They had than brought old, dirty, obvious sex tourists home to see their families.
OMG, old ones!? Yuuuuuuccckk that's terrible! Don't they know that it's the young, dirty, obvious sex tourists that are the ones to bring home to meet the families???
Like most people I think about this stuff from time to time. Here's my current casual analysis. There are three possibilities.
The universe, or at least us, is deterministic. Free will is an illusion.
The universe, or at least us, is not deterministic. Free will may exist.
The question of free will is the wrong question or is poorly posed.
If it is 1 then game over. If it is 2 then we have free will but by definition it is not deterministic. What does it mean to be making decisions non-deterministically? Is making a decision where the decision making process has a random element to it somehow "better" than not having free will?
It looks to me that 3 is the case that offers the most comfort (which seems to me to be what people are usually looking for when they ask these sorts of questions).
Is the behavior of adolescent frat boys useful to make generalizations about adult men in general?
Sure, of course it depends on what generalization you are trying to make.
So its only natural that it is perceived like a recruited change when they finally come out.
Except that isn't what was going on. These were adult women describing what happened to them at the "Womyn's Center" on campus. Now either the women I talked with were a huge statistical abnormality or what they were saying was a reasonably accurate description of what was going on. You seem to prefer believing the former and based on the extremely aggressive tenor of your original reply to the somewhat bland comments being made it feels to me like you are heavily emotionally invested in maintaining those beliefs. However I think the latter case is much more likely. I refer you to Andrea Dworkin's famous comment about all heterosexual sex being rape. For a non-trivial portion of the campus lesbian population having sex with men, excuse me, "males", was considered sleeping with the enemy and they proselytised that position to any woman they could get to listen.
If you think this unlikely consider the fact that much feminist criticism of men is phrased as criticism of "males" (e.g. "male violence")... i.e. the fundamental problem is not socialization, not situational, not economic, not cultural, not human boys and men, but maleness itself.
As for science becoming fraudulent there are a few things worth saying. First, most of the fraudulent stuff is not in science but in the social sciences where it is much easier to "fudge" things, however it does occur in gender related science as well. Second those kinds of problems are a long way down the food chain. Any scientific investigation begins with the phrasing of a question and fraud begins with making it unlikely that certain questions are ever asked, if asked never publicised, if publicised never funded, if funded not published and so on.
A good example of that is the issue of domestic violence. The are huge numbers of studies on DV yet most of them do not address girl/woman on boy/man DV. Yet virtually every time that subject is explored, using exactly the same metrics used for boy/man on girl/woman DV, it turns out that there is a huge amount of such violence taking place. Most of the time the question just never gets asked in the first place.
I'm going to stop here because it's too huge an issue to address in a forum like this and I think it will take a new generation of boys/men to change anything. Of course while boys/men used to be a significant majority on university campuses they are now a minority (in my country about 40% of the undergrad population last time I looked) so it may be some time before those issues get addressed in any meaningful way. It might start with somebody asking why in the course of a single generation boys stopped doing well in school and why such large numbers stopped going off to university. The fundamental nature of boys certainly didn't change in that time and if the situation were reversed, as it was not so long ago, the very existence of the imbalance would be considered conclusive proof of system sexism.
I look at all the space announcements as mere conjecture, I mean, all these astrophysicist guys are looking at is light waves in a telescope or radio waves right?
When you look at something (anything) in front of you all you are looking at is light waves. In fact the actual process of how your brain perceives that object in front of you is even more indirect than that!
So I think that hostility you are feeling has more to do with the fact that you are a mysogynist prick rather than the fact that you have a prick.
First you have pretty much provided an example for his statement about men attacking men.
Second nothing he said was misogynist.
Third, there used to be (maybe still is) a stereotype of gays "recruiting" amongst straight men. I never believed this stereotype to have any truth in it but at the university where I did my undergrad degree it was quite obviously true in the case of lesbians recruiting among straight women. If the women I talked to were to be believed the hostility toward men in the "womyn's center" was so intense that bisexual women were considered traitors and straight women were routinely advised and then pressured to become lesbians as a political statement. This is not my interpretation it is what several different women told me of their experiences there.
I've never known a gay man who decided to be gay but I've known lesbians who decided to become lesbian as a political statement. I have also known lesbians who were embarrassed at the man hating that originated with such "political" lesbians. I've never run into or even heard of a gay separatist but it's not hard to find lesbian separatists. If any of this is news to you then you should better inform yourself before launching ad hominem attacks like "has more to do with the fact that you are a mysogynist prick rather than the fact that you have a prick." If it's not news to you then your response wasn't very honest.
Oh and "testosterone poisoning" was a phrase commonly heard emanating from both the "Womyn's Center" and the Women's Studies Dept. and was routinely used as a derogatory reference to maleness.
I agree with you that insulation is one of the best money investments most people can make it they have not already. Canadian building standards have really concentrated on this to great benefit.
As long as you didn't live on the west coast where the application of building standards designed for the rest of Canada resulted in a billion dollars or more of damage to homes from water penetration, condensation etc. Most shocking was the later discovery that the government knew that such damage might occur and apparently hid the information.
Assuming OS and APIs are identical, you shouldn't have to praise that trait. You should take it for granted.
So unless the X-Box runs Windows his first comment is irrelevant which was the point of my original reply to him. Perhaps I should have been more straightforward in my comment.
In reply to your comment I would say the ability to correctly compile source code very definitely has to do with the platform (hardware and software) for which it is being compiled, along with a host of other things.
Nope, it means that it's independent of the low-level OS API. Correctly written application software in a high-level language should run on any processor -- you get that for free. Making software cross-platform often involves creating an abstraction layer around the OS API, or using one that already exists (such as Java or the POSIX standards).
Simply repeating/paraphrasing the statements in your earlier post does not suddenly change them from incorrect to correct. As well the fact that you don't seem to know that what (you claim) software should do and what it actually does do in the real world are often two very different things, indicates a lack of experience on your part.
Sorry my earlier post wasn't able to clear up your confusion.
That's probably because the confusion is all yours. Being well educated in the field and a professional in it for more than three decades I'm perfectly well aware of the accepted definitions of the terms and I provided multiple sources supporting the definitions I used.
You on the other hand have just repeated your unsubstantiated opinion and then say:
unfortunately I don't have time to discuss this further with you
which, sorry, seems a tad cowardly to me. If you had looked at the links I gave you would have realized you were wrong. Or perhaps you do realize that and you're one of those people who just can't admit to a mistake. That would certainly explain your repeating yourself and then running away. It would also explain why instead of providing links to definitions of the term under discussion, "cross platform", you instead link to wiki pages on terms irrelevant to the definition of "cross platform". That seems a transparent attempt to misdirect the discussion away from your mistake linuxrocks123.
I'm afraid you're the one that is confused. A "platform" is a particular combination of hardware and software, in the current case a processor and operating system. Change either and you have changed platforms. Software being "cross platform" means it runs on platforms that differ in a non-trivial way, i.e. OS or hardware. Being processor independent can be synonymous with cross platform, if the only differences between platforms are the processors, or it can be a necessary but not sufficient component of being cross platform if both the processor and OS differ, or it can be irrelevant if all the platforms under discussion differ only by OS.
When talking about platforms if you want to refer to just the OS (or supporting libraries, specifications etc.) then you would say "software platform" and if you want to talk only about the processor (or other supporting hardware) then you would say "hardware platform". Otherwise, in computing, the word platform is understood to mean a particular combination of hardware and software.
Also be aware that cross platform is not the same thing as platform independent.
If you are still confused you may find the following helpful:
Re:Can't anyone create a GNU version of Mathematic
on
Mathematica 6 Launched
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· Score: 1
Why can't the FOSS community beat Wolfram at this? Octave, Maxima, Yacas; they all fail miserably in comparison. The UI for Yacas is so idiotic that the function that transposes a matrix is Transpose[], a nine-character entry for an operation that a real mathematician may use a few hundred times in a given program. At least Mathematica is smart enough to use T (or at least it was when I last used it, at 4.0). Why can't we do better than this?
Terseness in a programming language is not a virtue - if it was we'd all be programming in APL. IIRC it was Wirth who said that programming productivity is not a function of typing speed. And really, I'm sure the average mathematician can master a decent text editor well enough to do a substitution with a regular expression... or does Yacas force the user to only use a brain damaged editor?
Dude, code that compiles and runs for two processor architectures isn't called "cross-platform". It's called "not broken".
Assuming OS and APIs are identical, you shouldn't have to praise that trait. You should take it for granted.
ok.... what version of Windows is running on the X-Box and how is it identical to XP/Vista?
BTW running on two different processor architectures is called "cross-platform". Changing the architectures makes for a different platform just the same way changing the OS makes for a different platform. Obviously you've never run into code breaking when it is moved from a big-endian machine to run on a little endian machine, or vice versa.
For example, take a simple algorithm which decides the next best move in a chess game... do you really think that the standard mental process is to recursively examine the next several moves and potential counter moves for a given board layout.
Ummm, yeah that's exactly what I used to do when I played regularly. I'd go about 6 levels down before I had to stop. IIRC at the time of his victory Fisher said he looked 11 levels deep. Of course there is also a weighting function involved to decide the value of the terminal positions.
I have done a lot of software design and implementation and a lot of UI design and implementation but I tend to agree with the sentiment that programmers shouldn't be doing UI work - the results usually leave a lot to be desired and to see why you only have to read/. for a while to get a sample of the attitude that many programmers have toward users. I also have problems with the other side, as the parent says, waiting for manna to drop from heaven.
But graphic artists can contribute without knowing anything about programming... they need only mock up screens (pencils, paper etc.) to show what could be done to improve an existing design. Whether that's the color scheme, the layout, the interaction sequences or what have you, they don't need to know anything about programming to help the programming crowd improve the end result. They don't need, as one poster put it, "GL" tools to make programs from their designs. They simply need to be able to create designs that other people can understand. If they aren't willing to do that they they should quit their bitching and if software people aren't willing to accept that those designs might be better, than whatever they came up with on their own, then then should try and figure out what it is they are hoping to accomplish.
All these problems of observers, and reality and whether it's really real all go away if we make one very simple assumption: some particles can travel faster than light (and therefore backwards in time).
What makes you think that there is any such thing as "time" within which to move "backward" or "forward"? Eliminate the idea of time as a dimension and all the problems go away too.
the more we encounter the computational limits of the simulation our brains-in-vats inhabit. It's a bit like visibility culling of polygons; there is no point in extending the simulation beyond certain limits
What makes you think that you (or your brain) exist outside of the simulation? What you consider your consciousness could merely be a simulation of conciousness...
canada is not like the US, canadians care about civil liberties and open society..
Ummmm did you miss the part where the Supreme Court of Canada said discrimination of the basis of sex and race is A-OK? Or the one where the same court said an accused is not entitled to the best possible defence? Or where it became a crime to publicly disagree with the official state sanctioned version of history? And, as another poster has pointed out, there is the whole Quebec thing.
The only thing the Conservatives need to get re-elected is for the Canadian people to remember what the Liberals were like when they were in power including, to pick a trendy topic, the Liberal's utter failure to do anything about the Kyoto accord they signed, until now it either has to be abandoned or more than a decade of changes have to somehow be squeezed into three years.
You may be correct about the specific comparison to Nazi's in this specific instance, yet the general thrust of the poster's comments have the ring of truth to me.
My parents' generation fought a war against racism etc. yet here we are in a country that has officially embraced discrimination on the basis of sex, race etc. - as long as it's the right group being discriminated against, because hey, we're not like the Nazi's we're good people and when we discriminate on the basis of race or sex it's for a good reason and so it's OK.
You can also chalk up another point of pride which, as it happens, is related to the above. Our country has officially adopted the position that an accused is not entitled to the best possible defence.
Oh and let's not forget our country also officially approves of both censorship and a state specified version of history against which it is a crime to publicly disagree.
Ummmmm, press on the "Status" column header to sort all the "New" entries, delete the offending mail, press on the "Date" column header to return to sorting by date?
Take a look at pure math. Provided that space is continuous, we can model position (in one dimension) as a real number. In two dimensions, we need 2 real numbers. There is no way to use a single real number to pinpoint an arbitrary position in the cartesian plane with continuous axes. Similarly, for three continuous dimensions, you can use no fewer than 3 real numbers to describe an arbitrary position. In jargon, there is no bijection from R to R^3 (reals to reals times reals times reals). This can be (and has been) proven.
Even if it isn't discrete you can always encode any arbitrary triplet as a single number, F(x, y, z) -> a. And you can do it in such a way as to always be able to retrieve the three original numbers, i.e. F() is invertible.
But, I'm not sure there's any real argument for space being discrete. I'm not familiar with any theory which uses a discrete space, but I would conjecture that it would be much more complicated and difficult to work with. And certainly there isn't any experimental evidence which suggests a discrete space.
If I understand it correctly Quantum Loop Gravity requires space to be discrete.
SciAm recently had an article that considered whether we could be in a two spatial dimensional universe rather than 3 spatial dimensions; it also explained why we wouldn't necessarily be able to perceive the difference.
You had dimensions? When I was a young physicist we didn't even have a point! All we had was a single real number! Mind you we didn't complain! No siree Bob! We could change that number all we wanted and we just projected coordinates in all those fancy shmancy hypothetical dimensions down onto our one number and considered ourselves lucky! Mind you we had it easy in comparison to our fathers. Sure, they had a number. But it was just a whole number and yet they made do. You kids today don't know how lucky you are!
"I feel Linux to be perfectly ready. It is the consumers who have lots of catching up to do."
Here is how the free market works. Consumers by the goods that they want not the goods that the manufacturers think they should want. You don't have to like it but you need to recognize it. If Linux proponents do not get this then Linux will fail to capture the desktop. Period. End of story.
Now some things are inherently complex in nature and require a moderate amount of learning to do successfully and sometimes users need to be shown the possibility of a better way of doing things - where better is defined by the user, not the programmer. That does not in any way change the above. Most consumers buy computers to do something other than become deeply knowledgeable about computers. They will pick the solution that maximizes what they can get done while minimizing the amount of effort required to be devoted to activities other than doing what they actually want to do. That is human nature and it is not unreasonable.
People value their time. I've never used a Mac in my life but I know lots of people who do. If over the life of a machine they save 10-20 hours of learning curve by getting a Mac then they have made up the difference in price between that Mac and a Windows or Linux machine.
The attitude expressed by the quote above is why much software fails in the marketplace. It's also a major reason why we now have UI specialists - because too many programmers thought the user should be the one to adapt. Now most programmers no longer get to make those decisions.
What really puzzles me is why people want to write software for other people to use if they don't want to write the kind of software that those people actually want to use.
I haven't used Unix for about a decade. This week I had to do something on a Windows machine that I couldn't do with Windows. I decide to try running Ubuntu off a live dvd. Despite the long time since using Unix I was very quickly able to figure out what I needed to do, which included reconfiguring the package management and installing a package not included in the default configuration. Having done a lot of command line based Unix installs and configurations in the distant past I was very impressed with how easy it was for me to get the job done with Ubuntu. But I can tell you that someone without a Unix background would probably have given up.
It's definitely getting there but Mr. Shuttleworth is right - it's not ready for the average desktop user.
This isn't quite what you are asking but most of the mass of an atom comes from the motion of the constituents of the protons and neutrons. In other words most (80%-90% IIRC) of what we perceive as the rest mass of an atom is actually not rest mass at all but relativistic mass attributable to the motion of quarks.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG, old ones!? Yuuuuuuccckk that's terrible! Don't they know that it's the young, dirty, obvious sex tourists that are the ones to bring home to meet the families???
If it is 1 then game over. If it is 2 then we have free will but by definition it is not deterministic. What does it mean to be making decisions non-deterministically? Is making a decision where the decision making process has a random element to it somehow "better" than not having free will?
It looks to me that 3 is the case that offers the most comfort (which seems to me to be what people are usually looking for when they ask these sorts of questions).
Sure, of course it depends on what generalization you are trying to make.
So its only natural that it is perceived like a recruited change when they finally come out.
Except that isn't what was going on. These were adult women describing what happened to them at the "Womyn's Center" on campus. Now either the women I talked with were a huge statistical abnormality or what they were saying was a reasonably accurate description of what was going on. You seem to prefer believing the former and based on the extremely aggressive tenor of your original reply to the somewhat bland comments being made it feels to me like you are heavily emotionally invested in maintaining those beliefs. However I think the latter case is much more likely. I refer you to Andrea Dworkin's famous comment about all heterosexual sex being rape. For a non-trivial portion of the campus lesbian population having sex with men, excuse me, "males", was considered sleeping with the enemy and they proselytised that position to any woman they could get to listen.
If you think this unlikely consider the fact that much feminist criticism of men is phrased as criticism of "males" (e.g. "male violence")... i.e. the fundamental problem is not socialization, not situational, not economic, not cultural, not human boys and men, but maleness itself.
As for science becoming fraudulent there are a few things worth saying. First, most of the fraudulent stuff is not in science but in the social sciences where it is much easier to "fudge" things, however it does occur in gender related science as well. Second those kinds of problems are a long way down the food chain. Any scientific investigation begins with the phrasing of a question and fraud begins with making it unlikely that certain questions are ever asked, if asked never publicised, if publicised never funded, if funded not published and so on. A good example of that is the issue of domestic violence. The are huge numbers of studies on DV yet most of them do not address girl/woman on boy/man DV. Yet virtually every time that subject is explored, using exactly the same metrics used for boy/man on girl/woman DV, it turns out that there is a huge amount of such violence taking place. Most of the time the question just never gets asked in the first place.
I'm going to stop here because it's too huge an issue to address in a forum like this and I think it will take a new generation of boys/men to change anything. Of course while boys/men used to be a significant majority on university campuses they are now a minority (in my country about 40% of the undergrad population last time I looked) so it may be some time before those issues get addressed in any meaningful way. It might start with somebody asking why in the course of a single generation boys stopped doing well in school and why such large numbers stopped going off to university. The fundamental nature of boys certainly didn't change in that time and if the situation were reversed, as it was not so long ago, the very existence of the imbalance would be considered conclusive proof of system sexism.
When you look at something (anything) in front of you all you are looking at is light waves. In fact the actual process of how your brain perceives that object in front of you is even more indirect than that!
First you have pretty much provided an example for his statement about men attacking men.
Second nothing he said was misogynist.
Third, there used to be (maybe still is) a stereotype of gays "recruiting" amongst straight men. I never believed this stereotype to have any truth in it but at the university where I did my undergrad degree it was quite obviously true in the case of lesbians recruiting among straight women. If the women I talked to were to be believed the hostility toward men in the "womyn's center" was so intense that bisexual women were considered traitors and straight women were routinely advised and then pressured to become lesbians as a political statement. This is not my interpretation it is what several different women told me of their experiences there.
I've never known a gay man who decided to be gay but I've known lesbians who decided to become lesbian as a political statement. I have also known lesbians who were embarrassed at the man hating that originated with such "political" lesbians. I've never run into or even heard of a gay separatist but it's not hard to find lesbian separatists. If any of this is news to you then you should better inform yourself before launching ad hominem attacks like "has more to do with the fact that you are a mysogynist prick rather than the fact that you have a prick." If it's not news to you then your response wasn't very honest.
Oh and "testosterone poisoning" was a phrase commonly heard emanating from both the "Womyn's Center" and the Women's Studies Dept. and was routinely used as a derogatory reference to maleness.
As long as you didn't live on the west coast where the application of building standards designed for the rest of Canada resulted in a billion dollars or more of damage to homes from water penetration, condensation etc. Most shocking was the later discovery that the government knew that such damage might occur and apparently hid the information.
solid cold magma?
Assuming OS and APIs are identical, you shouldn't have to praise that trait. You should take it for granted.
So unless the X-Box runs Windows his first comment is irrelevant which was the point of my original reply to him. Perhaps I should have been more straightforward in my comment.
In reply to your comment I would say the ability to correctly compile source code very definitely has to do with the platform (hardware and software) for which it is being compiled, along with a host of other things.
Simply repeating/paraphrasing the statements in your earlier post does not suddenly change them from incorrect to correct. As well the fact that you don't seem to know that what (you claim) software should do and what it actually does do in the real world are often two very different things, indicates a lack of experience on your part.
Sorry my earlier post wasn't able to clear up your confusion.
That's probably because the confusion is all yours. Being well educated in the field and a professional in it for more than three decades I'm perfectly well aware of the accepted definitions of the terms and I provided multiple sources supporting the definitions I used.
You on the other hand have just repeated your unsubstantiated opinion and then say:
unfortunately I don't have time to discuss this further with you
which, sorry, seems a tad cowardly to me. If you had looked at the links I gave you would have realized you were wrong. Or perhaps you do realize that and you're one of those people who just can't admit to a mistake. That would certainly explain your repeating yourself and then running away. It would also explain why instead of providing links to definitions of the term under discussion, "cross platform", you instead link to wiki pages on terms irrelevant to the definition of "cross platform". That seems a transparent attempt to misdirect the discussion away from your mistake linuxrocks123.
When talking about platforms if you want to refer to just the OS (or supporting libraries, specifications etc.) then you would say "software platform" and if you want to talk only about the processor (or other supporting hardware) then you would say "hardware platform". Otherwise, in computing, the word platform is understood to mean a particular combination of hardware and software.
Also be aware that cross platform is not the same thing as platform independent.
If you are still confused you may find the following helpful:
http://www.bellevuelinux.org/cross-platform.html
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/platform
http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_platform.html
http://mtechit.com/concepts/platform.html
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary
Terseness in a programming language is not a virtue - if it was we'd all be programming in APL. IIRC it was Wirth who said that programming productivity is not a function of typing speed. And really, I'm sure the average mathematician can master a decent text editor well enough to do a substitution with a regular expression... or does Yacas force the user to only use a brain damaged editor?
moustache
ok.... what version of Windows is running on the X-Box and how is it identical to XP/Vista?
BTW running on two different processor architectures is called "cross-platform". Changing the architectures makes for a different platform just the same way changing the OS makes for a different platform. Obviously you've never run into code breaking when it is moved from a big-endian machine to run on a little endian machine, or vice versa.
Ummm, yeah that's exactly what I used to do when I played regularly. I'd go about 6 levels down before I had to stop. IIRC at the time of his victory Fisher said he looked 11 levels deep. Of course there is also a weighting function involved to decide the value of the terminal positions.
But graphic artists can contribute without knowing anything about programming... they need only mock up screens (pencils, paper etc.) to show what could be done to improve an existing design. Whether that's the color scheme, the layout, the interaction sequences or what have you, they don't need to know anything about programming to help the programming crowd improve the end result. They don't need, as one poster put it, "GL" tools to make programs from their designs. They simply need to be able to create designs that other people can understand. If they aren't willing to do that they they should quit their bitching and if software people aren't willing to accept that those designs might be better, than whatever they came up with on their own, then then should try and figure out what it is they are hoping to accomplish.
What makes you think that there is any such thing as "time" within which to move "backward" or "forward"? Eliminate the idea of time as a dimension and all the problems go away too.
What makes you think that you (or your brain) exist outside of the simulation? What you consider your consciousness could merely be a simulation of conciousness...
canada is not like the US, canadians care about civil liberties and open society..
Ummmm did you miss the part where the Supreme Court of Canada said discrimination of the basis of sex and race is A-OK? Or the one where the same court said an accused is not entitled to the best possible defence? Or where it became a crime to publicly disagree with the official state sanctioned version of history? And, as another poster has pointed out, there is the whole Quebec thing.
The only thing the Conservatives need to get re-elected is for the Canadian people to remember what the Liberals were like when they were in power including, to pick a trendy topic, the Liberal's utter failure to do anything about the Kyoto accord they signed, until now it either has to be abandoned or more than a decade of changes have to somehow be squeezed into three years.
My parents' generation fought a war against racism etc. yet here we are in a country that has officially embraced discrimination on the basis of sex, race etc. - as long as it's the right group being discriminated against, because hey, we're not like the Nazi's we're good people and when we discriminate on the basis of race or sex it's for a good reason and so it's OK.
You can also chalk up another point of pride which, as it happens, is related to the above. Our country has officially adopted the position that an accused is not entitled to the best possible defence.
Oh and let's not forget our country also officially approves of both censorship and a state specified version of history against which it is a crime to publicly disagree.
Oh Canada, eh?
Ummmmm, press on the "Status" column header to sort all the "New" entries, delete the offending mail, press on the "Date" column header to return to sorting by date?
Even if it isn't discrete you can always encode any arbitrary triplet as a single number, F(x, y, z) -> a. And you can do it in such a way as to always be able to retrieve the three original numbers, i.e. F() is invertible.
But, I'm not sure there's any real argument for space being discrete. I'm not familiar with any theory which uses a discrete space, but I would conjecture that it would be much more complicated and difficult to work with. And certainly there isn't any experimental evidence which suggests a discrete space.
If I understand it correctly Quantum Loop Gravity requires space to be discrete.
SciAm recently had an article that considered whether we could be in a two spatial dimensional universe rather than 3 spatial dimensions; it also explained why we wouldn't necessarily be able to perceive the difference.
You had dimensions? When I was a young physicist we didn't even have a point! All we had was a single real number! Mind you we didn't complain! No siree Bob! We could change that number all we wanted and we just projected coordinates in all those fancy shmancy hypothetical dimensions down onto our one number and considered ourselves lucky! Mind you we had it easy in comparison to our fathers. Sure, they had a number. But it was just a whole number and yet they made do. You kids today don't know how lucky you are!
Here is how the free market works. Consumers by the goods that they want not the goods that the manufacturers think they should want. You don't have to like it but you need to recognize it. If Linux proponents do not get this then Linux will fail to capture the desktop. Period. End of story.
Now some things are inherently complex in nature and require a moderate amount of learning to do successfully and sometimes users need to be shown the possibility of a better way of doing things - where better is defined by the user, not the programmer. That does not in any way change the above. Most consumers buy computers to do something other than become deeply knowledgeable about computers. They will pick the solution that maximizes what they can get done while minimizing the amount of effort required to be devoted to activities other than doing what they actually want to do. That is human nature and it is not unreasonable.
People value their time. I've never used a Mac in my life but I know lots of people who do. If over the life of a machine they save 10-20 hours of learning curve by getting a Mac then they have made up the difference in price between that Mac and a Windows or Linux machine.
The attitude expressed by the quote above is why much software fails in the marketplace. It's also a major reason why we now have UI specialists - because too many programmers thought the user should be the one to adapt. Now most programmers no longer get to make those decisions.
What really puzzles me is why people want to write software for other people to use if they don't want to write the kind of software that those people actually want to use.
I haven't used Unix for about a decade. This week I had to do something on a Windows machine that I couldn't do with Windows. I decide to try running Ubuntu off a live dvd. Despite the long time since using Unix I was very quickly able to figure out what I needed to do, which included reconfiguring the package management and installing a package not included in the default configuration. Having done a lot of command line based Unix installs and configurations in the distant past I was very impressed with how easy it was for me to get the job done with Ubuntu. But I can tell you that someone without a Unix background would probably have given up. It's definitely getting there but Mr. Shuttleworth is right - it's not ready for the average desktop user.
This isn't quite what you are asking but most of the mass of an atom comes from the motion of the constituents of the protons and neutrons. In other words most (80%-90% IIRC) of what we perceive as the rest mass of an atom is actually not rest mass at all but relativistic mass attributable to the motion of quarks.