Dak

does it not work? do you have a second browser you can try, like firefox, to see if it's an IE problem? also, what firewall are you using? zonealarm would be suspect for wierd overly-zelous 'security' 'features' (zonealarm has protected you from teh evil HTTP headers of doom! you may notice some reduced functionality' ) (and also would be a suspect for not shutting down when it looks like it is)

go to Tools --> Internet Options Go to the Security tab and choose the Internet Zone. Select the custom Level button and scroll to: "Submit nonencrypted form data". Check that it is enabled. http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=47&threadID=163409&messageID=1676390

i think that quake is open-source shareware like doom which is why it works natively on linux... most games you have to rely on wine, which doesn't allways work in my experience, tho i could have been doing something wrong i suppose. tbh, i usually am perfectly happy with my SNES emulator and nethack now i'm a bit more experienced with linux i might have another bash at getting some windows games to run with wine. slightly back OT: how're macs for games? last i heard they weren't too good, but were improving.

i'm just a noob and can only really code python, so this is a bit of a light-weight comment, but: I like the right-stemmingness, eg: var = 'i am a test 123' print var.to_a.pop.reverse.to_i eval: 1.........2......3.....4..........5 (gives 321) in python would be: print int(list(var).pop().reverse()) eval: 5.....2....1.......3........4 (gives 3) (that ignores that the string object has no reverse() function, and that anyway it'd be working on a string of len() == 1, but apart from that that's where reverse() would go ) anyhoo, to me ruby reads 'take this, do this, then this, then this etc' which i like, whereas python's more 'do this to the result of doing this to this, and then do this', which can get a tad confusing. is ruby allways right-stemming? cheers for the tutorial link btw

then yeah, it comes down to wether you want to teach scientifically correct, historically correct, and/or biblically correct history. one thing: christianity was, and still is, very important in western civilisation. it may be worth teaching genesis along with the fact that it was the accepted explination, and many people still believe in it. by all means point out that it's declining in popularity and has no scientific basis. to do otherwize would be to turn it into a religious education lesson. well, pretty much as pangloss said, there's no excuse for being mean to your students. 'it's scientifically unsuported' doensn't have to be stated as 'its BS and you're dumb for believing it' (not saying that's what he did)

somatic cells are 'out of the germline', so they won't be passed on to any offspring (as in childeren), but they will be passed on to any offspring-cells. eg, haematopoietic stem-cells (marrow-bown cells from whence blood-cells are made) are somatic, so if i have a mutation in one of them it will not be passed on to my childeren; however, any other haematopoietic stem-cells, or any red/white-blood-cells that are produced from that mutant haematopoetic cell will inherit the mutation. the mutation won't 'spread' as such, inasmuch as other, non-mutant cells won't somehow aquire the mutation unless they are actually decended from the mutant cell, and as for manifesting -- if the point mutation actually has an effect (eg, knocks out a gene), then all the blood-cells that are desended from the haem-stem-cell will express the mutation; in this case, i'd have a handfull of blood-cells that didn't make a certain protien, for example. the reason germ-cell mutations can be inherited is that one of the daughter cells that inherits the mutation could be a sperm/ova, in which case the zygote/foetus would posess the mutation. hope that's clear? (and it's not a stupid question btw)

I'm not sure. i'm sure that, if you're willing to do the not-entirely-easy configuration step (or get someone else to do it for you, eg dell's ubuntu deal) that a pc running linux would be more powerful for the cost than a windows pc, but i don't know how that compares with macs. macs were (still are?) quite expensive, but afaik they're also quite a bit more powerful. you're still paying for the OS i think, so out of $600 you'd get less than $600 worth of hardware. maybe? actually, the cheapest way would be to put linux on your existing box: greater efficiency plus no need for anti-viruses would mean your current box will probably get a new lease of life running a linux distro, but it depends on what you use it for (gaming's not great, unless you're prepared to settle for emulated SNES and nethack), and wether you'd prefer cost over ease-of-use or wether you're willing to pay to not have to manually configure your mouse --which, i swear, nearly made me take a hammer to my computer. otoh, i did eventually get it sorted, which is probably more than i'd have managed on windows if something had desided to Just Not Work. [/rant]

he he. what's a 'western civilisation' class? if it includes the history of western civilisation, then i suppose it comes down to wether you want to teach history according to one religion, or history according to whatever our best way of guaging it is: which would be science if you go far enough back, or normal history elsewize. otoh, was he threatened with legal action for saying it's untrue, or for the way in which he said it's untrue?

considering that linux is free and pc's are cheaper than macs, wouldn't a linux-pc give you more bang for you're buck than a mac?

awe-inspiring? it reminds me of an eddy izzard skit: what's it like in space, niel? --awesome, sir awesome? what, like a hot-dog? --no sir: awesome like a million hot-dogs

you offered it as an example of far-left ideologies being determined to prove a correlation between liberalism and intelligence. so, what, science is a "far-left ideology" now is it, because one paper was published that youve interpreted as an attack on conservatism? contrary to what? and omitting something from the abstract != 'burying' followed by: talk about kettle calling the pot black! those 'extra dots' are called elipses, and indicate an ommision from the sentance. in this context, they indicate that i was after a responce, but was too lazy to type 'so would you mind telling me?' on the end (i.e., it was a question, despite not being phrased as such). they're pretty standard punctuation, pangloss. interesting how, from "..." you managed to infer what you did, just after you admonished me for seeing what i wanted too. I wonder if, after i critisised your logic, you just wanted too see and dismiss me as some kind of 'liberal nut' then...

abstracts are limited to 250 words. no doubt the observation is made somewhere within the paper, but the abstract has to be uber-consice. and, tbh, i'm not sure i see the relevence of the study? if it claims that liberals are more intelectual, then this justifies liberals' desire to make this claim (as it lends weight to the idea that it's actually true). if it doesn't claim this, then i don't see the relevence...

just to add to what swansont said, that's why the IPCC report is cited so often, specifically because it is a review of the body of research and so is less suceptable to randomly being false.

even if you're only going to a run-of-the-mill university, the difference between people who do the best and people who only do ok is usually how much effort they put in: go out drinking alot and leave revision to the last minute, and you might get a 2-1, 2-2... study hard and read up on your lectures and revise as you go along, and you could get a 1st. so i guess my advice would be: focus on putting effort into studying, rather than trying to go to a leet university.

nice-looking site. a few randomish observations: Do science>living things>evolution and science>evolution point to the same place, or have you accidentally added the category twice? what if theres something that sounds like it could well be a myth, but is actually true? would you have an article stating that, or is it just a myth-database? is the removed thread holding area supposed to be viewable to guests? do you need users to seed the forum till the membership picks up, or do you have enough members allready?

in each case, the farm produces 80% of the population's dietry needs, so assuming the population remains constant the output is the same, but efficiency is greater. there probably would be. when everyone needs to work on the farm, then everyone is employed as a farmer (and i doubt 20% would agree to starve, more likely everyone would eat 80% of a good diet); when only 60% of people need to work on a farm, then that frees up 40% of the work-force, who will likely get jobs doing something else: building, gathering rubbish, cooking, entertainment, science, etc. OTOH, if you were to argue that, eventually, most things will be automated and there wont be enough jobs to go around then you might want to look into technocracy, which is a theryoretical solution to the theoryoretical problem you describe. why would a standard barter-material be better than currency? everyone can produce gold? hang on.... why bother producing it if it's not profitable? as for costly regulation, whatever you're using as currency you'll be subject to inflation and devaluation, (probably) requiring regulation to guard against.

compounds aren't 'made of' molecules, they ARE molecules. if you want it in that nonclamenture, then its: molecules --> atoms. atoms are elements, so you could also say molecules --> elements.

as i read it, it's claiming that, dependant on field, most published research findings that use statistical confidence testing can be false*. this paper doesn't use statistical confidence testing, so it isn't prone to this phenomena. * i.e., findings of the form "from the data, we can accept hypothesys x with a 99% confidence interval"

isn't 'science' pan-national? i.e., it's not britain's to regulate and dictate a code to?

at the very least, junk dna serves as a 'damage' trap: certain damage (such as randomly inserting viruses or electric damage) are much more likely to 'hit' the junk dna than the useful stuff.

which, may i add, was the stupidest thing that i ever witnessed: with all the work that went in, to abandon the letter when it needed just an atom's worth more work

evolution only works to push things from A --> G if at least one step along the way is an improvement. a simplified model of evolution: #taking the progression A-->B-->C-->D-->E-->F-->G #assuming that each step in the progression has a 1/10 chance of occouring #assuming that our evolving mechanism simply retains improvements and abandons non-improvements (eg, A-->better-than-A is kept, whilst A-->not-better-than-A is abandoned) #letting the maths be a bit wonky if A<B<C<D<E<F<G, then evolution will drive the change from A to G. as each step has a 1/10 chance of happening, then we could expect each step to occour after ~5 attempts, and then be kept. overall, then, with each step taking 5 attempts, a reasonable estimate is A-->G occouring in about 30 attempts. for each bit thats not advantageous, evolution works less well. eg: if A<B<C=D<E<F<G (and C<E), then: A --> B is an improvement, so will be retained (and so on), BUT C --> D is not an improvement, so will NOT be kept. to proceede, the information will have to jump directly from C to E for there to be an improvement, and thus retention. if the chance of C-->D = 1/10 and D-->E is 1/10, then going strait from C-->E is 1/100, and could be expected to happen in about 50 tries. so, then, we have A-->B, B-->C, E-->F and F-->G taking ~5 tries each, and C-->E taking ~50 tries: it now takes about 70 tries to go from A to G. if A=B=C=D=E=F<G, then there will be no retention at any step untill G is reached, and all the changes will have to happen at once. this gives a 1/10^6 chance, so we can expect it to take ~500,000 tries to go from A-->G. so, yes, non-viable intermediatory forms lessen evolutions effectiveness at driving a change, and it is required that the intermediatory forms be somehow advantageous in their own right in order for evoultion to take effect. a few notes: whilst the above is an implimentation of evolution, it is not natural evolution, which is a different 'implimentation' of evolution. natural evolution doesn't keep improvements and abandon all others and revert to what was there previously; rather, it retains changes at a rate proportional to their improvement. this complicates things alot, but the principle is still the same in which case evolution will specifically lower the chances of the progression A --> G by stalling it at the 'disimproving' step. note that it can still be gotten around, it just takes time, and, depending on many variables, it can take just one disadvantageous step to halt a progression.

yes. targeted at developmental genes, often using transposons. like i said, i'm not saying that bad stuff will happen, just that it could. that was clearly a worst-case scenario, and i'd assume that the chances of such an allele arising are virtualy 0 in both nature and GM, but the fact still remains that the risk could be higher in GM foods due to the nature of the modification. do they test individual food safety, or environmental impact (or both)?

yes, but my point is that it is a risk with potentially huge repercussions, and i'm worried that it's a risk that we've entered into without being sufficiently well informed. e.g., do we actually know that it's safe(ish), and what's the worst that could go wrong, and how likely that is to happen? have we actually made an informed descision? or are we doing it because it's cheap?; are we proceeding with the lower-risk higher-benifit technique, or with the higher-benifit hopefully-lower-risk technique? something to consider: it's been mathematically shown that alleles can be designed that will totally wipe out a species. all they need to be is: #a vital deveolopmental allele #a useless (post development) allele (which, i'd assume, would be common in developmental alleles) #capable of functioning correctly with only one allele present (not rare) #broken (combined with above = recessively fatal) #a transposon that transposes over the analogous allele on the other chromosome post-deveolopment (ok, this bit's rare ) then it's a race between the species ability to evolve around this, and the alleles spread throughought the species (which evolution would drive within a suprisingly short number of generations). genetic modification can utilise transposons, and presumably GM would target developmental alleles quite often (to make larger crops). so what'r the chances that an artificial, transposon-delivered, deveolpmental allele mutates into one of these allele-killers? probably extremely unlikely, but i'd like to know that the likelyhood of stuff like that has actually been assessed and deemed vanishingly small, rather than the possibility having not been looked at. where, and by who, has it been descided that GM is safe? (btw, i'd assume that GM is actually pretty safe; i'd just like to know that that's actually been proven)

true bacteria is just a historical term from when bacteria was seperated into two sub-groups, which is now not used that much. what lucascapa said as a diagram: ORIGINAL CLASSIFICATION: prokaryota (domain) | bacteria (kingdom) ---- ARCHAEBACTERIA RECOGNISED AS SEPERATE FROM MOST (TRUE)BACTERIA: prokaryota (domain) | bacteria (kingdoms) / \ true archaebacteria (sub-kingdoms) bacteria ---- ARCHAEBACTERIA RECOGNISED AS SEPERATE ENOUGH FROM BACTERIA TO NOT BE COUNTED AS BACTERIA..: prokaryota (domain) ___|______ | \ bacteria archaea (kingdoms) --- ...BOTH OF WHICH WERE THEN RECOGNISED TO BE AS SEPERATE FROM EACH OTHER AS FROM EUKARYOTA, HENCE ARE DOMAINS NOW: prokaryota (superdomain) ___|______ | \ bacteria archaea (domains)