Fenris: No, the old Amiga caught fire a few months ago when I was using it for some chromakey work. Vaugely hunting around for a replacement.
Windows XP and drivers: Win98se and 2k were the same, with any hardware that was pretty common about six months to a year before it was released. XP will have driver issues in a year or two, when the next generation of motherboards, video cards, and so on come out.
And, frankly, according to S.J. Gould, it should be brontosaurus. Bully for Brontosaurus!
To quote Gould:
“The name Brontosaurus, still affixed to skeletons in museums throughout the world, still perpetuated in countless popular and semi-technical books about nature, never lost its luster, despite its technical limbo… No argument of fact arises at all, just a question of names, settled in 1903, but never transferred to a general culture that continues to learn and favor the technically invalid name Brontosaurus” (1991, pp. 90-91, emp. added).
What are you disputing here? Please go back and note what I said. Technically not existing is no measure of opinion, whether Gould’s, yours, or mine. The point remains, few paleontology buffs would use brontosaurus, and if they did, they would likely include and explanation. Would you agree?
Copper Pin --> Pinco Perp :eek:
Waverly, you are entirely right. However, if I recall correctly, that very paragraph is embedded in a discussion that seems to take the point that, well, it really should be Brontosaurus. It isn’t, but they should have decided, or should now decide, to keep the common name.
Which is why I said should be, and not is.
Not a fact I am disputing, but a statement of opinion, echoed, somewhat amusingly, by the gentleman who you cited to point out the actual fact.
Be cool, man.
Bully for Waverly.
As we used to say upon entering the boy’s bathroom at my highschool all those years ago, lest a perfectly good cigarette get flushed… it’s cool.
I hadn’t thought about Gould’s opinion on the subject, just that he provided a very detailed dialog on why the name is as it is.
I’ve got this problem, you see, of never wanted to be wrong. I didn’t mean to sound like I was overheating though.
If you want to get really technical, Brontosaurus is what is known as a “junior subjective synonym” (JSS) of Apatosaurus. Which essentially means that all specimens formerly assigned to Brontosaurus have been re-assigned to Apatosaurus.
As such, it’s not really correct to say, “there’s no such thing as a Brontosaurus.” The animal that used to be called (and was officially referred to at one time as) a Brontosaurus still exists (well, its remains, anyway), it is just formally referred to by a different scientific name.
Note that the important term here is “subjective”, because the re-assignment from Brontosaurus to Apatosaurus was based on a subjective call, not made on a factual basis. A comprehensive re-examination of the former Brontosaurus material could, conceivably, result in Brontosaurus being restored as its proper name. Or not. For now, however, Brontosaurus remains unavailable for future use because of its JSS status.
Personally, I think Apatosaurus is the lamer name of the two, since the only thing “deceptive” about the beast is the name itself. But that’s neither here nor there.
ummm… What was this thread about again?
I think it should be Bully for Darwin’s Finch. I actually got to learn something today. Two things, if you count learning that I can’t proofread.
We were discussing whether or not it is possible to have a palaeontological discussion without resorting to name-calling.
And I think there was some stuff about computers, too.