But, it is flawed -- simply because its so incomplete. There's simply too much we have absolutely no clue about and we have a lot of gaps that don't neatly add up. Our ignorance is vast. This is partly to do with our limited nature.
What we don't know about the origin of the universe far outweighs what we think we do. This won't ever stop being the case no matter how clever we may become.
Take exoplanets. According to everything we thought we knew about planetary formation by looking at our own solar system led us to believe every other star system that had planets would follow a similar configuration (rocky planets close their parent star gassy giants further away). That turned out to be spectacularly wrong. We've never seen any star systems with planetary distributions even remotely like ours.
The formation of galaxies is even more full of contradictory evidence and we only have the sketchiest picture.
Modesty is a feature of good scientists. Know-it-all attitudes get us nowhere.
Apart from never being able to make this work, what would be a better way of lifting people out of poverty and making their lives better would be the government to abolish the caste system.
Indian society is a mess and this won't change a damn thing. Apart from making the lives of the desperately poor even more bureaucracy-ridden and miserable.
DOS was (is) a loose collection of small (optional) utilities, a tiny bootloader (IO.SYS) and a limited command interpreter -- command.com and the bootloader was all that was strictly necessary: hardly a "heart". Memory management was lousy (and bizarre) and usually since I was using PharLap memory management it was largely redundant anyhow. You could use any number of thrid party memory managers or even roll your own. Disk caching/buffering was just awful and it wasn't until version 5 that it started shaping up. V5 was actually a very good version, after years of rewrites and improvement.
Microsoft bought QDOS in good faith and are therefore not in the frame for anything. For once in my life I'd defend them here. I don't even know why Gates's name is even being connected to this story.
And yes, Gary Kidall was a genius. But in this one instance, MS are free of any wrongdoing in my view.
Paid up-front for a nice Android phone just over a year ago and shopped around and found a £10 a month deal -- 250 talk minutes (which I never use), unlimited texts and unlimited data (I can also tether it to my laptop in areas with no wifi). Never looked back. Before I had to sit out a 2-year contract with Virgin that never worked either at home or work. Ghastly.
I used to see a lot of TW tubes and it is amazing these are still vitally important and have never been surpassed in terms of gain and low noise.
Vacuum tubes (or valves here in the UK) in the high-microwave range are truly wonderful and bizarre. Some of the quantum theory involved in their operation is utterly mind-blowing.
I recall as a kid, a lot of military stuff my stepdad was involved with from Rathyon, Westinghouse and GE during the 70s was really cutting edge and has seldom been matched or bettered.
In the UK LSD is prescribable by a consultant for certain intractable conditions but you need a Home Office license to do it. It appears capable of curing chronic migraine (one dose apparently) though no one knows how. It also appears to help people who don't respond to conventional medication for a range of disorders. In the 80's anyhow.
I like RandomPlay or CMUS in preference to iTunes. Their randomness is more suited to my collection. Both on Linux and OS X. But what I love more than anything is listening to the playlist on FiP, any time of the day. Their programming is pure genius.
I have often thought that statistically most astronauts are quite long-lived (barring launch pad accidents). That, and their careers are usually quite short.
Unlike airline pilots. They are exposed to quite high radiation flux for a good number of years over their entire career and are normally monitored closely for radiation induced disease within the normal routine medical checks.
But then, Seth once made a bet with me that by now we would have AI's.
Although I do personally think he's spot on. We will, eventually, detect, at least, evidence of another radio-using civilisation. I think we probably have overlooked it already countless times because we were not looking in the right place at the right time.
What we don't know about the origin of the universe far outweighs what we think we do. This won't ever stop being the case no matter how clever we may become.
Take exoplanets. According to everything we thought we knew about planetary formation by looking at our own solar system led us to believe every other star system that had planets would follow a similar configuration (rocky planets close their parent star gassy giants further away). That turned out to be spectacularly wrong. We've never seen any star systems with planetary distributions even remotely like ours.
The formation of galaxies is even more full of contradictory evidence and we only have the sketchiest picture.
Modesty is a feature of good scientists. Know-it-all attitudes get us nowhere.