> Fag. Better?

Thank you for restauring cosmic equilibrium. This is now an average Slashdot discussion. :-)

And you are absolutely right, I am a history buff.

You are also right about multiple causation and the fact that a known cause A for a given observation doesn't preclude the existence of an unknown cause B.

Here, scientific prudence recommends that we correlate an observation with historical occurrences before we attribute it to a new factor. If there was any obvious inner ear damage in stranded mammals, the obvious cause would be sonar. To the best of my knowledge, no such damage was found in stranded mammals. This seems to go against the man-made sound explanation.

On the other hand, some dolphin autopsies showed evidence of bacterial infection of nervous tissue. Now that is an interesting finding. I also read an interesting hypothesis about cerebral amoeba infection. I'd like to see these plausible causes eliminated before going after a less-than-obvious possible cause. Occam's razor and all that.

I am disappointed. By now, my bringing up of the ancient Greeks should have degenerated into a discussion about homosexuality and why the average slashdotter is a bloody queer. Must be slow today.

Your logic is flawless. Clearly no further discussion is needed, you provided us enlightenment.

Yeah, well, that's the kind of assumptions you need to make if you want to keep blaming the sonar of the *EVIL MILITARY* (thunder rolls).

The arrogance of every young generations is to believe all problems on Earth are created by their parents' incompetence. Get a haircut and a bath, you hippies!

Classic Greek authors tell us that in the ancient Greece, dolphins and whales were already found stranded on the shore. This was a windfall for the locals, who were not eating meat very often. They saw it as a divine gift and thanked Poseidon for it.

So considering that the Greek galleys didn't use sonar, we need to stop barking at the wrong tree and find the cause of this phenomenon. My money is on a parasitic disease that affects the brain.

I am still using an IBM model M keyboard made in 1985. It doesn't have the Windows key, which is one more reason for me to like it.

You cannot beat the touch of a model M, and the tactile feedback helps me limit the number of fat-finger typos.

One downside of a model M is that the clicky noise might annoy coworkers in open space offices. But I have few complains. Complains are generally going like this:

Cow orker: "Eric, your keyboard is sure loud".
Me; "Yup."
Cow orker: 'Err..."
Me: "Heavy too. All metal. Feel this."
Cow orker: "Wow. At least three pounds".
Me: "Almost five, actually. And reliable, too. You can wield it as a baseball bat, whack someone's head, clean up the brain bits from the bottom, and it's still good for years of service."
Cow orker: (Gulps, retreat hurriedly.)

See why I love it?

Connecting two parts of the company campus? The company should pay for it.

Considering that a majority of Microsoft employees are donating to the Dems, MS should not accept Fed money. It would look like a payback. That would be very awkward.

There are foreseeable problems with this Net Neutrality provision:

• The definition of what Neutrality is will be decided by FCC bureaucrats and by courts. Both are notoriously clueless about networking and the Internet. Yet we will rely upon their uninformed, harried rulings to decide how to run critical infrastructure. What can possibly go wrong?
• I am blacklisting whole IP subnets in my mail server. Am I going to be sued by notorious spammers for preventing them from reaching my users? I am not neutral to spammers, that's for sure.
• If I pay for some costly network infrastructure, can any two-bit business come along and use if for free?
• I want to bar kiddie porn from my workplace. I am blacklisting the most notorious XXX web sites. Am I going to be sued by Young Flesh, Inc?

You see where this can go? Fuzzy regulations are often abused, this one will be no exception.

Good going, guys.

You're absolutely right. NASA killed the clipper because it was a threat to their employment-for-life guarantee, namely the Shuttle

Considering that the new prez owes votes to the Federal bureaucrats (93% of DC voted for him), it would be surprising to see him dismantle the NASA status quo. So any solution he'll consider will keep them employed and will not be cheaper.

evanbd,

Interesting posts, I regret that I don't have mod points right now.

Allow me to ask a question: what do you think of the statement "cheaper...while still providing jobs for much of the existing shuttle workforce"? If DIRECT is cheaper, won't it imply that most of the people employed by the Shuttle program will not be needed anymore? Or do they plan to keep these people and spread the salary costs on a very large number of DIRECT launches?

What's your BS-o-meter telling you there? Mine tells me that if they are really trying to keep the standing army of highly paid engineers currently working on the Shuttle, then DIRECT cannot be cheaper. If cheap is the target, then a lot of NASA people are going to be pink-slipped. Someone is lying here.

Your opinion?

Post by LifesABeach is dead accurate. The Delta Clipper demonstrator was an effective SSTO prototype. It was handled to NASA, which "accidentally" killed it on the first flight. Then they could not find $10 million to rebuild another one, while spending $500M a year on the Shuttle.

The Delta Clipper was a threat to the Shuttle milk cow, so it died. Technical superiority doesn't matter anymore at NASA.

NASA is great at science mission, but they have historically fought and destroyed every attempt to make access to space cheaper.

NASA used to be moon-conqueror heroes. Now it is a bureaucracy. The goal of a bureaucracy is to perpetuate itself. They are now standing firmly between mankind and cheap access to space.

Agreed. My first tech book was done in MS Word 6 (yeah, it was a long time ago). It was a nightmare. We had several production problems when it was time to produce the PostScript to send to the pre-press machine. Ugh.

The next books were done in LaTeX (my editor insisted on it for the 1st one, then I was sold). Sure, it's a bit of a learning curve, but the flexibility and control given by LaTeX are worth learning the tricks. Plus, Lamport's LaTex book is actually a well-written tutorial. Aspiring tech books authors would be well inspired to study its style and organization.

LyX reportedly goes a long way to making LaTeX easier to use. I haven't used it myself, though.

"Everybody knows that there is solar variability."

. Everyone, apparently, but the authors of the various global climate models, none of which currently include it.

Not true. There are models which include variation in the radiated solar input (that's sunshire for us laymen). Some even achieve a measure of success in reproducing the observed climate changes over the last few centuries. But as every other model, they don't explain everything and they cannot reproduce all the observed changes.

Moreover, to account for the most striking recent climate change episodes, these model presuppose a solar variation that is not backed by independent evidence. For example, the Medieval warming could be explained with solar activity increase, but we lack independent proof of it.

On the other hand, the climate change (cooling) that led to the demise of the Mayan empire can entirely be explained by solar forcing (that is, solar activity changes were the main cause), and this has been amply documented.