application won't run on XP. Linux doesn't help these folks.
Unless WINE is 100% functional for their application and is pre-installed (setting up WINE used to be a real bitch) such that the application can be loaded onto a Linux box and "just works", there's no reason to move to Linux.
DG
At the tender age of 17, I signed up to go to military college in St Jean, Quebec, just south of Montreal.
:)
I had the opportunity to go to Royal Roads, in my native province, or to go to RMC, in Ontario, but I was talked into going to CMR by a recruiter with a quota to fill.
Anyway, I had been taking French for upwards of 6 years and had always received good marks. I could understand the typical spoken examples on language tapes, and figured I was in good shape.
Ha!
It took a good six months before I could even hear the breaks between words; everything sounded like one long, unbroken stream of syllables. I wound up memorizing what individual streams meant and working out the constituant words after the fact: "Revvyayvoozmusurgransackrifiss!" which meant "Mr Grant, I am very unhappy with you!" was in fact, "Reveillez-vous, Monseuir Grant! Sacrifice!" (Wake up, Mr Grant, goddammit!)
Even more suprising was the day I met my first Bayman Newfie, ostensibly an English speaker, with whom I had the same problem: "Wharsyatdarebuy?" was, in fact "Where's you at there b'y?" (Where are you/what are you doing?)
I had an extended, 10-min long smile-and-nod session with one Neuf, and I don't have the foggiest clue of a single word that he said.
Incidentally, while I departed CMR officially fluent, I have a light Anglo accent on top of a Quebecois accent. Imagine someone from China learning to speak English in Kentucky, and that's what I sound like to a francias pur laine.
DG
So then, isn't the idea that your gun is inert unless YOU are holding it a good idea?
DG
I love how you (and a number of other people) immediately jump to conclusions based on political motivations - that anyone who puts gun use/ownership in a negative light is automatically a "fearmongering, hippy liberal".
% 20gun%20shoot%20funny even professionalism can't save you from an accident, so we can ignore accidental self-shootings for the sake of discussion of the utility of automatic interlocks.
For your information, I've used firearms since I was 14 (so 22 years) the majority of which occurred during my (ongoing) military service. Atlantic Area Pistol Team, unit shooting coach, range safety officer, and several years where my personal weapon was belt-fed.
So let's not go making assumptions based on stereotypes, OK?
Now then, as can be demonstrated by this video http://youtube.com/watch?v=MeGD7r6s-zU&search=DEA
Same deal with suicides and accidental shootings of family members/bystanders. If you are not sure of your target and you pull the trigger anyway... that's no different from willingly running a red light.
So we are left with the cases where somebody other than you uses *your* gun to shoot somebody - possibly YOU. We can agree, I think, that these are situations that should be avoided, right?
Like car crashes, the easy way to avoid them is to either not own a gun at all, or to keep it safely locked up whenever it is not in your possession. But let's take as a given that, much the same way that not owning a car (or keeping it forever locked away) makes it tough to drive, not owning a gun (or keeping it locked up) makes it tough to shoot.
So there is a good deal of utility in a mechanism that makes it impossible for anybody other than you to fire YOUR gun. We do the same for cars - cars have locks on the doors and have a key to start them. That doesn't defeat the determined thief, but it does make casual use of YOUR car a whole lot more difficult. Shouldn't a gun have the same level of safety precautions on it as a car?
Incidentally, the whole "cars kill more people than guns" analogy is DEEPLY flawed. Cars have a use other than killing people, to the point where car-as-weapon is a pretty rare use. (Car-as-suicide is much more prevelant) Excepting the relatively small portion of recreational target shooters, the purpose of a gun is to kill. If you own a gun for "personal protection", that gun is intended to kill people. That, to mee, suggests a need for a MUCH higher level of training, accountability, and safety than a car - whose primary purpose is to move you from one place to another.
I personally feel that the presence of a gun is a situation escalator; that having a gun handy changes what would be a minor dust-up into a deadly force encounter. But let's assume that there exists a class of people who are bound and determined to invade your home and do you violent harm, and that the threat level is such that there is a legitimate case for having access to a weapon of last resort. Should you not require training before you can use it, a licence to use it, registration that you have it, and some sort of tracking system that allows it to be tracked back to you, if necessary?
We do that with cars - why not guns?
A gun that ONLY YOU can fire (under most circumstances) and whose effects identify you as the shooter is a realy good idea, and actually goes a long way to legitimizing the home defense weapon.
DG
Statistically, the gun most likely to shoot you is the one you own/carry, so there is some value in some sort of authentication mechanism in a firearm.
But putting the mechanism into the ammunition is the wrong way to go about this. The fire/no fire algorithm should be in the weapon itself, such that it is inert unless an authorized user is holding it. I can imagine a simple mechanism that simultaniously blocks the firing pin and locks the slide (can't fire, can't even load) unless the proper user is holding it.
How THAT mechanism works... wow, that's not a simple problem. It has to be automatic and take no operator action to enable. Maybe something like an embedded RFID tag would work.. but those can be spoofed... this is not an easy fix.
What would be a good idea though would be a mechanism whereby some sort of write-once memory device was implanted in the BULLET, and the act of firing the round wrote the user's ID to the bullet for later retrieval (assuming the memory survived the impact). This isn't a universal panacea, and it too can be spoofed, and it is impossible to retrofit to existing guns - but I like the idea that bullets carry the ID of the shooter in them.
DG
1) The "only one intersection rule" doesn't apply to even-leader 3-digit highways, because they are loops/bypasses, and so must have two intersections.
2) There is only one intersection between I-65 and I-70 in Indy - the catch is that it is a few miles long. For a stretch, I65 and I70 run along the same route, so for that section of road, the route is simultationsly I65 AND I70.
DG
Ah, but that's allowed. The rule isn't "any given intersection must join only two routes" but rather "any two routes (excepting bypasses) may only have one intersection"
You won't find another intersection between I-76 and I-25 anythwere else.
3) Laws prohibiting passing on the right-hand side of another car, or driving a truck in the left lane. This prevents dangerous weaving and those scary moments when you suddenly realize the truck in front of you is traveling at 1/3 your speed.With a few exceptions (Michigan being one of them) there are similar laws on the US Interstate. Trucks are only allowed to use the rightmost two lanes (on a three-laner) and it is supposed to be illegal to pass on the right. Sadly, this isn't enforced much, and Americans are nowhere near as law-abiding as Germans when it comes to traffic laws.
A prime example is that Germans tend to view speed limits as absolutes, where North Americans view them more as guidelines. When a speed limit changes down, a North American will (might) lift throttle and coast down to the lower speed, where a German will wait as long as possible, then nail the brakes to enter the speed zone at exactly the proscribed speed. Scared the crap out of me the first time I encountered this - in North America, a wall of lit brake lights means "something bad has happened; prepare to test how good your brakes are".
I DO wish Americans respected the "don't pass on the right" rule. The blind spot on the right side of a rig is enormous; you can be tucked up in there and I'll *never* see you. Because I'm on your left, I'm expecting to be moving faster than you, so I'll see you enter the blind spot and I won't move over until I see you come out of it. If you enter that right side blind spot from behind, I probably didn't see you go in there, and I may move over on you.
As a rig (and a fast mover rig) I'll keep the leftmost lane open for fast car traffic if there are three lanes. The rightmost lane is dangerous for rigs because of merging traffic; if somebody pops out ahead of us, we can't stop, we have a hard time speeding up to get out of the way of a merger, and we're long so we block a good sized chuck of the merge lane - it is WAY safer for everybody if we stay out of the rightmost lane as much as possible. But you take your life into your hands if you pass on the right.
If it is a two-laner and I'm in the left lane (which normally happens in urban areas with a lot of exits so I can't do the rural practice of staying right and moving left when approaching exits) all you need to do is give me a quick flash of the brights and I'll move over at first opportunity to let you by. "Flash to pass" is good manners and I'll respect it if I can do so safely.
But my safety trumps your impatience. "Left side == passing side, Right side == suicide".
Concrete roadways. Virtually every mile of Autobahn is thick concrete. No asphalt, no potholes, washes, biannual resurfacing, grading, etcAll the Interstate referb work that has been going on in the last few years has been concrete whenever possible. Blacktop is being phased out.
DGI've driven the Autobahn, and I've done tens of thousands of km driving on the US Interstate highway system (running a SCCA race team means a lot of long-haul driving going from event to event)
The only thing the Autobahn has going for it are the occasional unlimited speed sections, most of which seemed absent on my drives from Stuttgart->Nurburg and Stuttgart->Munich - there were speed limits on most of the distance (either 120 km/h or 140 km/h)
Incidentally, posted speed limits notwithstanding,average car traffic speed on Interstates in the Midwest is between 120-140 km/h.
So what has the US system got on the Autobahn?
1) Interstates are numbered odd numbers North/South and even numbers East/West. Main routes have 2 digits, and connectors and bypasses have 3 digits, where the last two digits are the ID of the MSR that it connects to. This makes it very easy to tell (in most cases) which Interstate you need to be on, even if you don't know local geography that well. If you are West of Detroit, and you want to go to Toledo (south of Detroit) and you are on I-96 approaching the the I-275 interchange, you can tell that:
a) you are travelling E/W
b) 275 runs N/S
c) 275 links up with 75, also N/S
d) So taking 275 to 75 is moving you in the right direction.
2) There is only one allowed intersection between any two Interstates. The intersection of I-69 and I-94 is unique. That is NOT the case with Autobahns, which can loop back on each other and cross in multiple places. This very nearly got me lost on the way to Stuttgart from the Nurburgring, and the only reason I caught it was that the sun was in the wrong place after the interchange....
3) On/off ramps onto Interstates are labelled with the name of the nearest major city AND the direction of travel - so you might see "I-70 West - Topeka" and "I-70 East - Kansas City". Autobahns are labelled with the name of SOME city in that direction, but I never discovered the pattern; and with the city density in Germany, trying to find the city on the map (in one of two directions) while rapidly approching the exit, without the aid of a dedicated navigatrix, can be daunting.
4) Exits are numbered with the current mile marker value, and the mile marker value itself is the distance along the Interstate within that state. Working out time, distance, and fuel problems in your head become VERY simple. If I am at mile marker 20, and I need to take exit 140, and I am travelling at 60 MPH, then I have 2 hours of travel before my exit. Note that this wasn't always true - Florida and Georgia held out on sequential exit numbering for a long time - but as far as I know, everything is mile marked now.
5) I refute the claim to "highway hypnosis" being a problem; having done multiple all-night driving stints trying to make it to events on time, the general straightness of the Interstate makes the road network safer (especially in bad weather) gives you much better sightlines, and saves fuel, especially with big rigs. The few exceptions to this rule can really stand your hair on end imagine coming around a corner at 70 MPH with 14,000 lbs of car hauler to find that traffic has stopped dead... yikes!
Seriously, the US Interstate system is a wonder of design and is transportation networking done nearly perfectly. It takes almost all the best features of the Autobahn and then improves on them.
DG
Holy convergance of idealologies Batman!
We all know Al Gore is all about Global Warming (See Here), and we also know there is a direct link between the number of pirates and the average temperature of the earth! (See Here)
This cannot be an accident - it's fate!
DG
Duplicates? On Slashdot? Surely you jest, sir!!
Have a look at vTiger CRM - a truely Free and open fork of the SugarCRM codebase.
DG
I've never played WoW, but I see where you're going with the concept, and I can work within that framework.
You've got one major hole in your analogy, and the same hole drops back into the "real" world.
There exist people in your analogy who live outside the "universe" and yet can still act on it. In your case, the "God" of WoW (represented by "Blizzard") actually exists, and while the actors of God may not be corpeal inside the universe (ie, no Blizzard employee can physically manifest himself in the WoW universe) the ACTIONS of God CAN - and those actions are not bound by the laws of that universe.
So if we take the point of view of a WoW person, everything that goes on in that world is logically consistant with the "physical" laws that govern that universe. That person could, via the scientific method, eventually derive all the laws of his universe. But if God (via a Blizzard employee) mucks with that universe in a way that is inconsistant with the laws of that universe, then the WoW inhabitant who observes the consequences now has incontrivertible proof that some form of "God" exists. He may never be able to derive the true form and nature of that "God", but he CAN prove the existance of SOME God.
Still with me? If I'm sitting here, minding my own business, and suddenly the +10 Ultra Sword of Power pops into my hands, and there is no mechanism within the laws of the universe that would allow a +10 Ultra Sword of Power to pop into my hands, then I have proof that God exists.
Now here's the thing - there is no observable action within our universe that can *only* be explained via a supernatural act of God.There are many things that could POTENTIALLY only be acts of God (because we don't understand the physical mechanism yet) but the set of Potential Acts of God get smaller and smaller every day, as our understanding of the physical nature of the universe grows. Every time we discover a new physical truth, the amount of space that God has to work in gets smaller.
So far, it appears that EVERYTHING may have a physical explanation, and once that day is reached (assuming it will) then at that point, you've reduced the potential action space for God to a single point - the creation of the universe. And as that cannot be proven or disproven, and as that means that God, best case, created the Universe and then went away... well then, that pretty much wraps up God's utility, doesn't it?
Let me put it this way - 2000 years ago, God was responsible for everything - weather, seasons, birth, death, love... you name it. Slowly but surely over the years, science has chewed away at God's areas of action, such that now we're pretty well reduced to "God created it, but otherwise does nothing". That's a pretty good argument for the probability of the nonexistance of God, isn't it?
DG
Here's one thing that really boggles my mind.
Take a song on CD. That's a stream of binary numbers that represent a song when played back through the appropriate hardware - but that's really just by convention. If you take the entire bytestream, and ignore the word boundaries, that song is really just one great big binary number.
A single number.
Take any random number of a similar order, break it up into chunks typical of a CD bitstream, and play it back through the proper hardware, and you will get sound. Odds are that it will just be static, but there is a nonzero probability that you might just hit a number that resolves into actual music.
So at the end of the day, all this RIAA and MPAA stuff really works out to protecting NUMBERS.
How crazy is that?
DG
The mechanism for evolution has been proven out so completely and so thouroughly now that there is no room for doubt that It Actually Happened. So far, WITHOUT FAIL, *every* argument brought forward by the ID/Creationist camp has been conclusively refuted by science.
But Science is also honest to a fault, and the truth of it is that determining the exact chain of species to species as a matter of HISTORY is patently impossible, as most of the evidence of each link in the chain is long rotted away.
We are utterly dependant on the happy accidents of fossils to provide examples of links - and fossils preserve, at best, the outlines of form and some structural anatomy. Without a matching DNA sample from each fossil, we are left to infer decendancy from form only - and form can (and has been proven to actually DO) evolve separately in unrelated species.
So Archaeopteryx might very well be the ancestor of all birds, or it might be a side branch of a family of birdlike dinosaurs, or it might be an independantly-evolved spur with no more relation to birds than a common reptile ancestor millions of years in the past.
But here's the point - the structure of the actual chain from microbe to man (or whatever species you choose) is UTTERLY UNIMPORTANT. It's a complete and total red herring. All you need to do is understand the mechanism of evolution, and then note that we share almost all of our DNA with great apes, to understand that we share a recent ancestor with apes. If fossils never ever happened, that alone is sufficiant evidence to prove that evolution is "correct".
The fact that we DO have fossil evidence for evolution in action over the course of millions of years only serves to underscore and reinforce an already rock (heh) solid argument.
Why are there no "transitional forms"? EVERYTHING is a "transitional form". Each species is a point on a smooth continum, not a discrete island. (Dr Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibrium" speaks to the distance in TIME from ancestor to descendant, not in delta DNA)
BTW, typifying Dr Gould as a "marxist" does nothing to reinforce your argument, and instead outs you as Yet Another Close Minded Creationist who, in the face of an overwhelmingly strong factual argument, is forced to sling mud in ad hominum attacks. You destroyed what little credibility you might have been extended the second you made that choice.
DG
I think we are in perfect agreement on the core concepts, but we seem to differ on the terminology.
:) but life is too short to try and make major changes to somebody else's personality, and the attempt almost NEVER works.
And maybe on this - yes, maybe you really are an arrogant asshole who NEEDS to change in order to become a better person. But that is YOUR responsibility, and you will have to realize the necessity and then actualize the change more or less on your own, or it'll never take.
Because if your girlfriend is attempting to change you away from that sort of behaviour... flip it around to her perspective. Now SHE is breaking the "I can change him!" rule and SHE is in danger of having it end in tears.
You cannot force major changes in behavioral philosophy in the context of a relationship. You can help someone who *wants* to change themself, and you can make minor changes (for example, I'm a lot better about leaving dirty socks lying around than I once was
You time is much better spent finding the person who is a match for your personality - or if it is YOU who are the problem, making the changes to your personality yourself.
Big agreement on "deep mutual respect and completely honest communication" though. If that respect and honesty are not there, LEAVE.
I know a lot of guys who got into horrible relationships because they convinced themselves that the girl was their last chance, and they made sacrifice after sacrifice after sacrifice to try and keep her around - and then one day the boom gets lowered and they are heartbroken ON TOP OF all those months/years of suffering. There's no such thing as a "last chance" or "only hope" - learn to walk away! It's not personal failure to realize that the relationship isn't working.
While I'm at it, the phrase "she's out of my league" needs to be stricken from the language: the concept is fundamentally bogus. Why be self-limiting? Chase the one you want. And if she isn't interested, shrug and move on.
DG